Frontier Fictions

Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691151137, 9780691004976
• eBook ISBN: 9781400865079
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

In Frontier Fictions, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The "frontier fictions," or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity.


Kashani-Sabet maintains that land-based conceptions of countries existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. While many historians have focused on the concept of the "imagined community" in their explanations of the rise of nationalism, Kashani-Sabet is able to complement this perspective with a very tangible explanation of what connects people to a specific place. Her approach is intended to enrich our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.

1

A Manifest Destiny Diverted, 1804–1896

LONG BEFORE the French Revolution an anonymous geographer of the tenth century had already imagined the “boundaries of the world” (hudud al-‘alam) as comprising distinct regions (nahiyat).¹ According to this unknown figure, each territory varied from another “First, by the difference of water, air, soil, and temperature (garma-va-sarma). Secondly, by the difference of religion, law (shari‘at), and beliefs (kish). Thirdly, by the difference of words (lughat) and languages. Fourthly, by the difference of kingdoms (padsha’i-ha).”² These criteria as well as natural barriers—mountains, rivers, deserts—allowed the author of this tract to divide the world into quarters much like nation-states today.³

Hudud al-‘Alam was not the only work of Persian geography to attempt a mapping of the world. Earlier studies by Iranians displayed a similar interest in charting territories. In Zoroastrian cosmology Eran-Vej, the origin of the Aryans, found itself in the middle of the central circle of the earth.⁴ Just as the Greeks had adopted a system of climes to explain the universe, the Persians, building on Zoroastrian and Ptolemaic concepts, had devised a world of seven kishwars with “Iranshahr” at its center.⁵ While inspiring Islamic scholars, this schema nurtured a bias among the residents of “Iranshahr.” In the tenth century the geographer Abu Ishaq Ibrahim bin Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri completed his Masalik al-Mamalik, which aspired to map the world of Islam. As with other geographers of the Balkhi school, al-Istakhri’s observations had acquired an Islamic coloring, since by the tenth century the Qur’an served as a new source of geographical data. The lands of Islam gained a central position, with Mecca at its locus, in the minds of Muslim geographers. Still, despite his Islamic inclinations, al-Istakhri expressed a particular fondness for “Iranshahr,” in which he situated his native province of Pars (Fars): “No land (mulk) is more developed, more complete, or more prosperous than the kingdoms (mamalik) of Iranshahr.”⁶ Al-Istakhri’s practice of defining space not only offered an ordered understanding of the world, but served as a means of self-definition, an inclination familiar to other Iranians of the tenth century.⁷

However imaginary or fluid, the notion of “Iranshahr” persisted well after al-Istakhri’s time. Scholars had reified this abstraction and justified the “truth” of its existence by connecting it to a concrete reality: a territory, albeit one with shifting populations and boundaries. It is therefore unsurprising that years later Hamd Allah Mustawfi, even while writing under Mongol rule, would use the term “Iranzamin” to identify a region that corresponded roughly not only to al-Istakhri’s vision of “Iranshahr” but also to the territory of modern Iran.⁸ Iranzamin, as Mustawfi envisioned it, extended on the eastern frontier to

Sind, then by Kabul, Saghaniyan, Transoxiana and Khwarizm to the frontier of Saqsin and Bulghar. The western frontier lies on the province of Niksar (Neo-Caesarea) and Sis, and thence to Syria. The northern frontier lies on the lands of the Ossetes and Russians, the Magyars and Circassians, the Bartas and along the Khazar desert … with the country of the Alans and Franks…. The southern frontier lies on the desert of Najd, across which the road passes to Mecca, and on the right hand of this desert the line goes up to the frontiers of Syria, while on the left hand it comes down to the Persian Gulf….⁹

While these borders remained elastic, many of the provinces they embraced fall within Iran’s current boundaries. Modern Iran, then, did not haphazardly appear in its current location on the globe, nor did its appearance come about as a result of an entirely casual act of “imagination” or “invention.”¹⁰

In sketching the frontiers of “Iranzamin,” Mustawfi, almost prophetically, anticipated controversy and strove to avoid ambiguity: “Now although of these outer lands some, at times, have been under the sway of the sovereign of Iran, and even in these parts some cities have been in fact founded by the sovereigns of Iran, yet, since it is our intention here merely, and in particular, to lay down the exact frontier of Iran, it is necessary to omit now any detailed mention of these outer lands.”¹¹ Mustawfi’s impulse to chart accurately attested to his awareness that in cases where natural boundaries did not exist, defining frontiers became a questionable but necessary undertaking. His disproportionate attention to the lands of Iran suggested a desire to set apart that which he represented—Iranzamin—from the other peoples and territories of Islam.¹²

