Constructing Nationalism in Iran

From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic

Meir Litvak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315448787
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Nationalism has played an important role in the cultural and intellectual discourse of modernity that emerged in Iran from the late nineteenth century to the present, promoting new formulations of collective identity and advocating a new and more active role for the broad strata of the public in politics. The essays in this volume seek to shed light on the construction of nationalism in Iran in its many manifestations; cultural, social, political and ideological, by exploring on-going debates on this important and progressive topic.

1
Introduction

Meir Litvak

Nationalism in its many forms has proven to be the most potent and popular ideology of modernity, and in many ways the surrogate religion of modernity.¹ It has been interwoven with contemporary social, cultural, economic and political institutions, and deeply embedded in political psychology. In addition, it has been influential in the shaping of human identity and socio-political behavior.² Concurrently, nationalism has always been Janus-faced, in the words of Tom Nairn, as it contains several contradictions and paradoxes.³ While it stands over the passage to modernity it must look back into the past, to gather inspiration and strength for the ordeal of ‘development.’ In addition, it simultaneously embodies claims to distinctive cultural identities and social solidarities as well as to legitimate global standing. Thus it was both an essential source and the principal glue of state legitimacy, but also a powerful divisive ideology. Likewise, while it often served as a liberating force and as a lever of political emancipation as a part of modernization, it was also used to oppress minorities in the name of national uniformity. Moreover, as an ideology and a movement it is responsible for immense bloodshed.⁴

These maxims hold true for Iran from the late nineteenth century to the present. As in other countries, nationalism in Iran became, in John Hutchinson’s words, “a zone of conflict,”⁵ and an arena of multiple constructions of identity in view of Iran’s long history as well as of its multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition. A major contested issue has been the relative importance or tension among the three pillars, or repertoires, of symbols and ideas that form Iranian identity, that is Persian ethnicity and culture; Shi‘i Islam and statehood. Shi‘i religious and cultural identity, which is shared by about 90 percent of the population, alleviates but does not eliminate frictions between the dominant Persian culture and other minority cultures and identities. Concurrently, tensions exist between the concepts of Iraniyat (being Iranian based on the pre-Islamic Persian heritage) and Islamiyat (which centers upon the country’s Shi‘i-Islamic heritage). Both frameworks exclude minorities, although different ones aside from the Baluch and some Kurds.

Nationalism has played an important role in the cultural and intellectual discourse of modernity that has emerged in Iran, promoting new formulations of collective identity and advocating a new and more active role for broad social strata in politics. Similarly, every social movement in Iran since the 1891 Tobacco Rebellion to the 2009 post-election protests was at least partially motivated by nationalism and harbored nationalist goals. Nationalism also served as the dominant state ideology under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979) and as a major operative ideology and means of legitimacy under the Islamic Republic thereafter. Overall, it “has been the ideological reference point to which all competing ideologies had to adhere, and within which most have been subsumed.”⁶

As elsewhere, Iranian nationalism has been Janus-faced. It often looked at the past as a source of comfort or inspiration as Iranians faced their country’s often gloomy situation during the past two centuries. However, the choice of the usable past to cling on – the pre-Islamic imperial era or the Islamic one – became an ideological and political bone of contention throughout the twentieth century. Similarly, while nationalism and liberal constitutionalism were intertwined during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and the Mosaddeq movement (1951–1953), nationalism helped impose authoritarian and centralized state power on the periphery as well as cultural uniformity on ethnic minorities under Pahlavi rule and to some extent under the Islamic Republic.

The unprecedented horrors and bloodshed of the world wars, in which nationalism played an important ideological role, tarnished it in the eyes of many scholars. A prevalent theme in scholarship from the 1920s onwards contrasted the ‘civic-territorial nationalism’ of Western Europe and North America, which was a product of the Enlightenment and aimed at securing civil rights of the people with the more ‘reactionary’ and exclusivist Eastern ethnic nationalism, associated with Central and Eastern Europe as well as large parts in Asia and Africa. Accordingly, the latter type was embedded not on reason but on emotion, not in the present but in the past and was turning inwards, to the imagination, to tradition, to history and to nature.⁷ In addition to reflecting a strong Eurocentric bias, this categorization ignores illiberal aspects of civic nationalism such as the enforcement of cultural homogeneity on ethnic minorities. Iran, in this context, is a prime example of civic-territorial nationalism in a third-world country that has grappled with these dilemmas.

Moreover, the disdain toward various aspects of nationalism led scholars to reject its authenticity and regard it as false consciousness. Such views, however, aside from reflecting condescension toward their subject matter, ignore “the clear evidence that ethnies often sacrifice economic interests in favour of symbolic gains” and that “nationalism matters because people die for it.”⁸ Nationalism in Iran too has been occasionally dismissed as false or as a construct of European Orientalists.⁹ Yet, even the Islamic Republic, which had held strong reservations toward, or even opposed nationalism shortly after the 1979 Revolution, resorted to nationalist discourse as the war with Iraq dragged on.

