At the current volatile geopolitics of the region, the ruling regime in Iran has survived against all odds—under severe pressure, both internal and external to its borders. The politics of crisis management is definitive to this state. A postnational account of the nation, as I propose to do, does not abandon the national frame of reference, or its entanglement with the state that claims it, but embraces the nation within a larger transnational frame of reference that contrapuntally makes the national scene more meaningful. In this chapter, I begin with a panoramic view of the region at large, where the role of Iran has become consistently more dominant, to the point that some observers in the Arab and the larger Muslim world are speaking of a resurrection of “the Persian Empire.” This is a false analogy, I will argue, and a red herring. There is only one flagellant empire in our world, the US Empire, and it is not particularly a potent or competent empire. Instead of fishing for flawed metaphors, we need to reconfigure the geopolitics of the region, in which the ruling regime in Iran has amassed considerable soft power, waging a successful asymmetrical warfare to protect its domestic and regional interests. What we see as a result is not an “empire” but a new geostrategic reality in which Iran is dominantly mapped out not by virtue of any inherent hard power or a particularly powerful political leadership but mostly by virtue of the follies of the USA and its European and regional allies and their misbegotten imperial vagaries. Beginning with the geopolitics of the region will enable us to frame the Iranian national scene in a far better frame of reference.
One Brick on the Other
“Iran is piling one brick on the other,” warns one pundit with solemnity, “today’s Iranians, with their Persian heritage, are on the march as surely as were the armies of Xerxes 2500 years ago.” 1 Usually such right-wing wizardry is the premise upon which is launched the criticism of President Obama’s evident determination to pursue a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. “Desperate for a legacy,” this particular warmonger surmises, “our president obsesses about a deal (no matter how wretched) on Iran’s nuclear program, while ignoring Iran’s aggression across the Middle East.” If the domain of such nonsense about the rising “Persian Empire,” a blatant act of fear mongering thus to call for yet another disastrous war in the region to facilitate the further Israeli theft of Palestine, were limited to these neocon artists, there would be very little to be said. But alas, and quite regrettably, we have begun to see echoes of them among some of the leading Arab thinkers, intellectuals, and opinion-makers. Where did that come from?
The origin of this particular brand of fanciful ghost-busting may seem to have been a casual remark by a verbose Iranian official who is reported to have said, “Baghdad is now capital of the Persian empire.” 2 But did he—really? A quick check of the actual phrase by this official, Ali Younessi, President Hassan Rouhani’s adviser on Ethnic and Religious Minorities Affairs, does anything but corroborate that charge: “cultural, economic and political cooperation between countries in the region,” he had said, and then parenthetically added, “(which in the past composed Persian empire) could be instead of past ancient empires.” Entirely highfalutin and convoluted sentence you might say, but a claim to the rising Persian Empire—by no means. Later on, Mr. Younessi went out of his way emphatically to deny he had ever said anything to claim the return of the Persian Empire—but to no avail. 3
If someone were to bother to read Younessi’s original Persian phrasing, the confusion about the rising currency of “the Persian Empire” will become even more confounded, because in the midst of all his bombastic verbiage, he keeps repeating: “What I say does not mean we want to conquer the world but we must reach historical self-consciousness and understand our place in the world, and while thinking globally act in an Iranian and national manner.” 4 Again, pompously verbose, you might say and think the proverbial clerical penchant for vacuous hyperbole may have overcome the man at this conference on “Iranian identity,” where he delivered this speech—but calling for a Persian empire now? Not really.
But the news of an Iranian official calling for a Persian Empire with Baghdad as its capital was too juicy to let go and soon spread like a bushfire among the nervous and confused pan-Arab nationalists rightly upset about the Iranian meddling in many Arab countries, so upset that they did not bother to check the original and see what the man had actually said.
So where did such panicked rubbernecking around and about the phrase “Persian Empire” originate? The date of this speech by Ali Younessi is 17 Esfand 1394 on Persian calendar, which is 7 March 2015. But the neocon American and Israeli Zionist charge of this Persian empire business predates it by many months, and even years, until it finally found its way to the august pages of the New York Times by three apparatchik operators employed at the notorious Zionist joint Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy (WINEP). 5 In other words, the boorish and blasé charge of the ruling regime in Iran trying to revive “the Persian Empire” did not have to wait for Younessi’s off-the-cuff remarks at a gaudy conference on “Iranian identity,” for the hasty and nervous Arab opinion-makers seem to have taken it directly from Israeli and American Zionists, with whom they now seem to share not just the English language but a frightful Iranophobia.
