This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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The current round of talks over Iran’s nuclear programme is coming to a close and the stakes are high. Western sanctions have stifled Iran’s economy, and Iranians are under threat of attack by the United States or Israel if the negotiations do not end in an agreement that pleases the west.
To fortify our understanding of these negotiations, pundits and officials alike often draw from a legacy of ideas about Iranians that pervade scholarly, official and popular representations. In their most overtly racist form, these characterise Iranians as sneaky deceivers who are not to be trusted.
Commentators have traced this Iranian quality to many sources, including centuries of Arab rule on the Iranian plateau; the Shia Islamic principle of taqiyyeh, which it is implied amounts to a licence to lie; and a “bazaar mentality” that makes Iranians master bargainers who can’t wait to give hapless westerners a raw deal.
Unsurprisingly, these attitudes have been instrumental in efforts to demonise Iranians and justify sanctions or military aggression. When around this time last year the US Congress threatened new sanctions to derail the Obama administration’s negotiation efforts, assistant secretary of state Wendy Sherman assured them no-one was being naive in dealing with the Iranians, saying, “We know that deception is part of the DNA.”
Sherman faced some media criticism, and blatantly characterising Iranians as inherently deceptive seems to have fallen out of fashion outside the authoritarian right.
The comment threatened to undermine the talks just by annoying the Iranians at a time when any dealings with the US were unpopular among many in the country. But even in the centrist and slightly left-of-centre media, the discourse has taken on new life with a discussion about an Iranian socio-linguistic phenomenon known as tarof.
A piece in the Atlantic magazine in 2012 and a feature on Public Radio International (PRI) earlier this monthwell illustrate the point. In the article in the Atlantic, headlined Talk Like an Iranian (from “walk like an Egyptian”, get it?), author Christopher de Bellaigue informs us that tarof is a uniquely Iranian way of “managing social relations with decorous manners”, a practice that “may be charming and a basis for mutual goodwill” but is also “malicious” as “a social or political weapon that confuses the recipient and puts him at a disadvantage.”
The piece opts for explaining tarof in terms of the latter. The majority of de Bellaigue’s examples emphasise tarof as a deceptive or purposely confusing use of language designed to take advantage of others. Not only do Iranians use theirtarof tricks to gain the upper hand on each other, they may even use them in the nuclear negotiations.
Tarof, writes de Bellaigue, is something you can get “suckered” by, something with which Iranian diplomats perform “mischief”. It is “symptomatic of a broader Iranian tendency to clothe everything in ambiguity – and to spend an inordinate amount of time doing so.”
Topping the article is an image of a confused white man being strung along through a word maze by a smiling, bearded Iranian with his arm stretched out in invitation. The message is summed up by one of the many online comments: “All Iranians I’ve known are competitive, egotistical, deceptive, secretive, manipulative, and selfish.”
If the nuclear talks are the gooey centre nestled in the Atlantic piece, they adorn the wrapper of a recent PRI segment titled “The Persian art of declining what you really want and offering what you’ll never give could play a role in US-Iran talks”. The piece frames itself as primarily about the talks, but it eschews a discussion of “political challenges” to explain the “confusing, time consuming and inefficient” cultural practice of tarof, which Iranians “bizarrely” do out of respect for one another.
Aside from the classic example of a host offering tea to a guest who, as politeness dictates, must deny the offer three times, the piece offers examples of Americans caught up in the tricky business of tarof in dealings with Iranians. Former US diplomat and embassy hostage John Limbert, the segment reports, once embarrassed himself by using the wrong tarof to offer someone a gift but later redeemed himself by using tarof “as a weapon” to embarrass his captors and even future supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by showing that hostage-taking went against the Iranian tradition of hospitality.
To be sure, the apparently less desirable aspects of tarof showcased in these articles aren’t complete fabrications. For some Iranians in the comment sections, the anecdotes ring true. Ahmad Shamlou, one of Iran’s greatest 20th century poets, didn’t care much for tarof. He called some of its manifestations “insincere”.
I too have had to negotiate it. I began learning Farsi in my early 20s, and later I worked for three years as a resettlement caseworker with Iranian refugees in Los Angeles. My co-workers, my boss, and nearly all the refugees I met spoke Farsi as a first or second language, meaning that figuring out just what tarof was and how to navigate it became an urgent personal project. In time, however, I learned there are as many definitions of, and feelings about, tarof as there are Farsi speakers, making it difficult to obtain a definition let alone master its application in real life situations.
None of these subtleties is reflected by de Bellaigue or PRI, who rehash the old themes of dishonesty, manipulation, insincerity, bad intentions and ambiguity. They mine those aspects of tarof that Western audiences find amusing, fantastic, bizarre, and at odds with their own communicative norms and values, effectively erasing a myriad other ways of doing tarof as well as the wide variety of moral valences the concept can have for Iranians.
This prevents either de Bellaigue or PRI from digging deeper to see many social situations in which tarof would look less outrageous to westerners and more like the everyday acts of generosity and expediency that comprise the glue of all societies. Every society has its seemingly arbitrary rules – Jerry Seinfeld made one of the most successful careers in US television history by bringing to light and skewering US norms of politeness – but following them is still sometimes the best way to show other people you care.
There are a million and one ways to do tarof that have nothing to do with manipulation or getting the upper hand, and many of them look very much like practices we have here in the United States.
Ever offer to pay for your own meal when eating with older relatives, even though you more or less knew they would get it for you? Tarof.
Ever tell someone their outfit looked good, even though you had some reservations? Tarof.
Ever see an acquaintance on the street and say, “We should get together soon!” without really meaning it? Tarof.
All of the above occur regularly in both the US and Iran, and the rules dictating how to conduct oneself are strikingly similar. How many westerners believe total sincerity is always the ideal way to behave charitably toward others? Indeed, if the classic Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar has taught us anything, it’s that a policy of constant directness and sincerity is the quickest and most amusing path to utter social ruin.
Tarof is a sociolinguistic phenomenon, and skilful use of it – in many other cases besides simply getting what one wants from others – is important for Iranians because their society puts such a high value on language and its stylistic use.
One of the most well-known short stories in Iran, written by Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh in the early 20th century, is called Farsi shekar ast (“Farsi is sugar”), and some of the culture’s most celebrated heroes are poets, meaning many people know and regularly recite poems.
So Tarof is not the “art” of strategically offering or declining or getting what you want. It is rather the artful use of language to negotiate the rules of a society that cherishes its language and appreciates innovative uses of it. Naturally it seems ambiguous to uninitiated westerners; they don’t know the rules. But for Iranians in the know, tarof makes things less – not more – ambiguous.
Tarof can be fascinating, frustrating, and a topic worth spending hours discussing. But if exploratory pieces want to go beyond the tip of the taroficeberg, they should look not only at differences with other cultures, but at similarities too.
Pieces that mischaracterise tarof as a backdrop to the nuclear talks do a great disservice because of the consequences that could follow a failure in diplomacy. Presenting tarof as a uniquely Iranian kind of insincerity not only resuscitates odious discourses of sneaky Persians selling westerners a lemon with a handshake and a smile. It serves war propaganda.
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