Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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William Shakespeare and I

BBC Radio Four, August 1998

The very first time I held an English text in my hands, was at Uncle Isaac's shop. This was in my little Kurdish town of Sahneh, in the mountains of western Iran, and it must have been the middle 1950's. Sahneh had, at that time, a small, but well-liked community of Jewish shopkeepers - Islam having always fallen on rocky ground among us Kurds - and, as far as I knew, Uncle Isaac was the most popular of them. My father would always stop to talk to him. Short and stocky, perhaps in his seventies, and never without his black, trilby hat, he would, invariably - in hot summer or snow-bound winter - be found just inside his dark little shop and ready to exchange pleasant banalities with us children. He specialised in stationery, and he had struck on a good idea: recycling. He stocked bundles of pamphlets with mysterious inscriptions on one side and nothing on the other, and sold them to us as exercise paper for a quarter of the usual price. As we always had better uses for our meagre pocket money than exercise paper, we regarded him as nothing short of a saviour.

On that particular occasion, the little pamphlet of perhaps 20 pages inspired me specially. I had just begun learning the Roman alphabet and tried to pronounce the title of the essay. It was a single word and it said: Heedrogen.

Oh what a wonderful word! 'Heedrogen', 'Heedrogen'. I touched it with the inside walls of my mouth and threw it around my palette, like a wine-taster, and fantasised about the world where it belonged as an everyday subject of conversation. Then my father told me that the pamphlet was in English and that the word was pronounced 'hydrogen', not heedrogen. It was a light gas, he said, that filled airships that then blew up! Little did I know that one day I would dread the subject of hydrogen in an examination paper, in English, too!

And that reminds me: What a strange and wonderful journey my life has been. I'm a Time Traveller! From that little market town in those remote mountains, barely touched by modern times, where story-tellers still held sway as the most esteemed entertainers, where the philosophical discussions among illiterate orchard keepers on the fringes of the town on hot summer evenings would have reminded any learned man of the Athens of Socrates…, I have witnessed much on my way to this computer that memorises my words on their way to you: The jet aircraft that brought me to England, the moon landings that some people regarded as blasphemous, the telephone in your pocket, the Internet.

[Nowadays, anyone can have access to a dozen international news agencies from home, and I've even built a little studio in a corner of my study to which all the world's radio stations can link themselves whenever they need an interview. Think of the thousands of gallons of petrol that such 'back-to-the-cottage' workers such as myself are now managing not to pour into the air of the big cities, and imagine my thrill whenever I pull down the blinds in my room in the middle of the day in London to put me in the appropriate mood for a midnight chat over the radio stations of the Outback in Australia!]

But I mustn't jump too far ahead. Where was I last week when I interrupted myself to talk about Henry II? Oh, yes, we'd reached the point in the late 1960s when I gave up chemistry to write short stories for women's magazines, failed in that, reluctantly joined the BBC World Service as a very junior broadcaster in Persian, and took a girlfriend, my very first, at the age 28 or so, would you believe!

Looking back to those years, I see that almost every setback that I had in my career was exactly what I needed, only I didn't know it at the time!
[This has been an important point on my mind recently as my daughter approached graduation and looking for a job. Who's to know whether any guidance we might give her would be in her best interests? Accidents play such a large part in our lives!]

I also shudder when I recall how easily a foolish youth, desperate to make his way in the world and cut off from his family, might've been led to crime. When I was still trying to sell short stories to the magazines and had fallen into arrears with my rent, my landlord knocked on the door one night with a startling proposition. His name was Dimitri. He had a number of friends who owned Greek restaurants in London and they wanted me to supply them with several hundred bottles of bootlegged gin each week.

My years as an assistant in a research lab had made me, among other things, an expert in the chemistry of gin-making, exactly what proportion of which essential oils to add to alcohol and water to replicate an a famous brand. As it happened, I didn't even like gin. It was just an amusing prank with fellow technicians.

Now, an income of several hundred pounds a week which the Greeks were offering me for the gin was, of course, a fortune for a young man who paid only three pounds and ten shillings for his attic room in Hampstead. Fortunately, a little uprightness came to my rescue and I disappointed my would-be saviour. "Dimitry", I said. "If I were to be caught and imprisoned for this, I'd never dare to look anyone ever again in the face and talk to them about any serious social issues. They'd always be able to say: Aren't you the one who went to prison for bootlegging?" Dimity and his friends were amazed at my foolish values!

Anyway, fortunately again for me, a fellow activist in the cause of Human Rights in Iran guessed my plight and asked me one day whether I'd go to the headquarters of the BBC's external broadcasting service to voice a few sentences in Persian about the new roads that Brazil was cutting through the Amazon rain forest.

I was shocked that he worked for any external broadcaster. All external broadcasting was, to me, brazen propaganda, but he reassured me that the BBC was different. In any case, my name would not be mentioned and my family back home would not be embarrassed.

