Word: ghazan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cronin scarcely lives up to Herodotus or Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more "creative" if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., "near-factual history, almost myth." But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress...
...youth Ghazan was trained by a mullah in the tenets of Mohammedanism, but at 15 he was sent to school in Switzerland; now he tries to give his people the best of both worlds, only to find-like so many other men of good will in the East-that such an attempt can easily lead to tragedy. When Ghazan gets wind of the fact that the Persian army is planning once again to resettle his people, he leads them into the uplands for the summer, and they resume their way of life-shearing their sheep, weaving cloth and dazzling-colored...
...emissaries-an international aid mission-are uncomprehending and horrified by his tribe's backwardness, illiteracy and impractical preoccupation with poetry; civilization's missionaries depart, leaving behind two artificially inseminated ewes and predicting bigger and better herds, which the Falqani do not want. Throughout his country, Ghazan seems to see only a bizarre blend of ancient Eastern evils and too-hasty Westernization-hunger and corruption, opium smokers in grey flannel suits, profiteering officials who "displayed the refrigerator in their drawing room like a Chinese lacquer cabinet...
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