What's Doing in Isfahan

A few weeks ago it was more than a half-dozen places in the Middle East that won spots on the New York Times' 53 Places to Go in 2008. The surprise then was how many of those spots were counter-intuitive even to the adventure-seeking tourist: Iran? Algeria? Libya? Well, yes, and why not (although not long after the hot-spot suggestions appeared terrorists were at it again in Algeria, clobbering the hopeful trend there.

Since then the Times travel section has been on a Mideast kick: an adoring spread on Yemen in the last week of December, and now a front-page feature on Iran--and specifically, Esfahan, or Isfahan, Iran's Chicago: it's Iran's third-biggest city, a fabulous center of Islamic architecture (as Chicago is a fabulous center of modernist architecture), an industrial and nuclear nerve center (wasn't it in Chicago that Enrico Fermi set off the first nuclear chain reaction in December 1942?), and a center of Islamic education. It was in Isfahan that Persia's great Safavid Dynasty set up shop for a couple of centuries, beginning in 1588.

Among those, a "madrassa," implicitly, if not stereotypically, surprising to the writer for bucking his expectations for a religious school: "Robed students with books under their arms crossed the leafy interior courtyard; there was a low murmuring of voices and pleasant chirping of birds." The 2,500-word piece is worth a read, if only as a dignified counterpoint to the steady drumbeat of Iran-the-Monster the Bush administration's ministry of information keeps peddling.

See Also:

• Iran: Country Profile
• Iran's Nuclear-Weapons Program: Ambition or Reality?
• Iran's Ahmadinejad Leading the Blind