The scholarship on nationalism, which seemed to decline after World War II, rebounded and bloomed since the 1980s. The study of Middle Eastern nationalisms, however, lagged behind this trend.¹⁰ The failure of pan-Arabism and the rise of Islam as a political ideology and movement contributed to this gap, as nationalism appeared to be out of tune with the changing regional realities. The 1979 Revolution could have been seen as affirming this trend with the rejection of Pahlavi nationalism and the victory of the Islamic forces. Yet, the Revolution was also a nationalist one, expressing widespread rejection of foreign domination. Moreover, subsequent developments, be it the resurgence of ethnic discontent and particularly the war against Iraq, showed the vitality of nationalism. These developments were also reflected in resurgence of scholarship of the field.¹¹

As the study of nationalism in Iran progressed, its complex and multifaceted nature has emerged ever more intriguing and the gaps in our knowledge and understanding appeared clearer and no less in need of addressing than before. The present volume, which is the outcome of an international conference held in June 2013 at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University, seeks to address and fill some of the gaps in the study of this fascinating topic.

The premise of this volume is that nationalism, like any other collective identity, is the product of continued construction and reconstruction that evolve as the outcome of historical processes as well as of conscious and unconscious collective actions of human beings. In addition, it is the subject of negotiations or conflicts as well as processes of inclusion and exclusion among social groups and political forces. Put in other words, identity is a story of human drama. Whether nations actually exist is a hotly debated question among scholars.¹² Yet the construction of collective identities, and in our case nationalism, responds to deep human psychological and social needs of belonging to a meaningful community. Moreover, unlike buildings, which are created ex nihilo, Iranian identity or identities, in whatever form, have deep historical roots.

The construction of nationalism in Iran in its many manifestations – cultural, social, political and ideological – is of particular interest because of its multifaceted nature and the passionate political, cultural and social struggles and scholarly debates that it has elicited. The impressive progress in scholarship on nationalism in general, and on the Iranian case in particular, has only added to these debates. A major issue, alongside the Iraniyat-Islamiyat conflict, has been the tension between Iran’s ethnic diversity and the homogenizing tendencies of nationalism, which has focused on the centrality of the Persian language and history. The definitions and categorizations of ethnic groups in Iran are not devoid of difficulties. It is therefore useful to adopt Rasmus Elling’s statement that Azeri, Kurd, Arab and Baluch “were originally socioeconomic, geographic and linguistic categories used situationally according to changing contexts throughout history.” What matters, then, he adds, “is how people identify themselves, when their identification labels change and why.”¹³ The conflicting figures over the size of the linguistic-ethnic minorities and the debate whether all Persian speakers can be described as belonging to a Persian ethnicity reflect the complexity of the situation. These issues are not merely academic; they have had significant ramifications on governmental policies as well as on sociopolitical struggles pertaining to Iran’s cultural, ideological and political orientations.

Scholars both in and outside of Iran were engaged in these debates as well, but also deliberated the historicity or ‘invented nature’ of Iranian nationalism, the time and processes of its emergence and development as well as questions of inclusion or exclusion, from above and below, of ethnic or religious minorities. Yet, while our knowledge and understanding has advanced considerably in recent years, much more research still needs to be done.

Structure of the book

These complexities and the multifaceted nature of nationalism as an ideology, culture, social movement and state policy are brought to light by the various chapters of this volume. The book is arranged chronologically, while emphasizing different themes in each period.

The first four chapters offer diverse overviews of nationalism in Iran. Meir Litvak opens with an historical overview of the development of Iranian identity.

Azar Gat asserts that contrary to modernist views, Persia-Iran has a claim to being one of the world’s oldest nations and a distinctive two-pillar, Persian-Iranian, ethnopolitical identity has been in existence almost continuously since the Achaemenids in the sixth century BCE. The Perso-Iranian cultural and linguistic identity underpins and explains this remarkable political endurance during Parthian, Sassanid, Safavid and Qajar times.

Nasrin Rahimieh examines the link between literature and nationalism in Iran during the past two centuries. Westernized Iranian intellectuals and literati became the conduits of a concept of literature as a platform for forging a national identity that would inform and reform all aspects of Iranian culture, society and politics. All of these voices exemplify a desire for a modern national identity that actively rewrites history and occasionally offers anachronistic readings of premodern and early modern Persian literature. The history of modern Persian literature, Rahimieh concludes, is inextricably interwoven with the construction of a national identity.

Eliz Sanasarian calls for a paradigm shift in the study of Iranian nationalism, where gender, class, ethnicity, minorities, provincial identities and even community development issues dominate the discourse. Drawing on biographical sources from the Pahlavi period, she highlights the deep-seated ethnic and local identities and rivalries as well as prejudices among religious groups, thus questioning the meaning of Iranian national identity.

The late Qajar period is the subject of the next two chapters. Sivan Balslev analyzes the links between masculinity and nationalism in the Iranian nationalist discourse during the years surrounding the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911). She demonstrates how this discourse employed terms loaded with gendered meanings as a vehicle for mobilizing men for the nationalist cause under the threat of losing their masculinity. Moreover, members of the Western-educated elite appropriated patriotism and the model of westernized masculinity as part of their attempt to monopolize power and hegemony in Iranian society.

