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Inculcate Tehran: Opening a Dialogue of Civilizations in the Shadow of God and the Alborz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Zirinsky
Michael Zirinsky*
Affiliation:
Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, USA
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Abstract

This essay discusses the establishment of Alborz College by American Presbyterian missionaries. Alborz's early years, before its 1940 nationalization by Iran, were shaped by the vision of its first president, Samuel Jordan, a liberal, athletic, pragmatic Christian reformer who led by example, a practitioner of what we now call “social work” and an encourager of female empowerment. Alborz and the Presbyterian mission which gave it birth grew in the context of American social history, including the religious awakening of the early nineteenth century, American doctrines of freedom and universal education, as well as the contradictory impulses of ethnocentricity and ecumenicism. The essay is based on private and governmental archival sources and the experience of the author as a high school student in Tehran.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 5: Alborz College , September 2011 , pp. 657 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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References

1 This is a paraphrase of a remark made to me by Alborz alumnus and history professor Yahya Armajani in November 1988 at the MESA banquet in Los Angeles, following our panel on Presbyterian education in interwar Iran.

2 Donald Murray was a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer, subsequently a writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire and a columnist for the Boston Globe. This phrase appears repeatedly in his books about writing.

3 Not all sources appear in footnotes; the most important archive is that of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Philadelphia; other archives consulted include those of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris; the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Church of the East, London; the Church Missionary Society, Birmingham; the Archives Lazaristes, Paris; and the US and UK diplomatic archives.

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6 Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 1981), 1146.

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15 See Sattareh Farman Farmaian with Munker, Dona, Daughter of Persia; A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1992).Google Scholar The continuing importance of social work in Iran is reflected in Samira Makhmalbaf's 1998 film “Sib” (The Apple).

16 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 349–50.

17 Wadsworth, Tehran, 28 December 1933, D.1607 and 10 January 1934, D.1615; Speer to Murray, 20 December 1933, USNA, RG59, 391.1163/46–48.

18 Ralph Hutchison at Lafayette College and Washington and Jefferson College, Herrick Young at Western College for Women, and Walter Groves at Centre College.

19 William N. Wysham, “‘Mr. Chips’ of Tehran,” Presbyterian Life, 1 November 1952: 36.

20 Martin Luther, “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520),” http://www.cas.sc.edu/hist/faculty/edwardsk/hist310/reader/address.pdf.

10 Michael Zirinsky, “Jordan, Samuel Martin,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/articles/jordan-samuel-martin.

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23 Long ago my friend Judith Austin—who grew up in New York City and became a professional historian and an Elder of her Boise Presbyterian Church—answered my enquiry as to the difference between Congregationalism and Presbyterianism with three words: “the Hudson River”; i.e., the difference was administrative, not theological.

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27 George Orwell, Animal Farm. Online reprint, http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/print/animal_farm.pdf, 52.

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31 The importance of football to Iranians cannot be overemphasized; see Jafar Panahi's 2006 film Offside; also see “Jafar Panahi Freed from Jail in Iran,” The Guardian, 25 May 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may/25/jafar-pahani-released-iran-prison.