Iran Without Borders

Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784780685
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784780708
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

"No ruling regime," writes Hamid Dabashi, "could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people." For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan.

In Iran Without Borders, the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland-either physically or emotionally-and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.

CHAPTER 1

Craving for India

I was craving for India.

Mir Seyyed Abd al-Latif Shushtari (1788)

The opening of Iran’s horizons towards a changing world began many centuries ago. In what today we call Iran, the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722) unified a vast area stretching from India to the Ottoman territories, forming a Shi’i empire. The Safavids oversaw a flourishing of art, architecture, industry, and commerce, as well as a vast body of scholastic learning. Under pressure from their Russian and Ottoman neighbors, the Safavids finally collapsed in response to a tribal Afghan uprising, giving rise to the triumphalist figure of Nader Shah (r. 1736–47), who defeated the Afghans, secured much of the Safavid border, and founded his own Afsharid dynasty(1736–96). After a short interval in which power was held by the Zands (1750–94), finally the Qajars (1785–1925) came to power. The Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) marked the end of the Qajar absolutist monarchy, eventually leading to their final demise and the rise of the Pahlavis (1926–79), whose rule collapsed in turn under a popular revolution (1977–79) that resulted in an Islamic Republic (1979 to the present).

This skeletal narrative is only there to be disabled, for all these dynastic claims to legitimacy and political domination have always been consistently challenged by revolutionary uprisings by the combined energies of the impoverished peasantry and the urban poor. Centralizing dynasties and centrifugal uprisings have driven the momentum of power-play in Iranian and many other similar histories. Massive urbanization under the Safavids was crudely interrupted and reversed by tribal solidarity under the Afsharids and Zands, and a sudden thrust for colonial power under the Qajars ushered Iran into the heart of this tumultuous age. The Iranian urban population grew steadily, while guilds and merchants in bazaars and foreign trade began systematically to incorporate Iran into the regional and global economy. Mosques and royal courts remained the major sites of power struggles, with the bazaar eventually coming to political terms with its emerging power. Foreign trade by colonial powers became an increasing force beginning with the Safavids and culminating with the Qajars, threatening the interests of local and regional merchants and forcing an uneasy alliance between them and the clergy. After the Safavids came to power, Shi’ism became the official state religion, but many Sunni enclaves persisted, joining Iranian Jews, Christians (Armenians), and Zoroastrians in thriving or suffering with the fate of the nation as a whole. Such tribal affinities as those of the Lors and the Bakhtiyari remained a constant force into the twentieth century.

Exposure to foreign ideas from the late eighteenth century became definitive of Iranian political culture. Travel narratives soon emerged as a particularly popular genre. Diplomats, merchants, and students traveled abroad, wrote books and magazine articles, bringing news of the wider world to their compatriots. With the arrival of the printing press, in the early nineteenth century, newspapers, books, and periodicals became widely available. Translations of texts from European languages (English and French, in particular) encouraged the simplification of Persian prose, making it ready to reach far beyond its traditional home in royal courts, to be read by an emerging literate public, and for far more radical purposes. Iran and Iranians were exiting a world over which they had a high degree of control, and entering one that increasingly lay beyond it.

Nader Shah Goes to India

The details of these historical developments lead us towards the dynamic force of Iranian social and intellectual history, far beyond its current frontiers. In the post-Safavid period, the history of Iranian territorial disintegration under colonial pressure began to unfold. Nader Shah (1688–1747) emerged as a military leader during the reign of Shah Tahmasb II, by way of helping him consolidate Safavid control of greater Khorasan and Afghanistan. But the main menace to the Safavid dynasty was the Afghan invasion and occupation of Isfahan. In the decisive battle of Murcheh Khvort, on November 12, 1729, Nader helped the Safavid monarch deliver a severe defeat to the combined forces of the Afghans and the Ottomans. Nader spent the next three years expelling the Ottomans and the Russians from other Safavid territories in the north and west, and in 1732 he deposed Tahmasb II. Installing his infant son Abbas III on the throne, Nader began to rule the Safavid realm in his name. While still engaged in battle against the Ottomans and the Russians in 1736, Nader dismantled the Safavid dynasty altogether and declared himself king.

