Download PDF | Ali M. Ansari - Perceptions of Iran_ History, Myths and Nationalism from Medieval Persia to the Islamic Republic-I.B. Tauris (2014).
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Ali M. Ansari is Professor in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of several books on Iran, including /ran, Islam and Democracy: ‘The Politics of Managing Change (2000).
Contributors
Ali M. Ansari (Editor) is Professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews. His research interests are focused on the political development of modern Iran, Iran’s relations with the West from the early modern period, the politics of nationalist myth and historiography. Main publications include: Jran, Islam and Democracy — The Politics of Managing Change (2000, 2006 (2nd edn)); The History of Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After (2003); Confronting Tran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Roots of Mistrust (2006); and The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (2012). He is Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (London) and Vice President of the British Institute of Persian Studies.
Pejman Abdolmohammadi is Adjunct Professor of History and Institutions of the Islamic Countries at the University of Genoa and is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Global Studies in Rome. His PhD dissertation was published in 2009 as La Repubblica Islamica dell Tran: Il Pensiero Politico dell’Ayatollah Khomeini. He has authored various articles on the Middle East, with particular focus on Iran and Shi’ism, and is a regular contributor to Italy’s leading review of international affairs, Limes.
Robert Bartlett is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews and a fellow of the British Academy. His publications include: The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (1993), which was joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize; England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225 (2000); The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (2004); and The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (2008). He has presented two television series for the BBC: Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), and The Normans (2010).
Stephen P. Blake is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota. His research interests focus on the three early modern Islamic empires — the Mughal, the Safavid and the Ottoman. His books include: Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739 (1991); Half the World: The Social Architecture of Safavid Isfahan, 1590-1722 (1999); and Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires (2013). He has presented his research extensively around the world including in Iran, Turkey, India, Poland, Germany and the UK, and contributes to the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Asian History and Modern Asian Studies, among others.
Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World, and the Associate Director of the Dr Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. He is the editor of the Name-ye Iran-e Bastan: The International Journal of Ancient Iranian Studies and the creator of Sasanika: The Late Antique Near East Project. His research interests are diverse and include ancient and medieval Iranian history, Iranian languages and literature, Zoroastrianism, numismatics and world history. He has published extensively in both English and Persian.
Farhang Jahanpour received his PhD in Persian Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he also served as Lector in Persian for five years. He is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, and spent a year as Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard. Since 1985, he has been teaching as a part-time tutor at the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Publications include Nuzhat Nama-ye ‘Alai, an Eleventh Century Encyclopaedia of Natural Sciences, History and Literature by Shahmardan bin Abil-Khair Razi (1983) and Directory of Iranian Officials: A Guide to the Political Structure and Government Officials in Iran (1992) for BBC Monitoring. He has also translated Arnold Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial (1976) into Persian and recently translated from Persian into English the Memoirs of Ardeshir Zahedi (2012).
Lynette Mitchell is Professor of Greek History and Politics at the University of Exeter. Her interests are focused on Greek political history, Greek historiography and the development of Greek political thought, especially in the archaic and classical periods. She has published two monographs: Greeks Bearing Gifts: The Public Use of Private Relationships, 435-323 Bc (1997) and Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece (2007); as well as co-edited The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (1997), Greek History and Epigraphy: Essays in Honour of PJ. Rhodes (2009) and Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (2012). She has recently completed a monograph on rulers and ruling ideology in archaic and classical Greece: The Heroic Rulers of Archaic and Classical Greece (2013).
David Motadel is a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He studied history at the University of Freiburg and completed his MPhil and PhD in history at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates scholar. He has held research positions at Harvard, Yale and Oxford.
Anja Pistor-Hatam is Professor and Chair of Islamic Studies at Kiel University, where she teaches history of the Near and Middle East as well as Islamic religion. Her research focuses on the later modern and contemporary period, especially intellectual history in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, and the Shi'ite pilgrimage to the holy sites in Iraq (‘atabat). Recently, she has been working on modern Iranian historiography.
Elisa Sabadini is an independent scholar attached to the Chair of History of Civilizations and of International Systems at the University of Milan, where she is a member of Centro di Politica Estera e Opinione Pubblica (Centre for Foreign Policy Studies and Public Opinion). She holds a masters degree in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Milan and a PhD (2010) in European history from Sapienza University of Rome. Her main research interests include the history of ideas, relations between Christendom and Safavid Persia, and European consciousness, perceptions and identity arising from travel in the early modern period.
Saeed Talajooy is Lecturer in Persian Literature at the University of St Andrews. His research is focused on the changing patterns of Iranian identities as reflected in Iranian theatre, cinema and literature. He has taught and published on literature, world drama and cinema in Iran and the UK. His recent works include co-editing Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music (2012) and editing a Special Issue of Iranian Studies on Bahram Beyzaie (2013). He is currently working on a critical study of Iranian plays and playwrights entitled Modernity and Iranian Drama: Plays and Playwrights.
