Roma o’ Morte, Rome or death, proclaimed General Giuseppe Garibaldi in typical ‘psycho-nationalist’ parlance in the late nineteenth century, at once linking the ‘eternal city’ to notions of blood and sacrifice in order to consolidate the risorgimento or unification of Italy in the face of foreign invasion and internal strife. Similarly dramatic emotions were expressed by his contemporaries, in particular Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), probably Italy's most famous nationalist. Sceptical of communist calls for a worker's revolution in Italy – Karl Marx referred to him as a middle-class reactionary – the discourse used by Mazzini is typically emotional, imbued with themes such as God, sacrifice, love, death, blood, kinship and unity.Footnote 1 ‘Love your country’, he demanded from his listeners during a speech in 1848 in protest of the killing of Italian soldiers by Austrian forces.Footnote 2 ‘Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart blushing whispered the first word of love’. This romantic, almost poetic reference, which seems rather innocent at first sight, is immediately followed by a prescription to give blood for the nation: ‘It is your name, your glory, your sign among the peoples. Give to it your thought, your counsel, your blood … Let it be one, as the thought of God’.Footnote 3
Mazzini was certainly not a fascist, despite the appropriation of his thought by Benito Mussolini and some recent scholarship linking his ideas to the latter.Footnote 4 His nationalism was tempered given that he embedded it in a humanitarian discourse. But his constant reference to Europe as the pinnacle of civilisation and his repeated emphasis on blood sacrifice as a necessary ingredient in the making of nations, lent itself to abuse in post-unification Italy, including by the fascist movement. The mobilisation of the masses to safeguard the honour of the nation, his intense emphasis on the role of God, transmuted into a secular form of theo-politics. As a consequence, the national narrative was given a sacrosanct status which was readily exploited by those who claimed to work in the name of the nation and as its chaperone. Mazzini believed that Italy could only be adequately united through heroism, sacrifice and martyrdom, symbols and imagery that were very central to his dramatic reading of national regeneration. Once this task was accomplished, Mazzini promised, Italy would lead Europe to civilisational greatness. These are typically psycho-nationalist themes and they fed into the mythology of the fascist movement after the First World War, when motives such as blood and sacrifice for the nation and unity in the name of a pure race became particularly dominant in the public psyche throughout Europe. As Il fascio, the Fascist's main organ in Italy proclaimed in 1921: ‘The Holy Communion of war has moulded us all with the same mettle of generous sacrifice’.Footnote 5
The German experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is comparable. In Germany too, the themes appropriated by Mazzini – purity, blood, sacrifice, honour, unity – played a pivotal role in cementing the idea of a nation. Johann Gottlieb von Fichte (1762–1814) is probably the most famous forerunner to these themes that I have termed ‘psycho-nationalist’ because of their emotional charge and their cognitive power. Fichte started out as a supporter of the French revolution, in particular its calls for cosmopolitanism. Like Mazzini, Fichte was not a bigoted nationalist, but his emphasis on the superiority of German culture and language was used by latter generations in order to put forward an ethnocentric idea of Germany. If Mazzini accentuated the glory of Rome, the city of love and empires, Fichte maintained that Germans should assert leadership of Europe (and by implication the world) because of the purity of the German language which he deemed free of Latin influence. According to him, this undiluted linguistic heritage allowed German philosophers to express their ideas without mediation and in a clear and rational format. Again, quite similar to Mazzini, Fichte attributed theological greatness to the German nation which he deemed blessed by a godly (göttlich) spirit and a distinct (Eigentümlich) national character. Because of their special status, Germans had emerged as the Urvolk or archetype nation of humankind. The psycho-nationalist terminology is apparent here: godly, pure, national character (Volkstum), spiritual (geistig), death, blood, sacrifice. Fichte turned being German from a simple geographic designation into a matter of life and death, into a primordial and unique ‘identity’ with frightening cognitive force. In his own words: ‘(und dass) ein wahrhafter Deutscher nur könne leben wollen, um eben Deutscher zu sein und zu bleiben und die Seinigen zu ebensolchen zu bilden’. [(and that) a true German could only want to live, in order to be- and remain German, and to educate his own to be the same].Footnote 6
