By DIANA BIRD

By DIANA BIRD

Rappahannock News Contributing Writer

Editor's note: On Friday, March 10, Iranian musician Mohammad Reza Lotfi will play at the Gay Street Theatre in a concert sponsored by RAAC. Formerly a professor at Tehran University, Mr. Lotfi was forced to leave Iran by the country's fundamentalist dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini. He now makes his home in the United States, and has performed across the country.

For most of us, the history of the Near and Far East is an unopened set of books. While those schooled in the Bible and ancient history hear something of the Medes and the Persians, and we have all been made aware of the threat that the infidel Turks posed to Christian Europe, most of us find the crusades difficult to understand.

Today when We read about the Near East, we think of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan as places of war, revolution, poverty, and fundamentalist religions — often unhappy, and certainly mysterious. Indeed, the “global village” doesn’t seem to have much promise when it comes to these countries.

Because our memories are short, we may forget what we owe to a place historically known as Persia and now called Iran. But if we concentrate, we can recall such things as Persian carpets, Persian cats, Bactrian camels, miniature paintings, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and gardens growing apricots, nectarines and tulips.

In the historical crossroads of the world that Iran is, we encounter the first “world” empire. Founded by Cyrus before 550 B.C., it stretched from North Africa into India, with its capital at Susa. Here too were developed religions of abstract ideas, such as Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, which differ from the more , usual local cults related to nature dieties and folk heroes.

Later, the Silk Road, linking China and the Mediterranean, crossed Iran by several routes •*— the . road wasn’t an interstate, but rather