Iran Facing Others
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Iran Facing Others Iran Facing Others Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective Edited by Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani iran facing others Copyright © Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-10253-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE® and MACMILLAN® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28689-8 ISBN 978-1-137-01340-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137013408 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface ix Farzin Vejdani Introduction: Iranian Identity Boundaries: A Historical Overview 1 Abbas Amanat I The Legacy of Cultural Exclusion and Contested Memories 1 Iran and Aniran: The Shaping of a Legend 39 Dick Davis 2 Redrawing the Boundaries of 'Ajam in Early Modern Persian Literary Histories 51 Sunil Sharma 3 Iranian History in Transition: Recasting the Symbolic Identity of Babak Khorramdin 65 Touraj Atabaki II Empires and Encounters 4 Rebels and Renegades on Ottoman- Iranian Borderlands: Porous Frontiers and Hybrid Identities 81 Fariba Zarinebaf 5 Facing a Rude and Barbarous Neighbor: Iranian Perceptions of Russia and the Russians from the Safavids to the Qajars 101 Rudi Matthee 6 Through the Persian Eye: Anglophilia and Anglophobia in Modern Iranian History 127 Abbas Amanat 7 British Imperialism, Regionalism, and Nationalism in Iran, 1890– 1919 153 H. Lyman Stebbins vi Contents III Nationalism and the Appropriation of the Past 8 The Academic Debate on Iranian Identity: Nation and Empire Entangled 173 Afshin Matin- asgari 9 Iran and Iraq: Intersocietal Linkages and Secular Nationalisms 193 H. E. Chehabi IV Self- Fashioning and Internal Othering 10 Identity among the Jews of Iran 221 Daniel Tsadik 11 The Confessions of Dolgoruki: The Crisis of Identity and the Creation of a Master Narrative 245 Mina Yazdani 12 Iranian Nationalism and Zoroastrian Identity: Between Cyrus and Zoroaster 267 Monica M. Ringer Contributors 279 Index 283 To John D. Gurney Preface The study of Iranian identity poses considerable challenges ranging from the complex legacy of the premodern past to the diversity of ethnic and religious populations, from the history of encounters with multiple imperial powers to the long shadow cast by nationalist ideologies. This present volume attempts to reap- praise the question of Iranian identity by engaging with more recent scholar- ship, including theories of nationalism, border studies, and research on identity formation. Abbas Amanat’s introduction, “Iranian Identity Boundaries: An Interpretive Overview,” lays out the major issues connected with the study of Iranian identity and sets the stage for subsequent papers in the volume. Avoiding a static concep- tion of Iran, he historicizes the multiple loci of Iranian identity, rooted in language, literature, territory, imperial traditions, myth, history, and religion. Part I, “The Legacy of Cultural Exclusion and Contested Memories,” examines notions of Iran as a bound geographical and cultural space in literature and liter- ary histories that often excluded regions and peoples from its self- definition. The notion of Iran and 'Ajam as geographical and imperial markers was by no means solely the product of modernity and nationalism. Nor were they, as some Iranian nationalists have argued, an eternal, continuous, and static category. A nuanced examination of Persian mytho- histories such as the Shahnameh, literary biogra- phies, and early literary histories demonstrate the unstable, shifting, and dynamic meanings attributed to Iran, particularly over the period of the tenth to the twen- tieth centuries. No discussion of Iranian identity can ignore the centrality and importance of Abu al- Qasem Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnameh (The Book of Kings). Arguably more than any other Persian text, it was the Shahnameh, according to Dick Davis in “Iran and Aniran: The Shaping of a Legend,” that “contributed much toward Iran’s perception of the nature of its own continuing reality in the past thousand years.” Although it would be tempting to see the text as conveying a singular and unified notion of Iran, Davis persuasively argues for a more nuanced reading of the poem, one that pays greater attention to the fundamentally shifting conception of Iran as a geographical boundary, the complex attitude toward presumed Others such as Turanians, Indians, Chinese, and