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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
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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

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