Iranian History in Transition

Abstract

In a world founded on nation-state entities, the construction of collective identity is a politically motivated project promoted by certain schools of historiography aiming at filling the gaps between people’s real or imagined past and their present political actuality. In fashioning twentieth-century Iranian identity, historians have made an effort to revisit the distant past and, hence, craft a new definition of the past that is entangled in the meshes of new political ideologies. In this regard, writing ethno-nationalist and Islamic histories in modern Iran has been articulated consciously by the recovery of self, rejecting the other, and the discovery of its elite agents who according to such narratives have exclusively been in charge of the protection of the motherland or the Islamic land against alien others. The alien others often comprised the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and in modern history, the colonial powers, namely, the Russians and the British or most recently the Unites States of America. Furthermore, in Islamic historiography, an attempt has been made to highlight the Islamic, and specifically the Shi’i, characteristics of Iran rather than its ethnic or cultural particularities—particularities that are summarily dismissed as a global imperialist conspiracy by nationalist, secularist, or Marxist ideologies.