City of Knowledge is an effort to celebrate the city of Shiraz and its people.

While the city is well known for its classical poets, mystics and scholars, not much has been written in English on Shiraz in the twentieth century.

It would have been impossible to compose a detailed narrative about all the poets, historians and scholars who have been active in the city in these last hundred years. So I was forced to choose a selected few. I hope people familiar with Shiraz will not be too disappointed with my choices.

The people I write about in the book, as it is often the case in anthropology, stand for a larger whole. While not necessarily “representative,” they stand for a way of thinking and acting I call “city of knowledge.”

Shiraz 1997 Setrag Manoukian ©

This book presents a cultural history of modern Iran from the point of view of Shiraz, a city famous for its poetry and its traditions of scholarship. 

Exploring the relationship among history, poetry and politics, the book analyses how Shiraz came to be defined as the country’s cultural capital, and explains how Iranians have used the concept of culture as a way of thinking about themselves, their past and their relationship with the rest of the world.

Weaving together a theoretical approach with extensive ethnographic research, the book suggests a model to integrate broad concerns with a nuanced analysis of Iran’s cultural traditions and practices. 

The author’s interdisciplinary approach sheds light on how contemporary Iranians relate to classical Persian poetry; on the relationship between expressive forms and the political imagination; and on the different ways teachers, professors, cultural managers, poets and scholars think and work. 

Manoukian describes how history and poetry are the two dominant modes to talk about the past, present and future of the town and demonstrates that the question of knowledge is crucial to an understanding of the political and existential dimensions of life in Iran today.

This book will be a major contribution to the current effort to move away from nationalist views of Iranian history and culture, and as such will be of great interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, history, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian studies.