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

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.

Imagined Iran After the Arrival of Islam in Aryanist Orientalist, Nationalist and Islamist Historiography

“…Consequently, at the point of the establishment of the Pahlavi regime, racist narratives were not limited to a small number of nationalist activists; owing to Aryanist orientalist ideas, racist-modernist discourse dominated the era to later become official Pahlavi ideology (Alizadeh, 2020a: 3-8). With due consideration to history's crucial role in the nation-building process, nationalists under Pahlavis patronage began rewriting Iranian history to follow their ideological racial concerns, legitimizing the Pahlavis as the inheritors of the Iranian tradition of monarchy, and forging a new national identity (Zia-Ebrahimi, 2016;Marashi, 2011). This nationalist historiography was to show Iran as an immortal nation and Iranians as a superior ancient race (Vejdani, 2015;Ram, 2000).…”

Mute-ability of the past and the culture of martyrdom in Iran: remembering the Iran–Iraq war and civic piety amongst the revolutionaries of postwar generations

“…Pristine lines of separation between history and memory would not explain the mute-ability of the past any better; nor would it make my analytical contributions any more precise. I regard the assigning of history writing and histography to academia and 'professionals' (see Zia-Ebrahimi 2016) as arrogance born of socially disengaged knowledge production in university ivory towers. I echo Uni Wikan (2000, 217) who explained 'people bleed stories but academics gather [historic] narratives'.…”