An American’s Unrequited Love for Iran

Among close followers of Iran, the late historian Richard Nelson Frye is a household name. Beyond that world, however, he is little known. As Iran and the United States fight a widening war, Frye’s forgotten legacy as an American Iranophile is worth revisiting. 

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1920 to Swedish parents, Frye became a Harvard professor of Iranian languages and history. His interest in the past began at age 12, when, on his way to an after-school job in Danville, Illinois, where he was raised, he came across Harold Lamb’s biography Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker in a bookstore. The book detailed the life and expeditions of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane, who founded the late medieval Timurid Empire that ruled Iran between 1370 and 1507. Lamb, a Middle East specialist, later handled the Iran portfolio at the Office of Strategic Services—the World War II intelligence agency that preceded the CIA—and published a book about Cyrus the Great in 1960. 

Twenty years after that encounter, Frye helped establish Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and became its first associate director. The center grew into one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of Iranian and Middle Eastern history. Visits to Persepolis in Iran, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, sparked his interest in the Achaemenid dynasty, a subject he would study throughout his career. 

Over several decades, Frye’s scholarship helped make the history of ancient Iran accessible to generations of students. 

But scholarship alone was not what set Frye apart from other Iran scholars. He gave his heart to the country he studied. Decades before his death in March 2014, Frye was thinking about his passing and had asked officials in Tehran to be buried in the historic city of Isfahan in central Iran, a city of more than two million about 270 miles south of Tehran. When Cyrus the Great unified Persian and Median lands into the Achaemenid Empire, Isfahan emerged as an example of religious tolerance. Despite publicly praising Frye’s work, Iranian officials failed to honor his well-known wishes, adding another bitter chapter to the history of relations between the two countries. 

In a will that drew public attention in the early 2000s, Frye asked to be buried beside the Zayandeh Rud, the largest river on Iran’s central plateau. The dean of Iranian studies had begun searching for a historically meaningful burial place in the late 1960s, when he was just in his 40s, initially considering Tajikistan, a country to which he also felt culturally close. 

In 1992 he visited Tehran, where he had been invited to lecture. President Mohammad Khatami approved his burial request during a later trip by Frye, at a time when Iran’s political climate barely tolerated public discussion of engagement with the United States. In the turbulent reform era after the eight-year war with Iraq, the judiciary banned several progressive newspapers for advocating normalization with Washington. 

When the firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded Khatami in 2005, Frye had to secure the new government’s consent. Ahmadinejad said in 2007 that he had accepted Frye’s request. Three years later, the government even gave Frye the deed and keys to a restored 17th-century house in Isfahan to serve as his Iranian home. 

Despite the religious conservatism prevailing the Islamic Republic, the burial of a non-Muslim American in Iran was not unprecedented. Isfahan was already the burial place of Arthur Upham Pope, a Rhode Island art historian and archaeologist, and his wife, Phyllis Ackerman. Pope accepted a position at the Asia Institute in Shiraz in 1966 and died there three years later; Ackerman remained in Shiraz until she died in 1976 and was also buried in Isfahan at the mausoleum built for the couple. 

Because Ahmadinejad was known for theatrical politics, camera-ready promises, and a mercurial temperament (Israelis would later woo him to lead Iran if the US-Israeli war on Iran resulted in regime change), doubts about his approval of Frye’s burial request persisted. By the time Frye died in 2014, Hassan Rouhani, a cleric who favored engagement with the West, had become president. Rouhani did not object to the burial but lacked the political capital to carry it out. After 73 days of silence from Tehran following the scholar’s death, Frye’s family concluded that the burial would not happen. 

His passing became another occasion for anti-Western hard-liners to attack Rouhani’s conciliatory agenda. Pressure groups close to the Revolutionary Guards mobilized to intimidate the government into abandoning the burial. 

In an incendiary sermon on April 11, 2014, days after Frye’s death, Isfahan’s Friday prayer leader, Mohammad-Taghi Rahbar, called Frye a “CIA spy,” prompting paramilitary vigilantes to rally against the burial. A radical mob vandalized Pope and Ackerman’s mausoleum as a warning to the government. Eight members of parliament from Isfahan sent Rouhani a stern letter cautioning that transferring Frye’s body to Iran would provoke an “unrestrained popular reaction” to the “diplomatic disgrace.” 

Rouhani backed down before the anti-U.S. firebrands. An editorial in the militant Javan Daily warned that if Frye’s remains were entombed in Isfahan, angry citizens would exhume them. 

As the dispute continued, Culture Minister Ali Jannati claimed Iran had no obligation to honor Frye’s wishes. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, after posting a tweet mourning Frye and trying to intervene, quietly retreated from the debate. 

Still, the failure to uphold Frye’s will was more than a breakdown of the rule of law or a victory for Iran’s unelected hardline powers. It marked the defeat of those in both countries who had spent decades trying to bridge the divide, often at great personal risk. 

Frye knew the challenges in trying to be buried thousands of miles from his birthplace, far from family and friends. He understood the hostility that parts of Iran’s leadership and society harbored toward the U.S. and the risks his request carried. His choice reflected a genuine love for Iran and its people, an affection that, in the end, was not reciprocated. 

In an October 2007 interview with CNN, some six years before his death, Frye described his affection for Iranian history and tried to dispel common misconceptions about the country. 

“I have many friends in Iran. The Iranians are very hospitable people, and I love them very much, and so there is no reason why I shouldn’t be buried in Isfahan,” Frye said. “Isfahan is the center of today’s Iran and is the former capital of Iran, and it’s the cultural center of Iran. Everything in that land just reeks of culture.” 

CNN’s Iranian American interviewer pressed him on the hardline theocrats who governed the country he loved. 

“I’d like to remind people of this: all those terrorists who attacked in Madrid, and London, and elsewhere and here, have you found one Iranian among them? No,” he responded. “I tell you, I don’t pay any attention to the governments; governments here and governments there.” 

Frye also wrote about the theological differences between Iranians and some of their neighbors, differences that had long been used to portray Shiites as inauthentic Muslims. 

“Superficially, the hierarchy of the Shiite faith in Iran, with mujtahids and ayatollahs (learned men and super savants), may appear to resemble the Catholic church, but in some ways Shiite philosophy is more akin to Protestantism, which is more open to change in beliefs. It is rather the Sunnis who have frozen their doctrine since the time of al-Ash’ari (ninth century),” he wrote in a personal essay in 2010. 

Leading figures in Iranian culture recognized Frye’s contributions. The influential lexicographer Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, who published the most comprehensive Persian dictionary  in the 1930s, called him Irandoost, or “friend of Iran.” Ehsan Yarshater, the founding editor of Encyclopedia Iranica, described Frye as “a true peripatetic researcher” rather than a “sedentary or abstract scholar.” 

Iran and the United States remain at war. One reason is that bridge builders like Frye were repeatedly sidelined while the loudest hawks came to dominate the fraught relationship. 

In June 2014, Frye was cremated in Boston, survived by his wife, the Assyrian cultural historian Eden Naby Frye, and three children. 

He had devoted his life to bringing two estranged nations together through culture and scholarship. But when he offered the country his love, it went unrequited.