Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar. Source: Afshar Publishing. "Iran's Epic and America's Empire" considers the implications of Iran’s national epic, the Shahnameh for the present political tensions that mark Iran's relationship with the West. It offers an explanation of the poem as a national and a cultural icon. Santa Monica, CA -- April 17, 2012 -- The Shahnameh is Iran's national epic. It is a compendium of Iranian myths, legends, and history. Unlike other Indo-European epics, it is not about a war, like the Iliad , or an individual, like the Odyssey , Beowulf , or the Ramayana . The central character of the Shahnameh is Iran, which it glorifies both as subject and hero. Unlike other classical Indo-European epics, the Shahnameh is not in a dead language. It is intelligible to every speaker of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. This book is addressed to Iranians who reside in the West. Following a brief survey of Iranian history from its beginning in the 7th century B.C. to Ferdowsi's time in the 11th century, Mahmoud Omidsalar provides a history of the poem and a biography of its author. "Mahmoud Omidsalar is a world authority on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Very few people anywhere in the world know the Persian epic inside out as well as he does. Omidsalar's Iran's Epic and America's Empire is a bold political manifesto written by a master literary scholar. His steely meditations come at a particularly troubling time when Ferdowsi's birthplace is ruled by chronic autocracy and threatened by military strike. Omidsalar writes with conviction, courage, steadfast determination, and a defiant will to recollect, to remind, and to claim the Iranian posterity." Hamid Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York) “In Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire, Mahmoud Omidsalar the master of Shahnameh Studies, attempts to provide a personal narrative about the substance and meaning of the greatest literary work composed in the Persianate World. Along the way he provides a useful and contentious purview of the pre-modern history of Iran and the life of the composer of the epic, Abol-Ghasem Ferdowsi. Furthermore, Omidsalar not only dispels the common Eurocentric notions about Iran and the Shahnameh, but also takes on the blind nationalism of his own countrymen who at times are blinded by their own chauvinism. He shows how this xenophobic view has kept some from understanding the essence and nature of the Persian epic and Iran’s cultural achievement. Whoever reads this book will be forced to think about her/his own views on the meaning and importance of the Shahnameh”. Touraj Daryaee (Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at the University of California, Irvine) Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar. source: Cover of Iranian magazine Mosalas. Donald Trump's election after a comical and combative presidential contest, carried America's politics from the farcical side of the Rubicon to its tragic shore, straight into the arms of the country's Radical Right. Marx's famous dictum that history is repeated first as tragedy, and then as farce, may have been turned right-side-up. Somewhere up there, Hegel must be terribly amused. What is equally amusing is the outrage of Hillary Clinton's supporters and their claim that Russia meddled in America's elections and paved the way for Trump's victory. These claims are hard to prove; but let's assume that they are right and the Russians did meddle in America's internal affairs. If they did, they did no more than what the United States has been doing around the world for a very long time. Russian interference, in other words, is a bit of America's own medicine. American administrations-both Democrat and Republican-have a long history of meddling in other nations' elections. Countries from Latin America to Asia and from Europe to Africa have experienced the bloody side-effects of America's intrusion into their political processes. In her memoirs, Hard Times (2014), Mrs. Clinton acknowledges the U.S.'s interfering with the Iranian elections of 2009, and writes: "Behind the scenes my team at the State Department stayed in constant contact with activists in Iran and made an emergency intervention to prevent Twitter from shutting down for maintenance, which would have deprived protesters of a key communications tool" (p. 423). Instances of America's interference with the domestic affairs of countries throughout the world are too well known to require documentation. These activities have gone far beyond spying on the confidential communications of political parties. According to The Guardian , in Cuba alone, the number of American assassination attempts against Fidel Castro's life exceeded six-hundred. More recently, in Libya, Hillary Clinton promoted the overthrow of the government, which destabilized North Africa and created a serious refugee problem for Europe. Following Qaddafi's capture and murder by a band of rebels who were supported by NATO, she laughingly said in a TV interview: "We came, we saw, he died." In her channeling of Julius Caesar, she failed to mention that Qaddafi's captors gruesomely murdered him, sodomizing their prisoner by a blade, and subsequently posting the photos on the Internet. Qaddafi's grisly execution took place during Obama's "Democratic" administration, when Clinton was his Secretary of State. Therefore, whatever the Russians may have done to Clinton in the recent U.S. elections pales in