The most significant event in the reign of Nader Shah was his invasion and occupation of India. At the Battle of Karnal, on February 13, 1739, Nader dealt a decisive defeat to the defending Indian army, and entered Delhi in triumph. This victory of Nader’s soon gave new ideas to the East India Company. As his fame grew in Europe, he inadvertently paved the way for the British colonization of the subcontinent. “By his famous invasion of India,” observed Karl Marx in an editorial he published in New York Daily Tribune on February 14, 1857, Nader had “contributed much to that disorganization of the declining Mogul empire, which opened the way for the rise of the British power in India.”¹

Half a century after Nader’s invasion of India, with the British now firmly entrenched in that country’s commercial and political grid, an Iranian merchant spent a major portion of his life in India, setting down his impressions and observations of what he saw and thought in what is now a major textual source attesting to the first encounter of an Iranian with European colonial modernity. Tohfat al-Alam/Gift of the World (1788–1804), by Mir Abd al-Latif Khan Shushtari (1758–1805), the travelogue he wrote while he lived in India, is one of the earliest accounts of a native Iranian leaving his homeland and encountering European colonialism at first-hand in a neighboring country, now in the full grip of the British commercial and political snare.² Between the Caucasus and the Indian subcontinent we can now map out the emerging horizons of a world that would redefine Persian political culture. Imperial rivalries between the Russians, the British, and the French were definitive of the emerging colonial circumstances that brought Iran and its environs face to face with its geopolitical context, and it was precisely in this context that their political culture assumed a necessarily cosmopolitan character.

Shushtari’s text is among the earliest extant accounts of an Iranian’s encounter with European institutions of (colonial) modernity. He was a man of unusual intelligence with a particular penchant for observing and recording for posterity what he thought were new and groundbreaking ideas concerning social formations, political prowess, and cultural effervescence. In India he had discovered the Europeans and their achievements. They mesmerized him, and he wanted his fellow Iranian countrymen to know what he had learned. His travelogue was written during the Qajar period, by an Iranian—but far away from Iran, at a time when European colonialism in India provided the young traveler with an unusual opportunity to reimagine his homeland within a new world order, and while outside its borders; his native country became a homeland by virtue of the distant gaze he was thereby afforded.

Shushtari was born to a learned clerical family and received a solid scholastic education in Iran and Iraq. But he soon abandoned the course of his higher education, opting to live the life of a lay businessman traveling to India and getting to know the world far beyond his ancestors’ juridical imagination. What is critical about his observations about Europe is that he never actually traveled to any European country, and all his impressions were indirect products of his experiences in India, now in the full grip of British commercial and political colonialism. About one hundred years before the rise of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, Shushtari wrote of constitutional rights, civil liberties, separation of clerical and political authority, and the institutional protection of individual citizens. At the time of his writing about these institutions, Qajar Iran was ruled by an absolutist monarchy —and thus his prose is decidedly not only informative but also inquisitive, transformative, and mobilizing.

Shushtari is entirely beholden to the British Empire. More than anything, he is drawn to the global power of the British, and tries to understand how that transcendental power has come about. His book provides a fascinating panorama of an emerging geography, central to which are the discovery of the New World and the emerging power of the United States. He traces the manifestations of this global power in the cosmopolitan worldliness of Europe’s cities, its institutions of contemporary civilized life, city designs, urban landscape, and civic services. He is particularly drawn to the rise of European philosophers in the public domain, and the corresponding decline in the power of religious institutions in general, and of the church in particular. He is fascinated by the freedom of the press, which he connects to the rise of a new mode of historiography in which the historian is no longer intimidated by the power of the monarch, and does not write history to appease his patron. He leaves very little doubt that he wishes to see these institutions emerge in his homeland, too. His ideals are palpably English, while his observations are made in India. Between these two locations, he imagines his Iranian homeland.