There Is No Empire but One Empire
There is no longer any Persian or Arab or Ottoman or Indian or Chinese, or British or Spanish or Mongol empire, and all the angels of mercy and justice be praised for that. The only empire that exists, and which does not feel particularly well or imperial these days, is the American empire. It is a kind of postmodern empire, as it were, ruling, or wishing to rule, via drones, proxies, mercenary armies, private contractors, and lucrative arms sales to rich, corrupt, and bewildered potentates.
Iran has not become a Persian empire. As a fragile and internally unstable Islamic Republic, Iran has systematically and consistently spread its sphere of influence in a region where national boundaries mean very little. Saudi Arabia is right now in Yemen, and a couple of years ago it was in Bahrain. While bombing Libya, Egypt wants to lead a pan-Arab army around the region, as the European settler colony of Israel continues to sit on and steal more of Palestinian and Syrian territories and eying even more. Syria and Iraq are under attack by a murderous gang of former Iraqi Baathists and other runaway hoodlums they have hired from around the world and call themselves ISIS, “a digital caliphate,” as Abdel-Bari Atwan rightly calls it in a new book, commenced by being lucratively funded by the Saudi and other ruling families in the region. 6 Pakistan acts freely in Afghanistan, as Turkey does in Iraq and Syria. Kurds have run away from Iraq to form an autonomous region and thus to protect themselves from yet another Baathist slaughter. Iran is integral to this widening gyre of geostrategic free-fall—not above it. To disregard the real imperial power operating in the region, and turn a blind eye to the aggressive counterrevolutionary mobilization and speak of “Persian Empire” at a time that all postcolonial boundaries have collapsed, is a silly red herring.
Speaking of “Persian Empire” and thus exaggerating the influence of a deeply flawed, menacing, and malfunctioning Islamist theocracy plays the horn from its open side, as the Persian proverb aptly puts it, and blinds us to the factual evidence of a chorus of counterrevolutionary forces that place the ruling regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia on the same (and not on the opposite) sides. There is no “Persian Empire” in sight: only the hard geostrategic facts of US imperialism reshuffling its cards to play a more winning hand.
Persian Writ Large
The nervous attribution of the rise of Persian Empire to contemporary Iran, however, points to a critical aspect of the rise of one particularly poignant case of postcolonial nation-state that requires further attention. Although today the invocation of the phrase “Persian Empire” in the current geopolitics of the region has a decidedly ethnic character that dovetails with the bourgeois ethnic nationalism and sectarian overtone of regional rivalries, in the idiomatic expression “Persian Empire,” the adjective “Persian” is in fact a linguistic and therefor cultural marker, and thus does not stand for any ethnic designation—though both Persian and Arab ethnic nationalism thus wish for it to signify. There are no such people as “Persians.” There is a language and therefore a culture that can be identified as Persian. There is no race or ethnicity called “Persian,” the way say the Kurds or Baluchis think and project themselves as an ethnicity on the fictive margins of the thing that now emerges as “Persian.” By the same logic, Kurds too are only marginalized as an ethnicity and there is nothing in their body or blood that designates them as a “race.” Communities of people are racialized by way of a power-relation, and not as a matter of biological identity. They become a race or an ethnicity by exclusion, negationally, by the paramount illusion of something called “Persian” as a marker of ethnic identity designating its peripheries as Turkish or Kurdish or Arab. Thus “Persian” works precisely in the same manner that “White” works in the making of the racialized relation of power in the USA or Europe. Throughout history from the earliest post-Islamic dynasties forward, “Persian” could have only been a marker of linguistic and therefore cultural formation especially after the rise of the Shu’ubiyyah movement against the racialized assumption of Arab supremacy.
The term Persian Empire has no meaning in pre-Islamic imperial dynasties from Achaemenids to Sassanids except the manner in which the Greeks self-projected their own Ionian (or Dorian, Aeolian, Achaeans) identity to the Persepolis and the Persian seat of the Achaemenid Empire in Iran. Thus two manners of naming fused together to make “Persian Empire” a Latin phrase on the model of the “Roman Empire.” A fusion of successive empires and Persian linguistic and cultural identity came together to inform “Persian Empire.” This imperial pedigree has remained a potent imaginary by virtue of the imperial provenance of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh epic (composed 1010). This plus all the other imperially idiomatic genres of Persian poetry—from panegyric to romance—have come together to mark the phrase “Persian Empire” as a false marker of ethnic identity.