comparison with the barbarity of what Clinton and the Obama administration facilitated in North Africa and elsewhere. The present chaos in Syria, the bombing of Yemen, and the destabilization of Libya and large regions of North Africa are all Obama's own contribution to the raging bloodshed in these areas. In the two wars that he inherited from George W. Bush, Obama revived U.S. involvement in Iraq and upped the ante in Afghanistan. In fact, in drone warfare and Special Forces operations that usually result in large numbers of civilian casualties, he actually broke George W. Bush's record, even bragging: "I'm really good at killing people," (Washington Times). This brings me to the implications of Donald Trump's election for U.S. policies in Western Asia, especially for Iran. Trump has not been in power long enough to do any real damage beyond what Bush and Obama have already done. It is likely, however, that he will continue the destructive policies of his predecessors because the foreign policy of the United States is not determined by the country's President alone, but by a "foreign policy elite," whose members rotate between government, think tanks, and the academy. This elite operates on two basic assumptions. The first assumption, best known as "American Exceptionalism," posits that the U.S. is a special country that has a responsibility to lead the world, and that the world would be worse off without its leadership. The second is the assumption that America's military might is the main means of resolving foreign policy issues. The first idea, the myth of American Exceptionalism, is deeply rooted in the American psyche. In 1630, drawing on a phrase from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matthew 5:14), John Winthrop (1587-1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said in a sermon of his own: "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us" (Pfaff, The Irony of Manifest Destiny 2010, p.23). This idea of uniqueness of the American experience, as Professor Bacevich points out in his American Empire (2002, p.43), was expressed by one of America's most iconic literary figures, Herman Melville (1819-1891), in the 1850s: More than a hundred and fifty years later, President George W. Bush's advisor Carl Rove was quoted in the New York Times Magazine , expressing similar sentiments: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. . We're history's actors . and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do." Of course, this type of arrogance is not limited to Republican politicians. Madeline Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, conveyed the same idea on NBC's Today Show (February 19, 1998). She said: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." As recently as January 27, 2017, Richard Haass, the president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and a former special advisor to President Bush, Sr. and to Colin Powell, said in a TV interview that the world is better off with America's leadership and as proof, he pointed to the "Middle East," saying, imagine how terrible the conditions would be without the United States. Apparently Mr. Haass believes that the United States had nothing to do with the destabilization of the region or with the creation of ISIS. However, those of us who live on this side of the proverbial looking glass, have read of America's role in facilitating the creation of terrorist organizations in Western Asia. In an ironic twist of fate, Haass said this on Bill Maher's comedy show. America's foreign policy is not driven by party affiliation. It is born of an ideology that is expressed in what is called "liberal hegemony" and is shared by the people who constitute its foreign policy elite. In an essay entitled "Liberation or Dominance? The Ideology of U.S. National Security Policy" (2007), Arnold A. Offner writes: Nothing demonstrates the continuity of this brutal tradition better than the fate of the Arab-American family of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in Arizona from Yemeni parents in 1971. He was assassinated in 2010 by a drone strike that was ordered by President Obama. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued president Obama on the grounds that Mr. al-Awlaki was deprived of due process before being extrajudicially murdered. The lawsuit was dismissed. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdurrahman, a second generation American citizen, was also murdered in a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen. A number of other innocent civilians also died as a result of the strike. In a "hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism," writes the investigative journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, Anwar al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter was killed during a Seal Team 6 raid on a compound in Yemen on Sunday January 29 th . Some 30 other people, including 10 women and children were also murdered during this raid that was authorized by President Trump. The notion that Donald Trump would be recklessly dangerous in foreign policy because he is reckless and radical in domestic policy is not necessarily true. Nor is the notion that a Democrat president is less likely than a Republican chief of state to get involved in wars or to threaten the safety of other nations. America entered both World Wars when Democrats Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), and Franklin Roosevelt (1882- 1945) respectively, were in office. It dropped two unnecessary