Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 2019, special issue, p. 59–73 Volume in Honour of Professor Anna Krasnowolska doi:10.4467/20843933ST.19.023.10966 www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Litteraria HTTP://ORCID.ORG/ 0000-0002-5883-6666 BERT G. FRAGNER Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] The Mental Mapping of Iran, Identity and Patriotism in Early Modern Iran – The Case of Moh. ammad-e Mofīd Abstract Moḥammad-e Mofīd was a 17th century diasporic Iranian living in Mughal India. In the in- troduction to his detailed geographic survey of Iran (Moxtaṣar-e Mofīd) he offers clear and emphatic proof of his patriotic feelings for a country which he had left decades before. Various scholars have hitherto argued as to whether there was any consciousness of “Iranian identity” among Iranians as early as the 17th century or not. Our author would definitely answer in the affirmative. Keywords: Moḥammad-e Mofīd, Persian diaspora in Mughal India, Iranian identity “Mental mapping”, i.e. conceiving awareness of territoriality and/or regionalism in historical perspectives, has been an interesting and sometimes even fascinat- ing concept with reference to historical inquiry over the last twenty-five to thirty years. This concept is closely related a generalised label of a “history of men- talities”. As with many other theoretical and conceptual innovations, we owe this idea to the famous “cultural turn” in the social sciences. Mental mapping also gained some importance in the comparative study of literature. In this field, the quest for the conceptualisation of space, and sometimes of space in time, proved to be particularly fruitful as may be demonstrated by the so-called post-colonial approach to literary criticism.1 There is no doubt that concepts such as these also deserve to be applied to Iranian Studies, both to literary studies as well as to his- tory. In historical reasoning, “mental mapping” may help to intensify the under- 1 J. Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire, Paris 1986; J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinne- rung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich 1997; B. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London 1989; Even Edward Said’s Orientalism deals with a spatial aspect: Blaming the “orientalists” to have created artificially the “Orient” as an instrument of cultural expropriation Said puts the (mis-)conceptualization of a region, a spatial unit, into the centre of his reasoning thus being closely related to an aspect of “mental mapping.” Studia Litteraria 3 zeszyt_pers_krzywe.indd 59 2019-09-09 21:55:51 60 BERT G. FRAGNER standing of spatial and regional perceptions of political and cultural identity at any given period in history. In this regard, there were, among others, two interesting articles published a couple of years ago, both dealing with the gradual development of Iranian na- tional self-awareness in terms of territory and history during the Qajar period. One was written by Juan R. I. Cole,2 the other by Firoozeh Kashani Sabet (then a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University).3 In 1999 Kashani Sabet published her breath-taking Ph.D. dissertation which may at that time have been something of a locus clas- sicus on the discussion of the development of the modern imagination of Iran as a nation-state, not only a geographical location on the map but a mental one as well.4 Both of them tried to trace the early stages of the emergence of national- ist thinking in 19th century Iran, and both ascribe the growth of territorial con- sciousness to the early stages of modernity in Iran or, to put it more precisely, to interpret changes in the “territorialisation” of the concept of “Iran” as indications of changes towards modernity. Kashani Sabet’s main point was to investigate how the Iranians developed their modern awareness of Iran. In her view, Iran had primarily been perceived as the domain of the ruler, “God’s Shadow on Earth” but was then throughout the later 19th century perceived to be the homeland of a nation which became unified by a growing awareness of language, culture and history, all these items being visualized through the perception and the awareness of soil. More than Cole, she deals intensely with this specific consciousness of ter- ritory. She even blames authors like Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellnerand Eric Hobsbawm for not having taken the problem of territoriality seriously enough in the context of the emergence of nationalist thought.5 As for the early changes Iranian society took into modernity, both articles contain very important ideas to be taken into consideration. At any rate, the impression should not arise that the conceptualisation of space was a phenomenon connected entirely to the era of early modernity, and therefore to the Qajar period in Iran. This is not a point of criticism either to Cole nor to Kashani Sabet. Both concentrate explicitly on 19th century affairs, and neither of them had in mind to deal with earlier periods. This is precisely what will be done in this article: tracing back the stages of collective consciousness of territory, of space / territory as a means of mental self-location in Iran. 2 J.R.I. Cole, Marking boundaries, Marking Time: The Iranian Past and the Construction of the Self by Qajar Thinkers, “Iranian Studies” 1996, vol. 29, no. 1–2, pp. 35–56. 