The history of nationalism has increasingly come to occupy a central place in the study of modern Iran. Since at least the mid-1990s, the growing number of conference papers, articles, and monographs examining various aspects of Iran’s experience with the nation-form suggests that there has emerged a confluence of interest among specialists in examining Iran’snational question.¹ This focus spans both the literary-cultural tradition of Iranian historiography and Iranian historiography’s social scientific tradition. The result has been a productive body of recent scholarship whose emergence can only be explained by understanding changes within both the field of Iranian studies and...

The conventional narrative of the rise of the Safavid Empire runs as follows: A twelve-year-old boy rose up in revolt and declared his intention to unleash the apocalypse. Bands of Turcoman tribes (Qizilbash) fully devoted to the mystical doctrine of their semidivine king marched to battle at his call and willingly sacrificed themselves for him. The combination of the boy Ismail’s charisma and the devoted and disciplined militancy of his Qizilbash gave birth to a new empire that ruled in present-day Iran and the Caucasus in the early modern period. The Safavids are generally viewed as the founders of what...

Among the least studied features of Iranian modernity are its links to German intellectual traditions, in particular the so-called Countermodernist trends prominent between the two world wars.¹ This chapter will argue that key characteristics of modern Iranian nationalism, during the Pahlavi monarchy and persisting under the Islamic Republic, are traceable to a decisive encounter with interwar German intellectual trends. These include: First, the German Countermodernists’ negative or ambivalent stance toward modernity, seen as a condition of crisis, a challenge that needed to be met and surpassed. Second, perceiving the crisis of modernity as a crisis of “the West,” defined as...

Premodern mystical poetry has become subject to a display of puritanical morality.¹ By the late nineteenth century, Iranian and European scholars of mysticism began this process by censoring homoerotic tropes such as the male Beloved, which, despite its varied earthly and ethereal meanings, was either feminized or designated as an “allegory.” In the first instance, early European scholars of Sufi poetry translated male Beloveds as female. For example, a “Turk” (a Turkish male slave) was changed to a “blooming maiden.”² Notable twentieth-century Iranian scholars also objected to the homoerotic content in medievalghazals(“love poetry”), yet because they could not...

Nationalist views of Iran are predicated on “a congruence of state, society and culture,” territorialized onto a homeland and sharply delineated from those around it.¹ The scholarship of the last few years has detailed the various ways in which this process of imagining Iran as a national homeland occurred in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.² All agree that there were previous notions of a place called Iran, and ways of belonging to it, that were different from what came after. But the question remains, what were these notions? Without specific historicizing, concepts like Iran tend to be read...

Many historians have focused on the complex and intriguing Kurdish and Azeri national movements of the 1940s, but the Khuzistani Arabs are conspicuously absent from the historiography of Iran’s “decentralization” era, which lasted from 1941 until 1953. When Iranian Arabs appear, they are often dismissed as nothing more than self-serving agents of British imperialism, or proxies for the British military, the Foreign Office, the Government of British India, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). This paper challenges these views and conceptions, arguing that the elites of Khuzistani Arab society voiced a unique Arab ethnic national identity which became the basis...

In 1746, more than a century before America and Iran would sign a Treaty of Friendship, theAmerican Magazine and Historical Chroniclereported on the latest happenings in Persia. The ruthless commander Nadir Shah had routed the Ottoman army and signed a treaty enabling him to occupy Najaf.¹ Nadir had risen from the ashes of the Safavid Empire to rule over Iran and its borderlands. Brief accounts of Persia appeared in other early American periodicals, including excerpts from Montesquieu’sPersian Lettersand excerpts of Persian poetry in English translation.² The volume of articles discussing Persian history, culture, and politics increased...

Afshin Marashi has noted in reference to the interwar period that diplomatic history played an important role “as part of the emerging narrative of modern culture in the region.”¹ I would broaden that assertion to a longer stretch of history—at least as far back as the rise of European hegemony in the Middle East and up to the present day. The nationalist narrative is being continually revised, and global influence is as important as ever. Alongside official and intellectual formulations of specifically Iranian nationalism, many scholars of modern Persian literature and memoirs have grappled with the complex nature of...

While nationalism is one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena of modern history, the scholarship on nationalism still struggles with how to deal with the relationship between nationalism on the one hand and religion and secularism on the other. More specifically, it has proven challenging to study cases in which religion and nationalism appear to be either inseparable or one and the same. This is not because there are no examples of religious nationalism in the world. In fact, there are many such examples, both in the developing world and in industrialized western nations, including the above quoted example of...

To claim that early Pahlavi nationalist historians considered the spread of Islam in Iran as the source of decline and backwardness has become an unquestioned axiom in the field of Iranian studies. According to this perspective, Iranian historians, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards, articulateda tripartite periodization of history: a golden age starting in pre-Islamic Iran, a period of decline brought about by the Arab invasions and the spread of Islam, and a modern age of renewal witnessing the revival of the “authentic” ancient nation.¹ The persuasiveness of this account is in many ways intertwined with a broader cultural explanation...

It was a dominant paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s among social scientists that modernization breaks down traditional loyalties and confronts the individual with new opportunities, depending on individual achievements in harmony with universal criteria. “As people come to desire the same goals and rewards, they become more similar. Occupational and class differences become the salient social differentiators, displacing traditional solidarities that lose their utility and are reduced to innocuous cultural vestiges; loyalties are transferred from parochial to more encompassing national symbols produced by powerful and irreversible nation-building processes.”¹ Consequently, “modernization, by socially mobilizing large segments of the population, would...

Beginning in the early 1920s, under the auspices of the Pahlavi dynasty, the tombs of selected historical figures were systematically destroyed to make way for a new kind of architecture that signaled secular nationalism. Initiated during the reign of Reza Shah, all but two of the projects were implemented under Mohammad Reza Shah. The monuments were ideologically inscribed commemorations of the political elite of the 1920s, who not only made up the first Pahlavi government, but also founded, in 1922, the Society for National Heritage (SNH,anjoman-e asar-e melli) with the aim of preserving and propagating Iran’s cultural patrimony.¹ Within...

“Natarsid, Natarsid, Ma Hameh Ba Ham Hastim” (Do Not Fear, Do Not Fear, We Are All Together). This chant was heard again and again during the protest demonstrations against the questionable official result of the 2009 presidential election in Iran. The declared large margin of victory for incumbent President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, along with the manner and timing of the counting of the votes, convinced a large number of people that the election had been rigged. Iran was shaken for the next few weeks as hundreds of thousands, and at times millions, poured into the streets to protest the result and...

Inspired by postcolonial theories, recent scholarship has studied the construction of Iranian and Egyptian modernity—including nationalism and identity—by focusing on the national engagement with European modernity or theorganic localroots of modernity.¹ Leaving the Iranian engagement with Eastern cultures out of the inquiry, and limiting the discussion on the Iranian disengagement from the Arabo-Islamic legacies, oversimplifies and distorts the complex dynamics of the making of Iranian modernity. The limitation of this scholarship resulted in a misperception that Iranians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries totally turned their backs on the Arab East, and that Arab...

On August 1, 2003, U.S. immigration authorities, in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security, issued new regulations requiring U.S. consulates to interview many more foreigners before letting them into the United States. These new regulations were planned to help prevent terrorists, such as those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, from entering the country. The stringent regulations have since been modified, but from then on all Israelis seeking an entry visa to the U.S. were required, as part of the screening process, to show up for personal interviews at their nearby U.S. consulates. The increased scrutiny of Israeli travelers...