The Iran Society

History

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Since then relatively few lectures have been published. Frederick Richter, a long serving member of the Council and for many years editor of The Asiatic Review edited and published on behalf of the Society a series of seven known as The Iran Society Occasional Papers, viz.:-

Two other lectures, both delivered in 1966, were also published - Sir George Trevelyan's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and M. Zelli (Minister at the Iranian Embassy)'s Modern Iran.

The Society's contribution to the lavish celebrations in Iran of 2,500 years of monarchy in 1971 was Sir Max Mallowan's lecture that September on Cyrus the Great at St. John's Church, Smith Square and its publication. Since then the only lectures to have been published are those of the Rev. Norman Sharp on Old Persian Cuneiform (1973), an English translation of Dr. Massoud Homayoun's lecture, delivered in Persian, on The Origin of Persian Gnosis (1992), John Bowen and Omar Pound on Persian Poetry (1976), John Carswell on China and Iran (1995) and Paul Gotch and Ronald Ferrier's Memoir of the Rev. Norman Sharp (1999). The last three were financed from the Society's Palmer Smith Publication Fund established in 1992 on the initiative of Gordon Calver, when Chairman, in memory of Miss Kathleen Palmer Smith from the residue from the sale of a British-owned hospital in Tehran. "PS", as she was always known, had spent over fifty years in Iran as governess and teacher of English before dying in a Sussex nursing home in 1978.

Since the 1980s lectures have been taped for the Society's archives and sold to members.

The original 1936 Rules stated that "Political problems will not fall within the province of the Iran Society": all subsequent revisions of these Rules have excluded political matters from the Society's lectures and other activities. In 1951 the Council firmly rejected a proposal by the Iranian Embassy's representative, the ebullient Hussein Hamzavy, that to help put his country and the Society more on the map the ban on political discussion should be not interpreted too strictly.

In order to avoid controversy and offence the Council decided at one of its earliest meetings that lectures or summaries of these should be submitted a week in advance for vetting by a sub-committee. It was probably this imposition that led to the mysterious withdrawal of Mrs. Harold Nicolson (Vita Sackville-West)6's invitation to lecture in 1937. The Minutes recording this incident state that "in future the subject of lectures should be confined to the art and archaeology of Iran, her literature, language and philosophy". By and large these rules have stood the Society in good stead: trouble and complaint have been avoided with occasional exceptions, one notable incident being the heated exchanges that took place following James Norris' lecture on The BBC and Iran in 1983.

Notes

6 Author of Passenger to Tehran (1926): Twelve Days (1928)

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