To be sure, and as I discuss in much detail in my book on The World of Persian literary Humanism (2013), Persian (“Farsi” in both Persian and Arabic languages) was used as a marker of ethnicity in the early Islamic period soon after the Arab conquest in contrapuntal juxtaposition to the Umayyad tribal racism and their patrimonial sense of superiority. But from then on, and as Turkish and subsequently Mongol tribes from Central Asia began forming Persianate dynasties, the term became a floating signifier, moving from a marker of ethnos to one of logos and then to that of ethos before dispersing into chaos. These four phases of what the word “Persian” has interchangeably meant also navigates the epochal passage of a people in the course of their Islamic history, soon after the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Empire (226–650) through successive Persianate imperial formations. The fateful encounter with European colonial modernity opened up the public sphere upon which postcolonial nations and then states eventually emerged.
It was in the course of Perso–Russian wars of 1804–1813 and 1826–1828 and the sizable loss of territories by Golestan (1813) and Turkamanchai (1828) treaties that the current map of Iran was more or less shaped, with the formation of Afghanistan by British colonial intrigues (as a buffer state in the “Great Game” between British India and the Russian Empire) as the last blow to that territorial claim of the Qajars to any empire. That imperial phantasm has now been fused with postcolonial geopolitics of various nations. Iran has had the exact opposite history of the USA as an empire. While Iran was diminishing, the USA was expanding its proportions, initially continentally and then globally, and from there into the outer space and now into the cyberspace. The frontier fiction has been crucial for the USA. For Iran, it has gone from an amorphous history into an ahistorical phantasm. What remains constant is the active memory of successive empires sustaining the collective memory of a postcolonial nation consistently expanding the domain of its national self-consciousness against the claims of any ruling state: monarchical or mullarchical.
Persia, Persians, and Persophilia
In what particular manner does the contemporary Iran emerge from ancient and medieval Persian and Persianate empires—and how does that manner qualify and anchor the current conditional of nation and nationhood in Iran? If my proposal for us to sever the fate of the nation from the vagaries of the state is to hold, then we must carefully trace the rise of Iran as a postcolonial nation (not a state or even a nation-state) on the transnational public sphere that enabled its active postcolonial imagination.
In the course of writing my book on Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015), I demonstrated the formation of Iran as a postcolonial nation on the site of a transnational bourgeois public sphere that had gathered on it the remnants of the trope of “Persia” from the Biblical and classical antiquity to the rise of Renaissance and Enlightenment modernity and beyond. This articulation allowed me to see and propose the condition of postcoloniality not as a tragedy as David Scott had, for example, proposed in his Conscript of Modernity, but more as a dialectical condition along the lines that Kojin Karatani has proposed in his Structure of World History. 7 Affecting a radical epistemic shift in assaying the formation of the postcolonial nation, this location of the subject on its transnational public sphere has the advantage of once and for all curing its chronic nativism.
The attraction of Europe to Persia was precisely because of its imperial heritage, a fact uniquely exclusive to Persian empires from the Achaemenids to the Sassanids and not shared by any other ancient civilization that Europe had encountered. These empires were known to Europe from the Bible to the Greek and Roman sources. It was precisely the imperial pedigree of the Achaemenids and their domination of a global and regional context that included Europe that had made them significant both in the Bible and for the Greek and Roman antiquities. In the Biblical and Classical ages and texts—Hebrew, Greek, and Roman—Persia and Persians were familiar foreigners, neither Hebrew, nor Greek nor Roman, nor a fortiori Christian. But they were never complete strangers either, and thus they could not be categorically othered. The encounter with the Persians predates the encounter with both the Ottomans and the Mughals, which mark the European imperial encounter with the region. Arabs become known to the Christian Europeans as Muslims as early as the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and the subsequent Battle of Poitiers in 732. But Persians were known to Europeans much earlier and even before the rise of Islam and Christianity and therefore not as Muslims or Arabs. Europeans knew them from the Hebrew Bible and Greek literary and philosophical sources. The Book of Esther in the Bible, where King Ahasuerus/Xerxes has a key role, is usually dated to the third or fourth century BCE, while Aeschylus’ The Persians was composed and performed in 472 BCE, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia circa 370 BC. At this time there are no “Arabs,” “Turks,” or others in the Bible or Greek sources. Even at the moment when Christianity becomes a European religion in the third century, it has to compete with a towering Iranian religion, namely Mithraism. Persians were therefore familiar foreigners that neither the Hebrews nor indeed the Greco-Roman world could completely own or completely disown. Persian empires were always known entities—feared, envied, hated, admired, but never a strangers or unknown. These same Persians and Persophilia becomes a peculiar attraction to Europeans of later generation during the Renaissance and Enlightenment modernity. There is not a single period from antiquity to modernity in which Europeans have not known or referenced Persians and invariably marked their Persophilia. This historic antiquity is quite crucial for when European Empires begin to conquer the world and eventually produce a tra...