In his travelogue, Shushtari scarcely writes about Iran. He is chiefly preoccupied with describing European achievements, and those of the British in particular, of whom he had a direct knowledge in India. Writing his book in a simple and accessible Persian prose, for the obvious benefit of his countrymen, he nevertheless placed Iran at the center of his thoughts when describing the institutions of a rich and diversified civil society. But it is British colonialism and the power of its globalized empire that most fascinate Shushtari, as well as the inventions and discoveries that have facilitated such economic and political prowess. He is completely in awe of the British, but his positive description of their political wisdom is obviously intended as a critique of the monarchical institutions of brute force and arbitrary rule operating at the time. His central proposition is that Europeans were able to move beyond those institutions by breaking away from papal authority, and thereafter developing institutions of civic and political authority independent of the Vatican. He tells his readers how the decline of papal power corresponded with the rise of the institutions of parliamentary democracy and rule of law. But he obviously has contemporary Iranian and Ottoman monarchs in mind, and when he gives full descriptions of the parliamentary debates that take place before the British king makes a definitive decision, there remains no doubt what future he envisions for his homeland. Shushtari’s admiration for the British must be understood in the context of his critique of Muslim monarchies and his desire for the rise of institutions of liberal democracy in his homeland.

It is crucial to keep in mind that Shushtari devotes fourteen of his nineteen chapters to a full description of his hometown of Shushtar, relating its history, geography, and anthropology. It is after the first half of the book that he informs his readers how he decided to move from his hometown, initially to Basra in Iraq and then to India. He describes, upon his arrival in India, the colonial domination of the British over the country, giving him occasion to talk about the military, industrial, scientific, and civic institutions of Europe in general, and the United Kingdom in particular, that had facilitated this domination. If he refers to Copernicus and Newton, it is to talk about their scientific discoveries, which had facilitated the rise of European science and technology. He devotes a full chapter to the European military sciences and their world-conquering capabilities. The final chapters of the book are entirely dedicated to his description of India, its history, geography, and anthropology. He concludes the book with a description of the rise of Wahhabism and their attack on Karbala.

When we consider the structure of Shushtari’s narrative, we see that his attention to the British in India is really in the context of his concern about his immediate region—initially Iran, but then also India, and ultimately the Ottoman territories to which he returns. In fact, the traveling narrative is a ruse—a way of finding an appropriate language to address the afflictions that have beset Iran and its environs. The fact that he is in India when writing the book gives him an added authority; having seen beyond his homeland, he is able to open the horizons of his compatriots—and thereby by the virtue of that location constitute the very emotive universe of that homeland.

After Nader Shah’s invasion of India, the subcontinent became a major point of interest and attraction for generations of Iranian merchants and intellectuals. Shushtari was neither the first nor the last Iranian intellectual to be drawn to India. The entire Mughal Empire was heavily under the influence of Persian poets and literati who had immigrated into the Mughal domain and helped to create a magnificent Persianate culture in its court. But Shushtari represents a particularly poignant turning point at which Iranians began to feel the fever of colonial modernity coming their way from India.

Haji the Traveler

With all its significance for subsequent generations of critical thinkers and public intellectuals, Shushtari’s account of his journey to India pales in comparison with that of another towering Iranian writer of a slightly later period. Hajj Mohammad Ali Mahallati (1836–1925), popularly known as Hajj Sayyah (“Haji the Traveler”) explored the world widely, becoming a harbinger and herald of a world far beyond his contemporaries’ imagination. It is hard for us to appreciate the extraordinary significance of this generation of Iranian travelers, who left their homeland behind to produce travelogues incorporating a radically simplified Persian prose with which they addressed what they saw as the vast discrepancy between European societies and that of their homeland, and thereby instigating reform and revolt against the status quo.

Sayyah was born in 1836 and raised in a rural family in Mahallat, near Qom in central Iran.³ He began to travel beyond his hometown at a very young age, initially to Tehran and subsequently to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, to pursue his scholastic studies. During the 1840s and 1850s, when Sayyah was in southern Iraq, seminarian students from around the Muslim world (from India to Indonesia) would gather and, in addition to their legal studies, engage in debates and conversations about the fate of the Muslim world, now increasingly in the grip of European colonial powers. The Ottoman Empire was proving unable to cope with these seismic changes, the dysfunctional Qajar was at the mercy of European colonial machinations, and the Mughals in India were overrun by the British. In 1859, at the age of only twenty-three, Sayyah, now fully cognizant of these changes, returned to Iran. Avoiding marital life, he abruptly left his homeland once again for the Caucasus, concocting on his way the fiction of his own death, and conveying the news back to his family so that he could travel freely. What was the source of this defiant will to travel the world? Wherefore the synergy?