Arabs, and the mixed genealogies of the tale’s quintessentially “Iranian” figures. While the Shahnameh as a poeticized mytho- historical narrative of Iranians embodied an important register of narratives and memories, tazkerehs, or biograph- ical dictionaries, and later literary histories of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were significant sites for the articulation of early modern and x Preface modern notions of Iran. In “Redrawing the Boundaries of 'Ajam in Early Modern Persian Literary Histories,” Sunil Sharma examines the processes by which 'Ajam, a term implying a broader Persianate literary world, came to have a more contracted meaning in the early modern period. The tendency in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Persian biographical dictionaries to valorize “classical” Persian poets while denigrating those of the “middle” period, particularly those writing in Central Asia and South Asia, formed the immediate background for later twentieth- century nation- centered canonizations of Persian literature. Meanwhile, in Chapter 3, titled “Iranian History in Transition: Recasting the Symbolic Identity of Babak Khorramdin,” Touraj Atabaki explores the con- struction of Iranian collective identity through the vector of a single event: the ninth-century revolt of the neo-Mazdakite leader, Babak Khorramdin, against the Abbasid Caliphate. He examines how modern historiographical readings of this event, including nationalist, Stalinist, regionalist, traditional Islamist, and Shi'i nar- ratives, reflect changes in Iranian political culture. All these conflicting narratives share a highly selective approach to the revolt, one that highlights the employment of amnesia as a critical aspect of identity formation. Part II, “Empires and Encounters,” examines how imperial encounters from the early modern period onward facilitated the articulation of an external Other through which to define a Safavid and later Qajar sense of Self. From the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century, Iranian dynasties encountered a number of foreign empires, especially the Ottomans and later the Russians and the British. All three encounters shared certain features: the loss of territory, the infiltration of foreign agents, ideological and religious competition, and anxieties over the fragil- ity of boundaries and frontiers. According to Fariba Zarinebaf in “Rebels and Renegades on Ottoman- Iranian Borderlands: Porous Frontiers and Hybrid Identities,” warfare, Sunni- Shi'i tensions and contested borderland regions contributed to the shaping of Ottoman- Safavid identities in the early modern period. Both Ottomans and Safavids supported dis- sident movements in each other’s borders: the Safavids aided Qizilbash and Celali (Jalali) rebels in the Ottoman Empire while the Ottomans in turn supported tribal groups and Christian minorities disgruntled with the Safavids’ extreme Shi'i policies. Safavid Iran consolidated its self- identity as a Shi'i state through its engage- ment with its main Sunni Other, the Ottoman Empire. Zarinebaf explores shifting political alliances, particularly among the Iranian- Ottoman border, where diverse populations on both sides were engaged in a constant process of refashioning them- selves according to social, political, and economic circumstances. Shifting attention to Iran’s northern border in Chapter 5, “Facing a Rude and Barbarous Neighbor: Iranian Perceptions of Russia and the Russians from the Safa- vids to the Qajars,” Rudi Matthee sets out to answer why Iranians’ perception of Russia failed to inspire the same intensity of sentiment as England. Focusing on Iranian perceptions of Russia, he traces the transformation of Iranian views of “Ominous Russia” (Rus- e manhus) from the Safavid condescension toward perceived Russian barbarity to Qajar ambivalence, wavering between awareness of Russia’s successful modernization program and fear of its military superiority and expansionist goals. Given Russia’s opaque, though somewhat brutal, imperial- ist agenda toward Iran, Matthee concludes that Iranian attitudes toward Russia, Preface xi although often negative, did not include a sense of dashed hopes that marked con- temporary Anglo- Iranian relations. Even more consequential in the shaping of modern Iranian national Self against an external Other was Great Britain. Abbas Amanat’s “Through the Persian Eye: Anglophilia and Anglophobia in Modern Iranian