3 F. Kashani Sabet, Fragile Frontiers: The Diminishing Domains of Qajar Iran, “International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies” 1997, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 205–234. 4 Idem, Frontier Fictions. Shaping the Iranian Nation 1804–1946, Princeton 1999. 5 In this regard she may underestimate the importance of territoriality in earlier nationalist discourses. In the Marxist context, territoriality was rather suppressed by the so-called Austro- -Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer but, this principle was reintroduced with specific stress by Joseph Stalin in his refutation of Renner and Bauer, titled Marxism and National Question, written in Vienna in the year 1912. The particular importance he paid to the question of territoriality has turned out in due course as a basic element of Soviet national politics, thus also deeply influencing nationalist discourses outside the Soviet Union and even outside Marxist thinking, particularly in the “Third World.” Studia Litteraria 3 zeszyt_pers_krzywe.indd 60 2019-09-09 21:55:51 The Mental Mapping of Iran, Identity and Patriotism in Early Modern Iran... 61 There is no doubt about the fact that the gradual implementation of modern thought, and of national self-awareness must be mostly connected to the 19th cen- tury, but earlier stages of territorial thinking in conceiving definitions of Īrān or Īrān-zamīn by authors belonging to pre-modern eras and particularly to the “Mid- dle Period” also deserve respect and analysis. In her introduction, Kashani Sabet refers explicitly to early Islamic geographers, particularly to the anonymous au- thor of Ḥodūdo l-ʿālam, and even to pre-Islamic Sasanian traditions “building on Zoroastrian and Ptolemaic concepts”. She concentrates on the idea of Īrān-šahr referring in particular to Abū Eṣḥāq al-Fārisī al-Eṣṭaxrī´s Masāleko l-mamālek6 from which she quotes: “No land (mulk) is more prosperous, more complete, or more pleasant than the kingdoms (mamālik) of Īrānshahr.”7 Her point is to prove that the notion of Īrān-šahr had persisted continuously throughout the Caliphate period, and also later on (obviously until the beginnings of the Qajar period). Ac- cording to her, it is therefore unsurprising that years later, Ḥamd Allāh Mustawfī, even [emphasis mine] while writing under Mongol rule, would use the term ‘Īrān-zamīn’ to identify a region that not only corresponded roughly to al-Iṣṭakhrī´s vision of ‘Īrān-shahr’ but that was inclusive of the territory of modern Iran.8 It goes without saying that these introductory passages of Kashani Sabet’s article serve as rather stylistic and compository purposes; what she really seems to be concerned with is the emergence of modern concepts of frontiers among Iranian thinkers of the Qajar period, and not medievalist speculations on Eṣṭakhrī or Ḥamdollāh Mostoufī, and the aforementioned remarks in her introductory pas- sages in no way diminish the value of her article or her book: it should not be forgotten that she aims not at dealing with medieval matters but with Iran’s path into modernity. Therefore, my remarks should not be misunderstood as any kind of criticism toward her excellent analysis of an Iranian history of mentalities in the 19th and 20th centuries as represented in her beautiful book which the author of this current text admires very much. Only a few years after the debate concerning “mental mapping”, did another and closely related concept gain a lot of attention in the field of Iranian Studies, just as happened in other branches of Cultural Studies, particularly in Social An- thropology: the quest for “Iranian identity”. As potentially the best, most concise and useful conclusive presentation of the “identity-debate” in Iranian Studies, I re- fer to Ahmad Ashraf’s highly informative contribution “Iranian Identity” (in four parts) to Encyclopedia Iranica (originally dated from the year 2006, and updated in following years).9 One of his main statements refers to the opinion that “Western civic-territorial experiences of nationhood and nationalism” had contributed to 6 Abū Eṣḥāq Ebrāhīm Eṣṭaxrī, Masāleko l-mamālek, tarjomeh-ye Moḥammad b. Asʿad b. ʿAbdallāh Tostarī, ed. Ī. Afšār, “Bonyād-e mouqufāt-e Dr. Maḥmūd Afšār”, no. 52, Tehrān 1373 h.š. 7 F. Kashani Sabet, Fragile Frontiers…, p. 205. 8 Ibidem, pp. 205–206. 9 A. Ashraf, Iranian Identity, [in:] Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 13(5), pp. 501–504, http://www.