Just as texts preserved spatial concepts, so did maps. Maps assigned visual definitions to kingdoms and empires, promoting the differentiation of states. Visual representations converted the image of “Pars” or “Iranzamin” into something concrete (or at least into something that corresponded to the geographer’s reality).¹³ Medieval maps did not mark the lands of Iran as Iranshahr. Rather, they depicted the provinces that together formed the general area known as Iran.¹⁴ This tendency reflected the times, since Iran was not a political unity under the early Islamic dynasties. However, as one scholar has noted, “The Iranian bias also appears in the contents of the set of maps. The Iranian area is divided systematically into areas for mapping, whereas the areas the Arabs conquered from the Byzantines were treated in a much less systematic way.”¹⁵

The province of Fars (Pars) maintained an exalted position as “the seat of empire of the Kings of Iran” in texts as well as on maps. As Hamd Allah Mustawfi noted, “[W]hile they [the Kings of Iran] exercised sovereignty over the whole of the Land of Iran, they called themselves simply the Kings of Fars.”¹⁶ Citing the Prophet, Mustawfi explained this bias in the following terms: “Verily God hath preferred amongst His creatures of the Arabs the Quraysh, and amongst the Persians the men of Fars: for which reason the people of this province … were known as ‘the Best of the Persians.’”¹⁷ Herodotus alone was not responsible, then, for popularizing the term Pars (Fars) in referring collectively to Iranians and the Iranian lands, a custom that Europeans would continue until 1935. These medieval examples also illustrate that the Persian emphasis of modern Iranian nationalism was not without historical precedent.

The mapping of “Iran” reinforced the sense that something concrete sustained the idea. Land existed tangibly and with a measure of constancy that other cultural constructs did not, and its reality was repeatedly supported by visual evidence. A series of European maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, placed the Iranian lands generally between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Breaking from the Ptolemaic tradition, these maps labeled the Iranian domains collectively as “Persia,” reflecting the political unity of Iran under the Safavids.¹⁸ These designs in a sense helped to “legitimate” Iran’s claims to those provinces, despite the errors and self-serving motivations of cartographers. Even if the boundaries of “Persia” remained fluid, as demonstrated in these maps, its “heartland” was fixed.

“Iran” thrived as much in the minds of its rivals as it did in the imagination of its residents. A rare map of Iran attributed to the famed printer Ibrahim Müteferrika gave pride of place to land by setting precise boundaries between two imperial adversaries.¹⁹ Müteferrika’s design clearly marked the frontiers of Iran and the Ottoman Empire in 1729, no doubt with an eye to the border wars that had occurred between the two powers and had come to a partial resolution in 1727. The Ottomans, who had pursued their Persian campaign partly to avenge their territorial losses in Hungary (1683) and Austria (1718), recognized the vulnerability of the declining Safavid state and successfully claimed Tabriz, Kermanshahan, Luristan, and Hamadan, areas that today fall within Iran’s borders. Yet, by 1729, Nadir Khan began to reassert Persian control, manifesting the fragility of frontiers.²⁰

Müteferrika’s decision to print a map of this significant yet fleeting victory, especially at a time when the lands were up for grabs, revealed his desire to assert unequivocal Ottoman control of disputed borderlands. In light of the empire’s recent defeats, Müteferrika hoped to capture a moment of Ottoman glory, as the newly won territories would once again affirm Ottoman hegemony in Asia, if not in Europe. Müteferrika’s map was printed in 1729, the year in which the Ottoman printing press was inaugurated. His devotion of one of his earliest prints to an Ottoman boundary confirmed the relevance of land and frontiers in asserting regnal power as well as the need to provide visual proof of territorial hegemony to affirm state and dynastic legitimacy. Müteferrika’s print is also notable for referring to the Iranian lands as “Mamalik-i Iran,” or the domains of Iran, an expression that Iranians themselves used to speak of the region.²¹ That the Iranians considered their mulk a congeries of mamalik did at times diminish the impact of the state.

