:Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940.(Studies in Modernity and National Identity.)

Abstract

Afshin Marashi's central thesis is that the transformation of the Iranian state from 1870 to 1940 was essential to the reification and promulgation of a durable Iranian national identity. This analysis is consistent with an increasingly dominant trend in Iranian historiography that evaluates change in modern Iran through an assessment of the emergence of institutions and ideas in Iran since the nineteenth century rather than on the basis of Iran's tumultuous political history alone. The strength of Marashi's contribution is evident in the episodic approach he takes. He examines Naser al-Din Shah's visit to Europe in 1873 in two ways. On the one hand, it was the result of lobbying by the new Qajar bureaucrats trained in the most modern Iranian educational institution, the Dar al-Fonun, and who possessed the most direct experience of Europe though their diplomatic service to the Qajar state. On the other hand, it was the beginning of efforts to create a new public persona for the king in the style of “royalist shi'ism.” Next, Marashi largely by-passes the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1907 and the Civil War of 1908–1909 to explore how Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh (d. 1965) did more to articulate and advance a politically potent national ideology through his expatriate journal Kaveh, published in Berlin from 1916 to 1924, than he could as a constitutionalist revolutionary in the previous decade. This was in part because in the 1920s many government officials were sympathetic to and influenced by many of the ideas expressed in Kaveh and wanted those ideas to guide state action.