When I walked into the Louvre Abu Dhabi in November 2025, the building immediately performed its thesis. Light was not merely admitted. It was translated. Visitors can watch the sun become lace, heat become shade. The universal museum is re-spoken in an Emirati accent beneath a dome that nods to local pattern even as it houses global stories. The project grew from a formal cultural agreement between the UAE and France, signed in 2007, and the museum opened in 2017 with all the proper grandeur of state ceremony.
As an Iranian-born museologist, I could not help asking a larger question. How does a nation learn the language of cultural modernity, of museums, biennials, global collections, and international prestige, without translating its own heritage into silence? Iran is the oldest country in the world. The United Arab Emirates is one of the youngest. Yet the question remains remarkably similar.
That same question, cast in different architecture, under different weather, and within far more perilous politics, hovered over New York City on January 12, 1978, when HIH Empress Farah Pahlavi delivered her address, “The Preservation of Our Culture,” at the Annual Dinner of The Asia Society.
It is, at first glance, an almost serene title. One can imagine it carved above a museum entrance in perfectly behaved lettering. But history, that vandal in evening dress, had other plans. Iran in early 1978 was not standing in ceremonial stillness. It was beginning to tremble.
The Pahlavi Dynasty, founded by Reza Shah in 1925 and followed by the reign of his son Mohammad Reza Shah, had built itself on modernization, authority, and spectacle. By 1978, however, the country found itself in an Islamic-communist-led revolutionary upheaval, followed by the establishment of an Islamic republic through what critics have described as an illegal and dishonest, frankly fake, referendum. On March 30 and 31, 1979, Iranians were handed a coffin-lid choice: “Islamic Republic, yes or no?” Critics argued that the process was staged in bad faith, with no independent observers, little room for open opposition, and allegations of coercion and fraud hanging over the result. Ballots were reportedly color-coded, green for yes and red for no, a detail so grotesquely theatrical it almost dares satire to improve upon it.
Against that ominous horizon, the timing of Empress Farah’s speech is impossible to ignore. Only days earlier, on January 9, 1978, protests broke out in Qom after an article in Ettela’at attacked Ayatollah Khomeini. Those events formed part of the opening sequence in the revolutionary drama that, within little more than a year, would sweep away the Pahlavi monarchy altogether. Read backward from that outcome, the title acquires a chill it could not have intended. Preservation is not a word one reaches for when the ground feels stable. One preserves what one senses may soon be endangered.
And yet the speech matters for more than tragic timing. It matters because it distilled a cultural philosophy that shaped some of the most ambitious artistic and museological projects of late Pahlavi Iran. Empress Farah’s role in this sphere was never merely ornamental, as though she had spent the 1960s and 1970s drifting through openings like a tiara with diplomatic clearance. She helped imagine institutions, collections, and festivals as public rooms in which Iran might wrestle with a question that has not aged a day: how does a nation become contemporary without becoming estranged from itself?
Empress Farah appears to have understood that culture is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. A museum is not neutral because its vitrines are made of glass. A festival is not innocent because it looks exquisite at dusk. These are instruments through which a society rehearses value, belonging, authority, and ambition. They tell a public what deserves reverence. They instruct a nation where to feel.
That understanding helps explain the architecture of her patronage.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, inaugurated in 1977, was a declaration that Iranian artists and Iranian audiences belonged in direct conversation with international modernism, not as passive consumers, but as participants. Its celebrated collection, acquired in the 1970s, made that argument visible.
The Reza Abbasi Museum, also inaugurated in 1977, made a different but equally consequential claim. It presented Iranian art as a long civilizational continuum extending from the pre-Islamic world into the Islamic era. That was no small curatorial choice. It resisted the temptation to carve Iranian history into politically convenient fragments, as though a civilization could survive by amputating parts of itself.
Then came the Carpet Museum of Iran, inaugurated on February 11, 1978, barely a month after the Asia Society speech. Here again, the lesson exceeded the building. Persian carpets were not framed as mere decorative objects, but as repositories of labor, geometry, region, memory, trade, and imagination. A carpet, in this telling, was not floor covering. It was a woven archive.
Seen together, these institutions reveal a coherent idea. Preservation was not conceived as embalming. It was conceived as continuity with infrastructure. To preserve a culture is not to pickle it in reverence or trap it behind glass like a particularly obedient ghost. It is to build systems through which memory remains active: museums, collections, scholarship, festivals, public encounters, international exchange.
The Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, held annually from 1967 to 1977 under Empress Farah’s patronage, brought that philosophy into especially brilliant and combustible form. It placed Iranian and international artists, traditional forms and avant-garde experiment, the symbolic charge of Persepolis and the shock of contemporary performance, into deliberate relation. It treated culture not only as inheritance, but as encounter.
Late Pahlavi cultural policy lived inside a difficult tension. It sought to project a nation ancient in inheritance yet contemporary in bearing, globally conversant yet unmistakably Iranian. Those were not frivolous ambitions. But ambition is not immunity, and architecture, however elegant, cannot confer legitimacy by itself.
Still, it would be lazy to dismiss these efforts as pageantry with better lighting. Their afterlife alone forbids that. Empress Farah’s cultural legacy matters because it advanced a harder proposition: that culture must be built into public life as infrastructure, not abandoned to fend for itself as decoration.
A regal idea, certainly. But also a practical one.
And history, with its customary dark elegance, has only made that clearer.
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