Thus began Sayyah’s lifelong travels around the world, and around his own homeland, engaging with the most progressive, radical, and critical movements of his time. He was neither from a wealthy family nor at the service of any prince or merchant, and thus he traveled and lived in dire poverty. In the Caucasus he managed to learn Armenian, Turkish, and Russian and, like all other young students of his time, was drawn to the revolutionary ideas promoted within Russian intellectual circles. From the Caucasus he traveled to Istanbul. Financing his journeys by teaching Persian and Arabic, he eventually arrived in Europe, learning English, French, and even some German on his way, before going to North America, from there boarding an American ship heading to China, Japan, Burma, Singapore, and India. In every city he visited, he went to see factories, public schools, and churches, and even managed to meet and converse with high dignitaries. In India he visited the Agha Khan Mahallati, the region’s widely influential Ismaili leader. From there he finally returned to Iran, after an absence of almost sixteen years.⁴

Sayyah—a major advocate of the liberty of his nation and of the rule of law—was instrumental in preparing the way for the Constitutional Revolution. He returned to Iran in July 1877, during the reign of the Qajar monarch Nasser al-Din Shah, and began composing his travelogue as the mode of narrative that would best communicate his insights to others. His travels had turned him into a wise and learned man, deeply attracted to European and North American progress—though neither was spared from his critical judgment—and determined to bring about change in his own homeland. He used his travelogue to mount a scathing attack on the backwardness of his homeland, constantly contrasting its deficiencies with the achievements of Europe and the wider world; official corruption and tyranny troubled him deeply. After visiting Shiraz and Isfahan—as well as Mahallat, to attend to his mother—Sayyah eventually went to Tehran, where he received a royal audience with Nasser al-Din Shah, who had heard of his travels. Nasser al-Din Shah first had his official translators test Sayyah’s command of French, English, and Russian, and then asked his opinion of what had changed in his realm while he had been away. Sayyah gave a candid response about the calamity of social and economic conditions. The Qajar king dismissed him, impressed by his knowledge and audacity.⁵

Sayyah continued to consort with progressive Iranians of his time, visiting the royal court on further occasions, and constantly speaking of the necessity of reform. He traveled extensively through Iran, learning more about his homeland and relentlessly speaking against the calamities that had befallen it. He eventually left Iran, passing again through Russia, and then through the Ottoman territories on the way back to Europe, from which he departed for his Hajj pilgrimage before again returning to Iran. He had found a singular vocation for himself, traveling through and beyond Iran, learning of the social and cultural conditions of progress and applying them to his homeland. He eventually befriended the leading revolutionary activist of his time, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), which began to create trouble for him with Qajar officials. Al-Afghani’s criticism of the Qajar monarchy eventually resulted in his deportation from Iran. Sayyah came under increasing pressure from Qajar officials, eventually suffering arrest and torture. At one point he even applied for an American passport, with which he intended to go to China. But he remained in Iran until Nasser al-Din Shah was assassinated, and the Constitutional Revolution commenced, in the course of which he remained intensely active until his dying day.

Shushtari and Sayyah were not the only figures writing accounts of their adventures around the globe who informed the emerging nationalist sentiments of their homeland. Many others joined them, traveling to the four corners of the world, expanding the imaginative geography of their compatriots. Even the ruling monarch, Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, join...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Craving for India
• Chapter 2: Learning French and Russian
• Chapter 3: The Young and the Liberated
• Chapter 4: The Sphere of the Earth
• Chapter 5: Sailing Upon the Waters Round the Globe
• Chapter 6: The World Is My Home
• Chapter 7: Where Is Homeland?
• Chapter 8: Geographical Indeterminacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index