Tag Archives: History

Six Pillars to Persia: Don’t Throw Your Love to Babylon


This week we’ve tickets to give away to From Babylon to London at Jackson’s Lane Theatre, Feb 16th 2014, plus we earmark several ResonanceFM fundraisers events going on around Valentine’s day.

This show includes our monthly guest slot from I Ran Into Iran USA. Artists Katayoun Vaziri and Brian Zegeer conduct the second part of an interview with Dr. Nayereh Tohidi, Professor and former Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University. We heard the first part of the interview last month, and now Dr. Tohidi speaks on influence of Western and Middle Eastern Feminist movements on the women’s rights movement in Iran from the early-20th Century to the present day. Plus music from the Samani Brothers who perform in the extravagantly named From Babylon to London for which we’re giving away tickets!
We also hear a track by singer Neyssatou (Badiaa Bouhrizi) from Tunis, Tunisia.
More info on our show and events on www.sixpillars.org

Six Pillars – Crossroads of the Ancient World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A personal tour of the British Museum’s major show in 2011 on Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World. This awesome and massively educative exhibition is brought to us thanks to the amazing bravery of a few men who took care of these objects in great secrecy and at great personal risk at the brink of two decades of civil war, strategic iconoclastic decimation and lawless looting.

Dr. St John Simpson is an archeologist and a curator at The British Museum and speaks here about the exhibition as a whole and Afghanistan’s place on the Silk Road where caravans from from Europe, China, India and Central Asia traveled back and forth. He guides us through the show and discusses details about several of the objects, of which his favourite is the fish-shaped drinking vessel pictured here.

This show was produced by Fari Bradley and originally broadcast May 2011.

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Six Pillars – The Pursuit of Pleasure

Author Rudi Mathee discusses his study of Persian uses for narcotics and other more mundane stimulants throughout history.  Mathee’s book “The Pursuit of Pleasure” has just been released in Iran, and Fari Bradley asks him about Sherry, Shiraz wine and stimulants and opiates in ancient Persia from coffee to opium.pp_cover_400hMathee focusses on the Safavid period (1501-1722) in Persia, when excessive drinking by the Shah was sanctioned by society, as he was seen as the son of Shi’i Imam and therefore exempt from the ban on alcohol. This one example embodies many of the massive paradoxes that existed during this period, and still exist as the tension between public piety and personal freedom.

Like the British, the Persians lived through entire eras of compulsive drinking, yet which were then followed by periods when imbibing became punishable with 40 -80 lashings of the whip due to Islam.

This progamme was originally broadcast from Resonancefm studios in  London on July 28th 2008.

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Six Pillars – A Modern Take on Folk

When five young men who are a typical modern concoction of traditional Iranian values and MTV play music together what will it sound like?

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Simorgh is the name of a mystical bird in Sufi folklore. As a band of young urbanites however, their music incorporates group chanting and a lyrical poetry that is folk-rap, accompanied by the evocative ney flute, tar strings and the empty bellow of the daf drum.  This alluring mixture is – as far as our experience shows – at it’s optimum best when seen live, so we brought them into the studio to whip up some of that tribal feeling we’ve come to associate their performances with.

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Fari Bradley talks to the five members of the band about leaving university, playing football, parents, Bryan Adams and musical instruments as weapons of culture.

Simorgh run workshops for the BBC on Iranian music and put on their own concerts around London. With their own unique melange of influences, the band stand for something many of us can comprehend: what it’s like to be a cultural cocktail in London now.

This programme was originally broadcast from the Resonance104.4fm studios on July 21st 2008.

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