دو قرن سکوت Quotes

“Zarrinkoub may have had other reasons for changing his mind about the role of Arabs and Islam in Iranian history. He was certainly aware of what happened to Parviz Nātel Khānlari, the promoter of his first book and one of his professors, in the early days of the Islamic Revolution. Because of his friendship with Mohammad Reza’s Minister of the Royal Court Asadollah Alam (1919-78), Khānlari was stripped of all his posts and imprisoned.23 Manṣur Rastegār Fasā’i’, a biographer of Khānlari, believes Motahhari, who was aware of Khānlari’s services to Persian linguistics, letters, and music, would have intervened on his behalf had he not been assassinated. After spending a harrowing hundred days in prison, Khānlari was released, but he was deprived of his pension and required to pay back the salary he earned as a senator. Despite efforts by expatriate groups to help Khānlari leave Iran, he chose to remain in his homeland and died there in 1990, in poverty and severe pain.24 The change in Zarrinkoub’s attitude was reported in an article published by the site Rahyāfteh25 called “To What Extent are the Matters in the Book Two Centuries of Silence by Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub Correct?” The article asserts that, having come of age during a time when cultural policy in Iran was to attack Islam and to sanctify ancient Iran (ḥamleh beh Eslām va taqdis-e Irān-e bāstān), Zarrinkoub was among those “pretend-chauvinist intellectuals” (rowshan-fekrān-e showvinist-māb) who showed great courage in openly admitting the error of their ways. To have a public intellectual of Zarrinkoub’s stature regret writing Two Centuries of Silence was and continues to be a boon to ideologues in the Islamic Republic.26 Even after his death, the author’s much-publicized change of heart serves as a lesson to others who might harbor thoughts of crossing the bright red lines around the taboo topics in today’s Iran.”
― Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub, Two Centuries of Silence