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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
This essay discusses the establishment of Alborz College by American Presbyterian missionaries. Alborz's early years, before its 1940 nationalization by Iran, were shaped by the vision of its first president, Samuel Jordan, a liberal, athletic, pragmatic Christian reformer who led by example, a practitioner of what we now call “social work” and an encourager of female empowerment. Alborz and the Presbyterian mission which gave it birth grew in the context of American social history, including the religious awakening of the early nineteenth century, American doctrines of freedom and universal education, as well as the contradictory impulses of ethnocentricity and ecumenicism. The essay is based on private and governmental archival sources and the experience of the author as a high school student in Tehran.
1 This is a paraphrase of a remark made to me by Alborz alumnus and history professor Yahya Armajani in November 1988 at the MESA banquet in Los Angeles, following our panel on Presbyterian education in interwar Iran.
2 Donald Murray was a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer, subsequently a writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire and a columnist for the Boston Globe. This phrase appears repeatedly in his books about writing.
3 Not all sources appear in footnotes; the most important archive is that of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Philadelphia; other archives consulted include those of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris; the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Church of the East, London; the Church Missionary Society, Birmingham; the Archives Lazaristes, Paris; and the US and UK diplomatic archives.
4 E.g., Eisenhower, Dwight D., Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY, 1948).Google Scholar
5 J. Richard Irvine, “Iranzamin,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/newsite/index.isc?Article=http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/v13f5/v13f5014.html.
6 Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 1981), 1146.
7 Elaine Sciolino, “Iranian President Paints a Picture of Peace and Moderation,” New York Times, 22 September 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/22/world/united-nations-iran-iranian-president-paints-picture-peace-moderation.html?scp=1&q=Khatami%20UN%20speech&t=cse.
8 Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996).Google Scholar
9 Microfilms of the Board of Foreign Missions, PCUSA.
11 Jordan, Samuel M., “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” The Moslem World 25 no. 4 (1935): 353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Arthur C. Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran and Dr. Samuel Marin Jordan, Founder and President” (Duarte, CA, 1954), reprinted in Saleh, Ali Pasha, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, ed. by Saleh, Ali Pasha (Tehran, 1976), 198.Google Scholar
13 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran,” 198.
14 F. L. Bird, “Modern Persia and Its Capital and an Account of an Ascent of Mount Demavend, the Persian Olympus,” The National Geographic Magazine (April 1921): 399.
15 See Sattareh Farman Farmaian with Munker, Dona, Daughter of Persia; A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem through the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1992).Google Scholar The continuing importance of social work in Iran is reflected in Samira Makhmalbaf's 1998 film “Sib” (The Apple).
16 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 349–50.
17 Wadsworth, Tehran, 28 December 1933, D.1607 and 10 January 1934, D.1615; Speer to Murray, 20 December 1933, USNA, RG59, 391.1163/46–48.
18 Ralph Hutchison at Lafayette College and Washington and Jefferson College, Herrick Young at Western College for Women, and Walter Groves at Centre College.
19 William N. Wysham, “‘Mr. Chips’ of Tehran,” Presbyterian Life, 1 November 1952: 36.
20 Martin Luther, “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520),” http://www.cas.sc.edu/hist/faculty/edwardsk/hist310/reader/address.pdf.
10 Michael Zirinsky, “Jordan, Samuel Martin,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/articles/jordan-samuel-martin.
21 Carlino, Anthony O., “Roger Williams and His Place in History: The Background and the Last Quarter Century,” Rhode Island History, 58 (May 2000): 35–71.Google Scholar
22 Shorto, Russell, The Island at the Center of the World; The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York, 2005).Google Scholar
23 Long ago my friend Judith Austin—who grew up in New York City and became a professional historian and an Elder of her Boise Presbyterian Church—answered my enquiry as to the difference between Congregationalism and Presbyterianism with three words: “the Hudson River”; i.e., the difference was administrative, not theological.
24 Sharkey, Heather J., American Evangelicals in Egypt; Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2008), 149–78.Google Scholar
25 Irvine, “Iranzamin.”
26 For the text of the CS pledge, see “A Letter from the Publisher,” Time, 13 June 1949, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,800274,00.html.
27 George Orwell, Animal Farm. Online reprint, http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/print/animal_farm.pdf, 52.
28 Zirinsky, Michael, “American Presbyterian Missionaries at Urmia during the Great War,” La perse et la grande guerre, ed. by Bast, Oliver (Tehran, 2002), 353–72.Google Scholar
29 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 347–53.
30 Katouzian, Homa, The Persians; Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (New Haven, CT, 2010).Google Scholar
31 The importance of football to Iranians cannot be overemphasized; see Jafar Panahi's 2006 film Offside; also see “Jafar Panahi Freed from Jail in Iran,” The Guardian, 25 May 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may/25/jafar-pahani-released-iran-prison.
