Chelsi Mueller. The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars.

Abstract

The Arab-Iranian rivalry, much like its equivalent Sunni-Shi’a rivalry, has been a trope frequently used and abused by scholars and pundits to explain the complex history and contemporary relations between Iran and the Arab world. Most recently, the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq drew international attention to this conflict as a way to explain it. But it has a much longer history. Ferdowsi’s tenth-century epic poem, the Shahnameh, depicted the Arabs as lizard eaters. Late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emergence and dominance of the Aryan Hypothesis added layers of cultural and pseudoscientific pretense to this rivalry. And in the second half of the ­­twentieth century, the prominent Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) decried: “[as a] non-Arab ­­Easterner, [I] have been beaten by the Arabs’ stick in the past and I am still taking beating now. Although I have borne the burden of Islam on my shoulders, and still bear it, they still consider me a barbarian. They call me a sectarian.” This is the spectrum of the cultural animosity between Iranians and Arabs. Taking up the task of tracing the origins of this conflict and demystifying it is a much-welcomed intervention.