THE ENCYCLOPEDIA IRANICA IS UP TO VOLUME "G":

U.S.-funded encyclopedia revels in Iran's greatness

Jim Krane, Canadian Press
Published: Monday, March 26, 2007

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - The Christian concepts of heaven and hell originated in Iran. The Jewish holy Talmud is littered with Iranian words and ideas. And some Iranians cherish the Israeli city of Haifa as a sacred place.

These are among the fascinating nuggets in the Encyclopedia Iranica, a sprawling project that since 1973 has sought to distill 5,000 years of Iranian history, geography and life and has produced 45 blue-bound volumes proclaiming Iran's greatness.

"Today more than at any other time we need to keep our Iranian culture alive," Iranica's director Ehsan Yarshater told an audience of 350 Iranians at a fundraiser in Dubai last month. The glitzy dinner, concert and auction raised US$100,000 for a project that will take an estimated $20 million - and another decade or so - to finish.

The Iranian government bitterly opposes the encyclopedia, and the U.S. government backs it. More than half of the encyclopedia's budget comes from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, which has funded it as a project of major cultural significance since 1979 - the same year Iranian students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

"Once completed it will be a magnificent gift to our children and the generations to come," said Yarshater, an Iran scholar at Columbia University in New York.

The encyclopedia is Yarshater's life work. Now a frail 86-year-old with Parkinson's disease, he started the encyclopedia 32 years ago, just after leaving Iran. The project threatens to outlast him. Another Columbia Iranologist, Ahmad Ashraf, will take over leadership of the project if Yarshater dies before completing it.

Only 13 volumes of the English-language encyclopedia have yet been published, up to the letter G. It's been so slow that managers have abandoned the one-letter-at-a-time approach and are soliciting all remaining articles at once.

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Concepts such as the survival of a person's soul after death, the Day of Judgment, heaven and hell, and holy angels all derive from Iran's surviving Zoroastrian faith, a 3,000-year-old religion that predates Islam and Christianity, the encyclopedia says. Iran's hard-liners also frown on the Zoroastrian beliefs.

I think that the claims in the article about Iranian influence on Judaism are a bit inflated. Resurrection, Judgement Day, heaven and hell, and angels are all concepts logically flowing out of the religion of ancient Israel, although it is clear that parallel ideas in Iranian religion had some influence on the development of these concepts in Judaism.