Turning to nationalism in the provincial setting of Isfahan during the Constitutional Revolution, Meir Litvak maintains that Nationalism in Isfahan was manifested inter alia in the adoption of a new modernist discourse, in the struggle to preserve national crafts against foreign economic imperialism, and in coordination with other cities against foreign incursions. The sociopolitical dominance of the local clerical elite meant that nationalism in Isfahan was suffused by Shi‘i symbolism and that the imagined national community was that of a Muslim Iran, thereby excluding the non-Muslims.

Linking the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, Ali Ansari reassesses the prevalent narrative, which holds that race, particularly Aryanism, was central to the foundation of Iranian identity. He argues that the narrative of Aryanism as a racial construct of superiority, while popular among sections of society, was neither widely supported by ideologues of Iranian nationalism nor left unchallenged. Quite a few of these ideologues promoted a cosmopolitanism inspired by central tenets of the Enlightenment, which saw the salvation of humanity through the pursuit of education. ‘Iranianness,’ Ansari concludes, was re-imagined as a means of transcending ethnicities in order to bind together disparate peoples in a revitalized imagined community imbued with a renewed spirit of civilization.

The Pahlavi period (1925–1979) could be regarded as the heyday of nationalism in Iran. Shifting the discussion to the territorial aspect, Chelsi Mueller shows how the Persian Gulf was a central theme of the anti-colonial nationalist discourse during the Reza Shah period. Nationalism was expressed in territorial terms, which depicted the entire Gulf, including its southern Arab littoral, as usurped Iranian lands. Mueller concludes that Reza Shah’s centralizing and nationalist policies in the Gulf prompted waves of emigration from Iran’s southern shore areas to the Arab sheikhdoms of the lower Gulf. Similarly, heavy-handed treatment of travelers disrupted centuries of movement and exchange between the two shores and forged a sharper dichotomy between Persian speakers and Arabs in the Gulf.

Iranian nationalism served as the main ideological basis of the Pahlavi state. Yet, as Raz Zimmt shows, Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah put emphasis on different components of its national identity in order to consolidate its regional stature. In its relations with Arab and Muslim states, Pahlavi Iran emphasized its Islamic religious nature. In its relations with Shi‘i societies in Lebanon, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, it highlighted the Shi‘i component, but used its Persian identity to promote relations with non-Muslim neighbors who were culturally and linguistically close to Iran.

Camron Michael Amin examines the role of mass media as a forum for studying the dynamics of Iranian nationalism and as a means of constructing the ‘national self’ in reference to ‘the other.’ He focuses on the travelogues of ‘Abbas Mas‘udi, publisher of Iran’s main daily Ettela‘at and occasional surrogate for Pahlavi foreign policy initiatives, which were published following Mas‘udi’s visits to the southern Persian Gulf in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his travelogues, Mas‘udi tried to place Iran in a global context and compared it with the countries visited. His definitions of Iranianness were always at hand to clarify the essential differences between Iranians and others. He was at pains both to justify Iran’s historical claim on the southern Gulf, and to admit that the Arab character of the region made such claims impractical.

Menahem Merhavi analyzes the dual attitudes of both admiration and aversion that the Pahlavi state and modernized Iranians showed toward rural Iran until the mid-1970s. Alongside the cultivation and dissemination of the Pahlavi vision of the ‘great civilization’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• A note on transliteration
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The construction of Iranian national identity: an overview
• 3 Persian-Iranian national identity: the longue durée, from Achaemenid times onward
• 4 Four iterations of Persian literary nationalism
• 5 Intersectionality and the narrative of nationalism
• 6 Gendering the nation: masculinity and nationalism in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution
• 7 Nationalism and Islam in a provincial setting: late Qajar Isfahan
• 8 Iranian nationalism and the question of race
• 9 Nationalist representations of the Persian Gulf under Reza Shah Pahlavi
• 10 Iranian nationalism, Islamic unity and Shi‘ism in Iran’s regional policy: from the Pahlavis to the Islamic Republic
• 11 Surveying the ‘Sheikhdoms’ of the Persian Gulf, 1966–1973: newspaperman ‘Abbas Mas‘udi and the construction of Iranian nationalism in foreign policy
• 12 “True Muslims must always be tidy and clean”: exoticism of the countryside in late Pahlavi Iran
• 13 “The Jew has a lot of money, too”: representations of Jews in twentieth-century Iranian culture
• 14 Jewish intellectuals in Iran and their quest for Iranian national identity in the first half of the twentieth century
• 15 Pre-revolutionary Islamic discourse in Iran as nationalism: Islamism in Iran as nationalism
• 16 Nationalism and the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 17 Beyond boundaries: Iranian Azeris in an age of globalization
• 18 Guarding the nation: the Iranian revolutionary guards, nationalism and the Iran-Iraq War
• 19 From state to nation and from nation to state in Egypt: the role of the state in the formation of nationalism and the role of nationalism in the formation of the state, 1805–1952
• Bibliography
• Index