Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T08:37:20.096Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Better a Warm Hug than a Cold Bath: Nationalist Memory and the Failures of Iranian Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Reza Zia-Ebrahimi
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi*
Affiliation:
Kings College London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 5: Special Issue: Dedicated to Homa Katouzian , September 2016 , pp. 837 - 854
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society For Iranian Studies 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adamiyat, Fereydun, and Ricks, Thomas M. “Problems in Iranian Historiography.” Iranian Studies 4, no. 4 (1971): 132–156. doi: 10.1080/00210867108701417CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aghaie, Kamran. “Islam and Nationalist Historiography: Competing Historical Narratives of Iran in the Pahlavi Period.” Studies on Contemporary Islam 2, no. 2 (2000): 20–46.Google Scholar
Ahmadi, Hamid. “Unity within Diversity: Foundations and Dynamics of National Identity in Iran.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 127–147.Google Scholar
Ashtiani, Abbas Eqbal. Tārikh-e Mofassal-e Irān az Sadr-e Eslām tā Enqerāz-e Qājāriyeh [A history of Iran, from the beginning to the fall of the Qajars]. Edited by Parizi, Mohammad Bastani. Tehran: Khayyam, 1347/1968 [1318/1939].Google Scholar
Bast, Oliver. “Disintegrating the ‘Discourse of Disintegration’: Some Reflections on the Historiography of the Late Qajar Period and Iranian Cultural Memory.” In Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture, edited by Atabaki, Touraj. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009, 55–68.Google Scholar
Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002.Google Scholar
Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural history: Problems of Method.” American Historical Review no. 5 (1997): 1386–1403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crone, Patricia. The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Elling, Rasmus Christian. Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enayat, Hamid. 1973. “The Politics of Iranology.” Iranian Studies 6, no. 1: 2–20. doi: 10.1080/00210867308701435CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forughi, Mohammad Ali, and Van Den Berg, Emmanuel. Tārikh-e Eskandar-e Kabir [History of Alexander the Great]. Tehran 1315 AH/1897.Google Scholar
Grigor, Talinn. Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs. New York: Periscope, 2009.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice, and Coser, Lewis A. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1950].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holliday, Shabnam. Defining Iran: Politics of Resistance: Ashgate, 2013.Google Scholar
Kashani-Sabetm, Firoozeh. Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804‒1946. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Katouzian, Homa. Sadeq Hedayat: the Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer. London: I. B. Tauris, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khatami, Mohammad. Eslām, Rowhāniyat va Enqelāb-e Eslāmi [Islam, clergy and the Islamic Revolution]. Tehran: Tarh-e Now, 2000.Google Scholar
Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Representations, no. 69 (2000): 127–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marashi, Afshin. Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940. 1st ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Mandler, Peter. History and National Life. London: Profile Books Limited, 2002.Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.Google Scholar
Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza. Answer to History. New York: Stein and Day, 1980.Google Scholar
Partow, Shin, Alavi, Bozor, and Hedayat, Sadeq. Anirān [Non-Iran]. Tehran: Farhumand, 1310/1931.Google Scholar
Pirniya, Hassan. Tārikh-e Irān az Āghāz tā Enqerāz-e Sāsāniyān [A history of Iran, from the beginning to the fall of the Qajars]. Edited by Parizi, Mohammad Bastani. Tehran: Khayyam, 1347/1968 [1308/1929].Google Scholar
Ram, Haggay. “The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post-Revolutionary Iran.” Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 1 (2000): 67–90. doi: 10.1111/j.1354-5078.2000.00067.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaban, Muhammad Abdulhayy. The ‘Abbāsid Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography. St. Antony’s series. New York: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaziri, Mostafa. Iran as Imagined Nation: the Construction of National Identity. New York: Paragon House, 1993.Google Scholar
Vejdani, Farzin. “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900‒1941.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2010.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Zarrinkub, Abdolhossein. Do Qarn Sokut [Two centuries of silence]. 7th ed. Tehran: Jāvidān, 2536/1977 [1957].Google Scholar
Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza. The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza. “‘Arab Invasion’ and Decline, or the Import of European Racial Thought by Iranian Nationalists.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 6 (2012): 1043–1061. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2012.734389CrossRefGoogle Scholar