Introduction
Ali M. Ansari
While the writing of Iranian history has grown dramatically in recent decades, the study of Iranian historiography has been comparatively slow to emerge, and in spite of one or two notable exceptions, the field may be said to be in its infancy.! Indeed, if the politics behind historical writing has rarely been disputed among Iranian historians and their readership, the precise nature of that politics has in equal measure been poorly understood, studied or reflected upon.
The earliest historians of the Persianate world sought to apply the lessons of the past to the government of the present with mirrors of princes that aimed to educate the ruling elite to the tenets and principles of best practice by drawing on the idealised examples of the past — a function that would later be adopted by European historians. Others sought to protect a broader heritage and ideal of Iran — variously defined — in the face of dramatic, turbulent and often violent change. In the modern age, the new discipline of history, drawn from Western methods forged in the Enlightenment, was put to the service of a nascent and reinvigorated nationalism, much as it had been in the West itself. Here, the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and the transnational principles it espoused and promoted were paradoxically applied for the purpose of creating distinct and often opposing ‘national’ histories. These national histories have been presented in many forms, and interpreted through diverse ideological lenses, but have in essence remained true to their central purpose of redefining Iranian identity for the present through a form of historical cohesion that would cement the state and the nation. Secular nationalists, Marxists and Islamists all sought to reinterpret history to the service of contemporary politics sharing a curiously Whig faith in progress, emancipation and ultimate salvation. In this sense they all betrayed, to a greater or lesser extent, the Whig inheritance they borrowed from the European Enlightenment.
This collection of essays, drawn from papers presented at a conference held in the University of St Andrews in 2009, on the theme of Historiography and Iran in Comparative Perspective, expand on these themes of nationalism, the idea of progress and the West, looking both at Iranian appreciations of the West, and Western constructions of Iran, or in the Western vernacular, Persia. Central to this is the concept of ‘freedom ’ itself as conceived among the Greeks in contradistinction to the Persians whose ‘slavery’ was argued to be at the roots of their ultimate failure and demise. Lynette Mitchell effectively dissects this argument and shows how in the case of Herodotus’ interpretation of Cyrus the Great, this motif was challenged and contradicted as the monarchical rule of Cyrus was considered a harbinger of freedom. The legacy of Cyrus, through both biblical and classical sources, is explored by Robert Bartlett in his investigation of the image of ancient Iran in the medieval Western imagination, an image that, as Bartlett points out, did not loom large but which nonetheless persisted in intriguing ways.
‘The importance of Cyrus to the myth of emancipation so important to modern nationalists and their historical writing is explored in my own chapter, which looks more broadly at the context of historical writing in Iran, the modern debt to the Enlightenment, narrative displacement and the persistence of mythologies — themes that are taken up by a number of other chapters in this volume. David Motadel analyses the development of the European myth of Aryanism and its complex and often contradictory appropriation by Iranian nationalists, who were not always fluent nor comprehending of the European concept. In this vein, Pejman Abdolmohammadi looks in more detail at some key Iranian nationalist thinkers and their interactions with Western ideas.
Mythologies and the uses and abuses of history are key themes in the chapter by Anja Pistor-Hatam, who looks at the way in which the Mongol invasions have been interpreted and applied in the Islamic Republic of Iran, while Farhang Jahanpour and Elisa Sabadini investigate the ways in which perceptions of the other have changed and developed through Iranian Occidentalism in the twentieth century, and Italian ‘Orientalism’ in the early modern era. Narrative displacement in the histories of Sasanian Iran, perhaps the crucial period for the formation of the historical idea of Iran, is explored by Touraj Daryaee, while two further chapters explore distinct aspects of time and narrative. Saeed Talajooy provides a fascinating account of the way in which the Iranian playwright, Bahram Beyzaie, dramatised Iranian nationalist history, while Stephen Blake addresses a crucial though often neglected aspect of historical perception: the notion and measurement of time. How societies and polities perceive of time and chronology is central to their world view and thus identity, as the noted Iranian nationalist Hasan Taqizadeh knew only too well from his own extensive studies of the Iranian calendar.
The conference and the chapters that form the backbone of this volume would not have been possible without the support of the Iran Heritage Foundation and the additional funding provided by the British Institute of Persian Studies. I am very grateful to both the Foundation and the Institute for their support, without which the conference would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Dr Paul Churchill for his exhaustive work in managing both the conference and the collation of the chapters, to Dr Giorgio Rota, and to the staff at I.B.Tauris in bringing the intellectual fruits of this endeavour to a wider reading public.
Ali M. Ansari University of St Andrews
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