“Iran” and its corresponding territory then were not nineteenth-century innovations, as J. H. Kramers had claimed in 1936.²² Nor did these ideas originate with the work of Orientalists, as one writer has suggested.²³ The impulse to set apart things Iranian—land and language, culture and civilization—had old roots and simply found a new application and context in nationalism. Modern Iran, like other nation-states, emerged from these frontier fluctuations. Iran, the empire, had once embraced lands extending from Asia Minor to India and from the Caucasus to parts of Arabia. Iran, the nation, comprised lands from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. What the empire and the nation shared was a heartland, despite the illusory or fictional nature of the abstraction; where they differed geographically was in their boundaries.

Premodern efforts to delimit territory, as demonstrated by Mustawfi, Müteferrika, and others, confirm that attempts to differentiate among societies antedated nationalism. Rather, these historical precedents, combined with the changes brought on by modernity, paved the way for nation-states. To explain nationalism without tracing such continuities ignores the long-standing patterns within societies to distinguish between rivals and neighbors by delineating territorial and cultural boundaries. The process of limiting frontiers, whether through battles or treaties—an activity that acquired immense significance in the nineteenth century—raised sensibility to differences and impelled more and more groups to stake out their space. Iran’s transition from a mulk to a millat occurred gradually in this milieu. It was, however, a transformation that would distinguish this brand of “Iranianness” from its earlier incarnations. Land played an important role in guiding this transition, especially in an age of empire, though it would become neither the sole cause of change nor the single barometer of national identity. At a time when imperial greatness was synonymous with imperial space, Iran grappled with its ambitious neighbors for its territorial share; by the end of the nineteenth century, it would forcibly forego its proprietary claims to the Caucasus, Herat, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. As the century drew to a close, the Iranian space could no longer be termed imperial, even if Iran’s imperial imaginings lingered.

Manifest Destiny

The hunger for empire emerged vividly in Qajar narratives. Qajar historians interpreted Aqa Muhammad Khan’s campaigns as the rebirth of an Iranian empire symbolized by its sprawling territory. In a brief but telling account, Muhammad Hashim Asaf Rustam al-Hukama showed the importance of land by centering his discussion of Aqa Muhammad Khan on the territorial consolidation of the Iranian domains. Rustam al-Hukama reduced the monarch’s reign to a chronicle of the regions brought under Aqa Muhammad Khan’s control.²⁴ There is little mention of familial relations or royal intrigue. Rather, the recovery of the Iranian provinces epitomized the monarch’s rule. Similarly, Hasan Fasa’i, the author of the Farsnamah-i Nasiri, saw Aqa Muhammad Khan’s campaigns to Armenia and Georgia as an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the Safavids.²⁵ According to Fasa’i, in the hope of subordinating Irakli, the vali of Georgia, Aqa Muhammad sent a letter to the Georgian stating his claims in the following terms: “Shah Esmail Safavi ruled over the province of Georgia. When in the days of the deceased king we were engaged in conquering the provinces of Persia, we did not proceed to this region. As most of the provinces of Persia have come into our possession now, you must, according to ancient law, consider Georgia part of the empire.”²⁶ Riza Quli Khan Hidayat, a prolific chronicler of the early Qajar reign, even forged a storied lineage tracing the dynasty back to the Safavids.²⁷ Decades later, the historian I‘timad al-Saltanah inflamed the imagination of his fellow patriots in a fictitious account that brought together Iran’s gallant emperors. In this imaginary gathering Aqa Muhammad Khan found himself in the august company of such heroes as Khusraw Anushirvan, Shah Isma‘il Safavi, and other emperors, all hailed as capable “country conquerors” (kishwar sitanan).²⁸

In a speech, Aqa Muhammad Khan pointed to the notable attributes—bravery, majesty, and conquest—that had made him a subject worthy of I‘timad al-Saltanah’s historical fiction. Turning to Nadir Shah, Aqa Muhammad offered his views on the former’s reign. While regarding his counterpart as an oppressor (zalim), referring in particular to Nadir’s murder of Fath ‘Ali Khan Qajar and to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Major Events
• Glossary
• Introduction. Frontier Fictions
• 1. A Manifest Destiny Diverted, 1804–1896
• 2. Limning the Landscape: Geographical Depictions of the Homeland, 1850s–1896
• 3. From Riches to Ruins: The Political Economy of Frontiers, 1897–1906
• 4. Political Parables: Iran’s Frontier Crucible, 1906–1914
• 5. Coercing Camaraderie: The War, the Military, and the Myth of Riza Khan, 1914–1926
• 6. Parenting Little Patriots: Domesticating the Homeland, 1921–1926
• Conclusion. What’s in a Name? From Persia to Iran, 1926–1946
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index