In the West, Aryanism as a concept denoting ethnicity has been discredited since World War II and now only thrives on the right-wing fringe of the political discourse, mostly in cyberspace. In Iran, by contrast, Aryanism as a signifier of identity is fully legitimate and proudly proclaimed by many, not just on the Internet but in everyday discourse and popular writing. Used to buttress a claim to the nation’s purportedly unbroken link to pre-Islamic times, it is employed above all to demonstrate how close Iranians are to (Western) Europeans and how different they are from Arabs—from Semites. Even the representatives of the Islamic Republic are not immune to this conceit; indeed, many would all but agree with the ruler they toppled in 1979 that Iran’s location in Asia is a mere geographical accident.
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s richly evocative and provocative study explores the origins and exposes the fallacies of this self-view. He sees Iran imagined as Aryan as the outcome of “dislocative” nationalism, a self-view of mostly foreign origin that equates Islam with backwardness and that nostalgically and therapeutically harkens back to the great Persian Empire of Cyrus “the Great.” This self-image, he contends, combines ideas from the European Enlightenment and its quest for origins with the theories of nineteenth-century Western scholars who proclaimed the distinction between Aryans and Semites to be not just deep but unbridgeable for being ethnically determined. The mythical type of nationalism that resulted celebrates the famous cylinder of Cyrus as the original human rights manifesto and denies the Arabs any positive influence on Iran.
Zia-Ebrahimi shows how European travelers “rediscovered” Persepolis in the sixteenth century, noting that the Iranians lacked a historical memory of the site and called it the Throne of Jamshid (referring to a mythological king). European scholars, beginning with the eighteenth-century French Orientalist Anquetil du Perron, next laid bare the pre-Islamic roots of Iran. Following a classicist reading of history, they lauded the wisdom and justness of the Akhaemenid kings, extolled Zoroastrianism as the country’s original faith, and disparaged Islam, equating it with moral degeneracy. French and German scholars completed this idealized image by positing a clear distinction between mentally agile Iranian Aryans, creative people open to multiplicity, and Arab Semites, unimaginative monotheists.
Modern Iranians have found this reading of history reassuringly attractive and appropriated it for their own purposes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they twisted it into a story of regeneration and redemption following defeat and humiliation by two bullying adversaries, Russia and Britain, nations that Iranians had never thought their equals, let alone their superiors. The British, in particular, also provided the impetus for a discursive change in Iranian history writing. John Malcolm, Britain’s first ambassador to Iran, historicized Iran in his A History of Persia (1815) by describing the country’s trajectory, in a secular mode, as linear and purposeful. Translated into Persian, works like that of Malcolm, together with new archeological findings, offered a template for Iranian literati intent on creating a national identity.
The two pivotal figures whose writings provide the connective tissue in this study are Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Kermani. The former, a Russian from the Caucasus who served the Tsarist government, Iran’s main enemy, is an unlikely advocate of Iranian nationalism, although that fact is usually left unmentioned. Both were fervently anticlerical, and especially Kermani espoused the kind of virulent, racially inflected anti-Arab sentiment that in the twentieth century became commonplace among Iranians. Akhundzadeh and Kermani established the myth of pre-Islamic Iran as a powerful, literate, and humane society that was destroyed when the Arabs, lizard-eating Bedouins, invaded the country in the seventh century and robbed it of its identity by imposing Islam on it. The twentieth-century secular elite, led by Iran’s foremost modern historian, Fereydun Adamiyat (1920–2008), who wrote a biography of both men, canonized their assertion that Iranians have always loathed Arabs. The Islamic Revolution and its perceived rehabilitation of the Arabs and their religion only further hardened Iran’s secular classes, which include most Iranians living in the diaspora, in this conviction.
The author does a good job showing how the lineage that modern Iranians claim for themselves is a hodgepodge of mythology and mumbo-jumbo—an invention of an unbroken tradition covering up a reality of rupture and discontinuity. He shows how the Iranians had but a dim idea of their pre-Islamic past until the Europeans “rediscovered” it. He correctly recognized the aversion to Arab and Turkish elements in Iranian culture as mostly the dichotomy between an old desert versus sown, culture versus barbarism dichotomy. He reminds us how the nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty fully acknowledged its Turkic roots, which included the Turkish language spoken by the elite, and how absurd it is to blame the seventh-century Arab conquest for Iran’s “decline” for all of the subsequent 13 centuries. Perhaps most importantly and sensitively, he notes how Iran’s national epic, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, which Iranians see as ethnically and linguistically pure, is a composite work that essentially espouses an Islamic worldview.
This study is especially good at explaining how modern Iranians have used the myth of pre-Islamic grandeur to come to terms with the country’s manifest backwardness, to help relieve the pain of national humiliation and restore the country’s badly bruised dignity. Zia Ebrahimi astutely recognizes the indispensable role that the idea of Aryanism played in this myth and how their presumed kinship with Europeans allowed Iranians to engage in what he calls submissive imitation, projecting themselves as subalterns rather than as critical interlocutors—to which their status as a great civilization should have entitled them.
The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism falls short on two counts. First, the author gives too little credit to the pioneer of the idea of the “foreign” origins of Iranian nationalism, Mostafa Vaziri, who in 1993 published a groundbreaking book on the topic that proved to be premature and was accordingly ignored or dismissed (Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity). And he pays too little attention to the orthogenetic roots of the culturally imperious attitude embedded in the Iranian sense of self. He ignores the preoccupation with ritual purity of Iran’s dominant faith, Twelver Shi'ism, which into the twentieth century created a distance from non-Shi'is among the devout. He all but dismisses traditional Persian poetry and its representation of Iran as a paradisiacal land of surpassing beauty. And he overlooks a rather supercilious and self-congratulatory attitude vis-à-vis other peoples and cultures that long predates contact with the West, let alone the age of imperialism.
This is an original study that shows the immense complexity of Iranian nationalism. Zia-Ebrahimi has also written a courageous book. It will be interesting to see how Iranians react to its unsettling argument and the extent to which they will be willing to acknowledge the racist streak in what has become a most cherished part of their identity.
