For any student of Persian, the name Ann Lambton is likely to conjure up feelings of either despair or gratitude. Despair, if, faced with her dense, unforgiving Persian Grammar, you felt like giving up before you'd even started. Gratitude, if having overcome the early obstacle of learning the alphabet and got to grips with Lambton's clipped style, she provided with you the means to begin reading real Persian.
I learnt Persian from another book, Wheeler Thackston's introduction to the language. But Lambton was always there in the background, as one of the past masters. She was a bit frightening: the "lessons" into which her book was divided offered no concessions to the confused. Any hint that the author was, in fact, a human being, was scrupulously avoided. The subtext seemed to be: if you don't understand, you're probably an imbecile.
Lambton, who died in July aged 96, has been the subject of a number of obituaries this week. Reading them, I was reminded of the various teachers I had as a student of Persian – at least one of whom, Peter Avery, had been taught by her – and the strange, rarified world they seemed to inhabit.
It's a minority subject, after all. There are few ivory towers as secluded as Persian studies. (With the exception, maybe, of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic?) Having only two or three students to contend with at a time, lecturers are freer to carry on research and pick up new languages: they are always well-versed in Arabic, sometimes Urdu, Pashto and Turkish, often with Latin and ancient Greek thrown in for good measure (Annemarie Schimmel apparently spoke 12). They come across as extraordinary, occasionally intimidating, repositories of arcane knowledge.
Lambton's academic writing, for example, focused on the political economy of medieval Persia; a time of assassins, invasions and secret intelligence (not to mention a great flowering of literature), but hardly part of the academic mainstream.
I've occasionally wondered what draws Europeans and Americans to Persian studies. I had a reason: I'm half Iranian, and wanted to learn more about my father's culture and language. But my brilliant teacher, Gabrielle van den Berg, fluent in Tajik Persian and an expert on poetry, was Dutch. I found the subject difficult and obscure at times, but I had reasons not to be put off. What could have motivated her to become such an expert? Similarly, Lambton, scion of an aristocratic English family, who ended her days living quietly in Northumberland, devoted to the church and her community. What had driven her to become, in her time, the west's greatest authority on Iran?
In the beginning, it might simply have been the pleasure you get from being different, from examining something in detail that few others have taken the trouble to understand. Beyond that, the subject has its own delights, which, once tasted, are reason enough to carry on. Stumbling through Sa'adi, Ferdowsi or Hafez, teasing out the complex meanings, is a little like unlocking a cache of oriental treasures.
Ivory tower-dwellers they might be, but, because of the nature of Iran and its place in the world, "Persianists" sometimes find themselves at the cutting edge of contemporary politics: no more so than in Lambton's case. Having become fluent the language, she was made press attaché at the British legation in Iran during the second world war. In the years afterwards, British diplomats came to rely on her expertise and local knowledge. Some accounts suggest that her advice was crucial paving the way for a CIA-backed coup against nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh, an episode that reverberates to this day.
In my experience, Iranians are generally thrilled when outsiders take an interest in their culture. EG Browne and Arthur Pope, for example, are well-known names in Iran, though largely forgotten in their own countries. But they are equally suspicious of foreign interference. Given the role she may have played in the downfall of Mossadegh, I wonder: what do modern Iranians think of Ann Lambton?
