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The Structural Foundations of the National Minority Problem in Revolutionary Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Leonard M. Helfgott
Leonard M. Helfgott*
Affiliation:
Western Washington University
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Extract

We commonly think of Iran as a unified entity with a political history beginning somewhere between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., a period roughly corresponding to the time of the religious figure Zoroaster and the political figure Cyrus the Great. Culturally, Iran reaches further back in time through an epic mythology that pictures Aryan heroes in struggle with Turanian invaders and links the ancient and the mythic with the modern and the real. Conceptually, Iran begins as an empire and ends up as a nation-state, following a path similar in our minds to the movement from imperial Rome to modern Italy. The reality, however, is distinct from the myth. Iran has always been a multi-cultural society divided into a number of socioeconomic formations—a sedentary agricultural formation based in the Central Iranian Plateau, surrounded by pastoral nomadic and seminomadic formations located in the Zagros Mountains and other border regions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 1-4: Iranian Revolution in Perspective , 1980 , pp. 195 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1980

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Footnotes

This paper has benefited through careful readings by professors Mangol Bayat of Harvard University, Lois Beck of Washington University, and Eric Hooglund of Bowdoin College.

References

Notes

1. E. Hooglund, personal communication.

2. See Abrahamian, E., “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran,” IJMES 5 (January 1974), pp. 3–31.Google Scholar

3. Helfgott, L., “Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” Iranian Studies X (Winter-Spring 1977), pp. 36–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. For the continuity between the Safavid and Zand bureaucracies, see Perry, J., Karim Khan Zand (Chicago, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the early Qajar period see my “Rise of the Qajar Dynasty,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1972.

5. Garthwaite, G., “Pastoral Nomadism and Tribal Power,” Iranian Studies XI (1978), p. 180Google Scholar; see also L. Beck, “Iran and the Qashqa'i Tribal Confederacy,” in R. Tapper, ed., Tribe and State in Afghanistan and Iran from 1800-1900, forthcoming. The title ilkhani was assigned to the leading khan of the Qashqa'i in 1818, to the leading khan of the Bakhtiyari in 1867.

6. Loeffler, R., “Tribal Order and the State: The Political Organization of the Boir Ahmad,” Iranian Studies XI (1978), p. 166.Google Scholar

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., pp. 153-154, Loeffler describes the tribesmen's resistance to this process: “It was only later on, they say, that the chiefs in their role as tax collectors backed up by the khan and allied kadkhodas developed the power to proclaim themselves landlords entitled to collect a rent from the tribal lands,” pp. 155-156.

9. Alavi, H., “Peasant Classes and Primordial Loyalties,” Journal of Peasant Studies I (1973), pp. 23–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See Abrahamian, E., “Communism and Communalism in Iran: The Tudah and the Firqah-i Dimucrat,” IJMES 1 (October 1970), p. 295Google Scholar; see also his “Kasravi: The Integrative Nationalist of Iran,” in Kedouri, E. and Haim, S., eds., Toward a Modern Iran (London, 1980), pp. 115–116.Google Scholar

11. Quoted in Abrahamian, “Communism and Communalism,” p. 295.

12. Fischer, M., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 78.Google Scholar

13. See L. Helfgott, The Rise of the Qajar Dynasty.

14. In Chaliand, G., ed., People without a Country (London, 1979), p. 113.Google Scholar

15. van Bruinessen, M., Agha, Sheikh and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan (Utrecht, 1978), p. 27.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 28.

18. Chailiand, p. 119.

19. van Bruinessen, p. 413.

20. B. Spooner, “Tribal Relations and National Borders in Baluchistan: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives,” unpublished, 1980.

21. Chailiand, p. 118.

22. Ibid., p. 133.

23. O. Fallaci, The New York Times Magazine, October 7, 1979, p. 31.