So I went along to Bush House, whose name I hadn't heard before, and I liked it. I asked that my name be broadcast so that my family would know that I was all right. My friend replied that he wasn't allowed to mention my name. "Why not", I asked. "Because you're only an OC". "What's an OC"? "Outside Contributor"!

I was disappointed, but at least the fee of two pounds and ten shillings went most of the way towards paying Dimitry for a whole week's rent! And soon I was laughing. They asked me to contribute several times a week, and that enabled me to keep a girlfriend!

I stayed a dozen years at Bush House, until 1980. A year earlier, a revolution led by a coalition of Islamic extremists, Marxists and nationalists toppled the Shah of Iran and the despotic monarchy of his family, only to replace it with a far more cruel state in the grip of a figure out of the seventh century.

Inevitably, supporters of the outgoing regime, both here and in Iran, blamed us, the dozen or so broadcasters in the Persian Section of the BBC for the agitation in Iran and brought pressure on the Labour government to order our closure.

It did not work. The allegations were exaggerated and a possible legal wrangle between the BBC and the British government would have caused a storm in the press. I admit that sometimes some of my colleagues who supported the uprising allowed themselves to be carried away by the emotion and referred to the Ayatollah Khomeini in reverential terms. But some others among us, including myself, intensely despised Khomeini and, we broadcast the news in exactly the same manner as elsewhere in the BBC. Furthermore, in the 37 days that the last, liberal prime minister, the late Shapour Bakhtiar tried, valiantly, to stem the tide, we interviewed him three times, while in all the months of Khomeini's exile in France, we talked to him only once.

As for me, I did an extra little bit of my own. I took advantage of my father's personal friendship with the leader of the opposition, the late Dr Karim Sanjabi, a Kurdish tribal chief, to beg of him not to go into coalition with Khomeini. But it was too late, Sanjabi told me. The Shah had destroyed the organisation of the opposition and Sanjabi was a general without troops. The streets had already been taken over by the fanatics.

Anyway, time came soon for me to move on, but where? I now had a family to support. Nonetheless, the urge overcame, and, one night, I woke up in the small hours wondering what to do. I wrote my resignation in verse in case I lost courage in the morning. It went as follows:

Dear Mark,
Next year, I'll be thirty-nine,
Time to embark on a new design!
A more ancient kind of craft,
Much more humble, much less daft
Than speaking into thin air,
Hoping someone might be there.
I hope to hear next of thee,
As Aunty's superest DG.
Goodbye, I'm going!

And yes, I'm afraid, the boss had the cheek to write back: "My dear Hazhir, I dare say you're making the right choice"!

But what choice was I making? At that moment, it was between work and lack of it. So I became desperate and thought up even more desperate schemes, except that one of them actually worked, although in an unexpected form, as is the story of my life.

I wrote to the editor of the Times, Sir William Rees Mogg, urging him to found a new news magazine under my editorship, and this at a time when The Times was losing fifteen million pounds a year. The previous year, its management had gone on strike against its printers!

Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a letter from the paper's foreign editor, the late Charles Douglas Home, asking me to a meeting. And yes, when I arrived, the foreign editor did allow me to sing the praises of my suggestion. At last, however, he spoke, and said that the paper was in absolutely no position to finance anything new. But his man in Tehran had been thrown into jail by the revolutionaries and now he had no-one there to write for him on events. Would I do it from here?

I had to struggle not to appear speechless. I said I would, but so numb was I with the new turn in my life that when he stood up to go, I remained seated and with his secretary. I did not even notice until later that he had walked out into the rain using his secretary's frilly umbrella.

Charlie later became the paper's editor, a valued friend and a fellow inmate in a hospital, where he died tragically young. But that's another story. For now, I had arrived, truly arrived, in the world of journalism, and reputedly at the top of it, at The Times, the oldest and possibly the most prestigious newspaper in the world.

I was also thrown in at the deep end. One late afternoon in July, 1980, while I was still a BBC employee and could, therefore, not write under my own name for anyone else, news came that the deposed Shah had died, and The Times summoned me to its awesome presence. "We want an OPED article placing him in the context of Persian history", they told me. "What's an OPED article", I asked, sheepishly. "Oh, opposite the editorials". Pompous people! Why didn't they say "centre page" to frighten the life out me earlier?

Then they put me in a small room, gave me hot cup of coffee after hot cup of coffee to make me sweat harder, and they ripped every little page out of the typewriter as soon as it was half-written. The printers were impatient, you see.

I left for home depressed, convinced that I had written the worst article possible. But, early in the next morning, it read reasonably well, and the BBC World Service, with its 39 languages, took most of its press review on the Shah from the article written by "The Special Correspondent of The Times"!

So, as far as my English was concerned, I had travelled far from buying that pamphlet 'Heedrogen' for exercise paper at Uncle Isaac's shop in Sahneh. From now on, I'd earn my living in the tongue of Shakespeare and, deceptively, deceptively, there were no mountains on the horizon!

(There are three other autobiographical talks entitled "Omar Khayyam and I", "Henry II and I" and "Isaiah Berlin and I".

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