12 - Professor Sayyah Comes Home to Teach

Summary

In Chapter 12, “Professor Sayyah Comes Home to Teach,” I look closely at Fatemeh Sayyah’s life and career (1902–1948). Fatemeh Sayyah (aka Fatemeh Reza Zadeh Mahallati) did not write a travelogue, but her life and literary career are emblematic of a peripatetic environment that had made her professional character and literary culture possible. She was related to Hajj Sayyah, whose travelogue I examine in Chapter 7, and was briefly married to his son Hamid Sayyah, from whom she received her last name. Her father was a professor of Persian literature in Russia, and her mother was Russian, of German descent. She was born and raised in Moscow, received her early and advanced education in Russia, mastered Russian and French literatures, received her doctorate degree in comparative literature with a dissertation on Anatole France, and then traveled to her homeland in 1924 and was a pioneering figure in introducing the discipline of comparative literature to Iranians. What is important about Fatemeh Sayyah is the fact that she was born and raised outside Iran, received her higher education in Russia, was far more comfortable in Russian than in Persian, assumed a leading role in the women’s rights movement in her homeland, and traveled extensively abroad to represent Iran in various conferences, and thus best personifies the multifaceted cosmopolitan culture that had deeply informed the entire body of travelogues I examine in this book. But, and there is the rub, that personification was marked by a positivist Eurocentricity that went against the grain of the world travelers who had made her possible. In that paradoxical twist we will see the emotive split between the unwavering sovereignty of a nation and the vagaries of states that have sought to rule them.