Mirza Fathᶜali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani are considered among the founders of Iranian nationalism, and here Reza Zia-Ebrahimi argues that they were the creators of a particular kind of vision for Iran, which he terms ‘dislocative nationalism’. According to this version of nationalism, Iran's true identity lies in its pre-Islamic pre-eminence, from which Islam was introduced as a form of deviation by Arab invaders, perceived by these two thinkers as greatly inferior to Iranians. The result, argues the author, is that the Iranian nation was removed by these ideas from its then current real context as a mainly Muslim society, and disassociated from Islam. An alternative, and according to these thinkers, truer representation of Iranian identity was found in close association with Iran's pre-Islamic past, reinforced by the view derived from European thinking that Iranians were an Aryan people, and therefore shared with Europeans their then current superiority on racial grounds. Iran's true position in the world had thus been undermined by the dominant position assumed by Islam. The perception of Aryanism so conceived reached its apogee under the Pahlavi dynasty, particularly in the nationalistic and identity-building policies of Reza Shah. The book traces the evolution of dislocative nationalism from its inception in the later nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth.
With regard to the origins of dislocative nationalism, the author draws attention to comments from the time of Herodotus that Iranians tended to see themselves as superior, but demonstrates that the racial component of the idea came from intellectual debate in response to the spread of modernity and the threat posed by Europe. Its first protagonist was Akhundzadeh, resident in the Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century, and influenced by Russian orientalism. In Maktubat, published in 1860, he idealized the pre-Islamic past in a much more systematic way than previous writers, his purpose being to criticize the ills then present in Iranian government and society. In contrast to Malkum Khan, who produced a practical approach to modern nation building based on law, he adopted the ideological position that the Arab invasion of Iran 1280 years before was responsible for Iran's current parlous state, and that its ill-effects had been reinforced through Islam by despotic ‘ulama. To embark on a successful reform and progress, it was necessary for Iran to escape from Islam and the loathed Arabs, and adopt a reform program based on science.
Kermani was a disciple of Akhundzadeh, but more radical. A Babi, and skeptical of all religions, he adopted Akhundzadeh's historicist view of Iranian identity, and defined it in linguistic and racial terms. Writing in the late nineteenth century, he was far more open to the racial theories of Europe, not least in European scholarship, and was the first Iranian author to adopt the term “Aryan race”, with an accompanying denigration of Arabs and Islam, and a veneration for pre-Islamic Iran. Zia-Ebrahimi, having conducted a wide search of cultural and historical sources up to this time, including Ferdowsi, has found nothing to suggest that this view came from anywhere other than Europe, though he acknowledges that intellectual contemporaries of Kermani associated Islam and some ‘ulama with backwardness. Therefore Kermani was the first to express the concept of superior race, and the distinction between Aryan and Semitic. However, Zia-Ebrahimi challenges historians such as Adamiyat and Ajudani in their portrayals of Kermani and Akhundzadeh as truly representative of the influence of European thought, saying they obscure what the approaches of the two thinkers really were—early attempts to synchronize European ideas with Iranian theories to create a nationalist ideology.
Zia-Ebrahimi gives an eloquent exposition of their ideas, and is properly critical. However, particularly in the case of Kermani, he overlooks the question of power, then in the hands of the Shahanshah Zillallah (Shadow of God) fearful of any substantial change in the political system, and buttressed by a clerical establishment determined to resist the implications of European rationalism and secularism (the latter a term which hardly appears in the author's text). In other words, Kermani's attack on Islam, and more particularly the Arabs, was part of a struggle to undermine the cornerstone of the prevailing political system, namely Islam itself.
The vision of Akhundzadeh and Kermani was marginalized by the mainstream movement for institutional and legal change until after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and World War I. In a development that they did not necessarily intend, their ideas, especially on Aryanism, returned with the rise of Reza Shah and the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty, when, argues Zia-Ebrahimi, dislocative nationalism and contempt for the Arabs came to permeate Iran's political culture. Reza Shah built dislocative nationalism into a state ideology, emphasizing pre-Islamic Iran and Aryanism as integral to the national identity, which Zia-Ebrahimi terms “his programme of Europeanisation.” When it comes to his discussion of Reza Shah, however, the author's view reveals what is a prevailing weakness in current historiography on Iran, which is that the intellectual sweep of the argument is allowed to override the actual political realities. An example of this is his assertion that Reza Shah derived his ideas on building a new identity based on Iran's pre-Islamic past from reading the Shahnameh with the scholar Abdolhossein Sheikh al-Molk Owrang, who claimed that it reduced the shah to tears. In fact, it is well-documented that the model for Reza Shah (not generally known for weeping) in his state-building policies was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was ahead of him in constructing a modern state in Turkey. His ideas on pre-Islamic Iran ran in tandem with Ataturk's deployment of the Turkish fruhzeit in creating a new state identity in the Turkish Republic.
Although this book would have benefited at several points from closer reference to the actual political context, it provides a major intellectual discussion on the emergence of Iranian nationalism, based on erudite study of both Iranian and European literature, from the period in question, and with regard to literature of ancient and early Islamic Iran. This also is a brave book in that it is the first major attempt to address the unwelcome issue of the racist strand in Iranian culture, its origin and its divisive impact. It is to be highly commended for its innovative identification and definition of dislocative nationalism, and its original, wide-ranging argument.