atomic bombs on Japan during the presidency of another Democrat, Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), and the Vietnam War really got going during the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973). The "Carter Doctrine," i.e., the doctrine that declares America's willingness to go to war over the Persian Gulf, was formulated during the democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter. Andrew Bacevich has shown that confronting threats before they emerge, namely the idea of preemptive war, or the "Bush Doctrine," did not appear out of thin air, but "might be a bastard child of the Carter Doctrine" ( America's War for the Greater Middle East 2016, p.245). And finally, it was President Barack Obama who overthrew the Qaddafi regime, helped launch the Syrian blood-bath, has been facilitating the Saudis' genocidal war against Yemen, and has intensified America's use of drones and Special Forces operations to unprecedented levels. At least since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, America's wars around the globe have been wars of choice. Protected on its flanks by two great oceans that act as its "moats," and lodged between two friendly and weak allies on its northern and southern borders, the United States hardly faces any existential threats. President Bush's claim that "we fight them there so that we don't have to fight them here" is as meaningless as Israel's pretense of being "existentially" threatened by its weak Arab neighbors, in spite of its prodigious nuclear arsenal. Chances are that once Trump gets used to being a president and is talked down from his hysterical reaction to everything, the change in the U.S. foreign policy toward Western Asia in general (and Iran in particular), will probably be in nuance rather than in substance. In this region of the world, the policies of a President Donald Trump would not be noticeably different from those of a President Hillary Clinton. Indeed, a case may be made that Clinton, as Professor Foad Izadi has already observed, would have been more successful in creating international alliances against Iran. Even allowing for the hawks that he has gathered around him, Trump, by contrast, would be less likely to succeed in such an undertaking because of his character and erratic behavior. In fact, several European leaders have already shown their impatience with the way that he conducts himself and have publicly stated their opposition to his recent executive order banning citizens of several Muslim countries from entering the United States. Being appealing to American rednecks does not necessarily translate into acceptability in the eyes of European leaders. For old or new sanctions against Iran to be effective, Trump needs the full cooperation of the Europeans. Chances are that he will not get it. But what of the so-called Nuclear Deal between Iran and the 5+1? How will it fair under Trump? Donald Trump's election was something of a gift to the Iranian diplomats who negotiated the Nuclear Deal with the 5+1 countries. Shortly after the signing of the agreement, Americans began to renege on the deal. The United States Congress passed a number of anti-Iranian bills and the Obama administration began to make new and unacceptable demands about Iran's various military tests and capabilities. Trump is likely to either continue or intensify his predecessor's policies by sticking to his campaign promise of rejecting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA). If so, the Europeans may be reluctant to go along with him, and without them, the sanctions regime will largely collapse. Therefore, if one of the goals of Iranian diplomacy was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, that goal would have a better chance of realization under a Trump administration than it would with Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. About the author: About the Author: Mahmoud Omidsalar obtained his Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, where he also studied Folklore under Alan Dundes. In addition to publishing many essays on Persian literature and folklore, he has also edited the 6th volume of the new critical edition of the Shahnameh, under the general editorship of Professors Khaleghi- Motlagh and Ehsan Yarshater. He has served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Iranica since 1990, and was appointed to the Supreme Council of the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia (Tehran) in 2006. In 2004, the first volume of his collected English and Persian papers received the book of the year award of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran. His most recent English book, "Iran's Epic and America's Empire" was published by Afshar Publishing in 2012. Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar order from amazon A Handbook for a Generation in Limbo Trade Paperback: $24.99; 240 pages; ISBN: 978-0962766497 Publication Date: May 15, 2012 Publisher: Afshar Publishing. ISBN 13: 9780962766497. The Shahnameh is Iran's national epic. It is a compendium of Iranian myths, legends, and history. Unlike other Indo-European epics, it is not about a war, like the Iliad , or an individual, like the Odyssey , Beowulf , or the Ramayana . The central character of the Shahnameh is Iran, which it glorifies both as subject and hero. Unlike other classical Indo-European epics, the Shahnameh is not in a dead language. It is intelligible to every speaker of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Following a brief survey of Iranian history from its beginning in the 7th century B.C. to Ferdowsi s time in the 11th century, this book provides a history of the poem and a biography of its author. It offers an explanation of the Shahnameh as a national icon and considers the implications of the poem for the present political tensions that mark Iran's relationship with the West. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Mahmoud Omidsalar obtained his Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, where he also studied Folklore under Alan Dundes. In addition to publishing many essays on Persian literature and folklore, he has also edited the 6th volume of the new critical edition of the Shahnameh , under the general editorship of Professors Khaleghi-Motlagh and Ehsan Yarshater. He has served on the editorial board of the Encyclopeadia Iranica since 1990, and was appointed to the Supreme Council of the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia (Tehran) in 2006. Together with Iraj Afshar, he edits the series Folia Medica Iranica and Persian Manuscripts in Facsimile. In 2004, the first volume of his collected English and Persian papers received the book of the year award of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran. Mahmoud Omidsalar is a world authority on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Very few people anywhere in the world know the Persian epic inside out as well as he does. Omidsalar's Iran's Epic and America's Empire is a bold political manifesto written by a master literary scholar. His steely meditations come at a particularly troubling time when Ferdowsi's birthplace is ruled by chronic autocracy and threatened by military strike. Omidsalar writes with conviction, courage, steadfast determination, and a defiant will to recollect, to remind, and to claim the Iranian posterity. Hamid Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York) In Iran s Epic and America s Empire, Mahmoud Omidsalar the master of Shahnameh Studies, attempts to provide a personal narrative about the substance and meaning of the greatest literary work composed in the Persianate World. Along the way he provides a useful and contentious purview of the pre-modern history of Iran and the life of the composer of the epic, Abol-Ghasem Ferdowsi. Furthermore, Omidsalar not only dispels the common Eurocentric notions about Iran and the Shahnameh, but also takes on the blind nationalism of his own countrymen who at times are blinded by their own chauvinism. He shows how this xenophobic view has kept some from understanding the essence and nature of the Persian epic and Iran's cultural achievement. Whoever reads this book will be forced to think about her/his own views on the meaning and importance of the Shahnameh. Touraj Daryaee (Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at the University of California, Irvine) Mahmoud Omidsalar. Iran's Epic and America's Empire : A Handbook for a Generation in Limbo. Mahmoud Omidsalar. Published by Afshar Publishing, 2012. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Perfect Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Race, Gender, and Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World) Mahmoud Omidsalar. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2011-11-25, 2011. New - Hardcover Condition: New. Hardcover. Condition: New. Poetics and Politics of Iran's National Epic, the Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2011-10-15, 2011. Used - Hardcover Condition: As New. Hardcover. Condition: As New. Item is in new condition. Poetics and Politics of Iran's National Epic, the Shahnameh (Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World) Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. New - Hardcover Condition: new. Hardcover. Condition: new. This item is printed on demand. Poetics and Politics of Iran's National Epic, the Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by AIAA, 2017. New - Softcover Condition: New. Paperback. Condition: New. PRINT ON DEMAND Book; New; Publication Year 2017; Fast Shipping from the UK. No. book. Poetics And Politics Of Iran's National Epic, The Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Used - Hardcover Condition: As New. Condition: As New. Unread book in perfect condition. Poetics And Politics Of Iran's National Epic, The Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. New - Hardcover Condition: New. Poetics And Politics Of Iran's National Epic, The Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Seller: GreatBookPricesUK, Castle Donington, DERBY, United Kingdom Contact seller. Used - Hardcover Condition: As New. Condition: As New. Unread book in perfect condition. Poetics And Politics Of Iran's National Epic, The Shahnameh. Omidsalar, Mahmoud. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Seller: GreatBookPricesUK, Castle Donington, DERBY, United Kingdom Contact seller. New - Hardcover Condition: New. Iranshenasi / Iran Shenasi : a Journal of Iranian Studies [Dual Lanugage Periodical in English and Iranian, Compilation of Articles Including: Papers in Honour of Professor Zabihollah Safa, Sussan Siavoshi, John Walbridge, Hamid Dabashi, and others] Matini, Jalal [Editor] ; Hamid Dabashi / Columbia Univeristy , H. Moayyad, et al. Published by Volume III / 3, No. 1, Spring 1991 a Publication of Keyan Foundation / This Book is in English and Iranian, Clean and Unmarked Text, 1991. Used - Softcover Condition: Good Clean Cond. Soft Cover. Condition: Good Clean Cond. Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket. Others Include: Hamid Hamid, Djalal Khalegi Motlagh, T. Kuroyanagi, Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani, Mahmoud Omidsalar, Naser al Din Parvin and Seyyed Mohammad Torabi (illustrator). Paperback : soft cover edition in good or better condition, some slight wear to edges, as normal for age of book. Excellent read. A good book to enjoy and keep on hand. Or would make a great gift for the fan / reader in your life. Tell us what you're looking for and once a match is found, we'll inform you by e-mail. Can't remember the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire. Following a brief survey of Iranian history from its beginning in the 7th century B.C. to Ferdowsi s time in the 11th century, Mahmoud Omidsalar’s Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire (Afshar Publishing, 2012) provides a history of the poem and a biography of its author. It offers an explanation of the Shahnameh as a national icon and considers the implications of the poem for the present political tensions that mark Iran’s relationship with the West.Mahmoud Omidsalar obtained his Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, where he also studied Folklore under Alan Dundes. In addition to publishing many essays on Persian literature and folklore, he has also edited the 6th volume of the new critical edition of the Shahnameh, under the general editorship of Professors Khaleghi-Motlagh and Ehsan Yarshater. PREFACE. What follows is a meditation on Iran’s national epic. It is addressed to the Iranian community abroad, and more importantly to that community’s children, many of whom don’t speak or read Persian but think of themselves as Iranian. This is an old man’s gift to the young in order to help them seize that chain of memory which makes us one people. It is an exhortation to remembrance because human beings are made of memories; recollections of events that happened and also of those that did not. Mankind achieves its humanity and its community in its real and imagined memories, and for us Iranians, the Shāhnāmeh is the highest poetic expression of that communal remembrance that connects us to one another and anchors our present to a shared sense of the past. It links us to a time of myth and legend that exclusively belongs to us, and to the land that we have inhabited for the past three thousand years. If Iran is our Jerusalem, a place of unrelenting longing in our soul, and if Persian literature is our Torah, then in that Torah, the Shāhnāmeh is our Psalms. For these reasons and a thousand others no Persian can say anything “impersonal” about the Shāhnāmeh and no “other” can say anything about it that is not taken personally. To the extent that the Shāhnāmeh is Iran’s national epic as well as her “ethnic history,” all scholarship on the Shāhnāmeh is by nature a comment on Iranian nationhood and ethnicity. In these disordered times when lies are routinely passed off as truth, and when descendents of those whom our ancestors freed from their Babylonian bondage can presume to threaten us with “preemptive” military strikes and nuclear extinction, the lines have been drawn very clearly.[1] A poem about wars and heroic combat becomes itself a battlefield, a place of confrontation between Persians and those who encroach on the Iranians’ sense of self. This is not a time for weakness, for compromise, or for pseudo-civility. There is nothing civil in military threats. What I intend to do in this small volume is to walk my countrymen through a brief history of our culture and through all that led to our national poet, Ferdowsi, and to our national poem, the Shāhnāmeh . Along the way, I hope to disabuse my readers of a number of dangerous myths that have been inculcated by our relatively recent experience with Western colonialism. Following the introductory chapters that briefly deal with Iran’s cultural and political biography, I will take up the relationship between our language and our ethnicity as understood by the general public, and not a few scholars. Drawing upon what we have learned in our brief review of Iran’s history, I will challenge some of the prevailing “truisms” about Persian language and literature, and will show how many of these “truisms” are not merely wrong but border on the strange. There is a biographical chapter, which is devoted to a consideration of Ferdowsi and his social and cultural milieu. In it, I will tell you that our national poet was not only a great artist, but also a conflicted man often at the mercy of his prodigious appetites and psychological forces that dragged him to and fro. The story of our national history and how it evolved into its present form is told in the next chapter. The final two chapters discuss our relationship to the Shāhnāmeh as the embodiment of our nationhood. In a lecture entitled “The Hero as Poet,” and delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) addressed the heroic nature of great poets.[i] Ferdowsi is a heroic poet for us. We already admire and revere him as a hero and as a cultural icon. I will suggest that we must also sympathize with him for the tragic figure that he was. In the final chapter, I attempt a synthesis of these studies and speculate on what they may mean for Iranians in the strange world which we inhabit along with Guantanamo detainees and prisoners of the Gazan Ghetto: western civilization’s latest “gifts” to the orient. NOTE. [1] 2 Chronicles 36:22 – 23: Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.” Cf. also Ezra 1:2, 5:2, etc.