The prescription to delineate a German self, unpolluted from foreign (ausländisch) influence, despite the non-militaristic approach that Fichte borrowed from the progressive adherents to the Enlightenment, nonetheless set the precedent for the racialised language pursued by German thinkers such as Ernst Bergman (1881–1945) in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 7 This is the time period when psycho-nationalist concepts matured into pseudo-scientific theories that charged traditional forms of nationalism with immense cognitive force, powerful enough to galvanise fascist movements to power all over the world. In the German case, Fichte and to a lesser extent Herder and even Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Duke who coined the famous militaristic credo Blut und Boden (blood and soil), were increasingly appropriated by Nazi sympathisers for ideological purposes. Indeed, the aforementioned Ernst Bergman used his professorship at the University of Leipzig to embrace Fichte as the main forerunner of National Socialism in Germany.Footnote 8 Comparable to Italy, war was a catalyst for radicalisation. Bergman wrote his first book about Fichte in the aftermath of the First World War and Germany's punishing defeat. Like Mazzini who was appropriated by the Italian fascists, Fichte became the poster-child for the Nazis because of his emphasis on blood, honour, national character, educational and physical perfection and national resurrection. Psycho-nationalism, then, carries a blood-stained genealogy that was readily exploited by the state. It was born in a period of immense global turmoil, war and revolutionary upheaval. Hence it is certainly not, even in its contemporary manifestations, a recipe for democracy, pluralism and social empowerment. Neither Mazzini, nor Fichte are good reference points for a functioning, inclusive and tolerant society.
There are several more examples that will pave the way for a better understanding of psycho-nationalism. There is this metaphysical assurance that it conveys a sense of romantic belonging and rooting of identity which is comforting to many individuals even if it is a false promise. Certainly, when the famed French philosopher Ernest Renan entered the lecture hall at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882 to ruminate about the question qu'est-ce qu'une nation (what is a nation), he must have felt that he was speaking as an unmistakeable ‘Frenchman’, that his whole existence was typically ‘French’. Despite his scepticism towards definitions of nations that are framed with reference to ‘race, language, material interest, religious affinities, geography, and military necessity’,Footnote 9 Renan accentuated the contingency of France and other ‘primary nations’ such as Russia, Germany and England. ‘A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle’ he famously proclaimed. ‘The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion’. As such it is by far more abstract and in its metaphysical essence by far more valuable than its material base. ‘A heroic past, great men, glory … this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea’. According to Renan, a nation is the surface effect of a common past, a shared heritage that is signposted by common battles and glorious achievements. ‘To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people’. And what are those great deeds, what is strong enough to bind this metaphysical collective together beyond time and space? According to Renan, a nation should be repeatedly marched through a valley of tears: ‘suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort’. While nations have an objective existence, they are not primordial. Moreover, while nations may merge in the future under French-European leadership, ‘at the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if the world had only one law and only one master’.Footnote 10
In similar fashion compared to Mazzini and Fichte, psycho-nationalism reveals itself in Renan's thought as typically emotional. It is interesting to note that all three authors put particular emphasis on martyrdom, a ‘complex’ that contemporary scholars repeatedly attribute to a particularly Islamic and Shia expression of politics.Footnote 11 But at this stage we can distil a few more pointers about the genealogy of psycho-nationalism, certainly in the way it appeared in Europe primarily in the nineteenth century. First, there is a very particular and recurrent link between the nation and individual emotions such as honour, pride and love. This reveals the Cartesian enlightenment tradition and its anthropocentric perspective at the heart of psycho-nationalist discourse. Hence, the nation is not only a metaphysical principle without linkage to the fate of the individual. Psycho-nationalism ties the individual, the ‘man’ – in truly phallocentric European tradition – to the very essence of the nation, its heritage, present and future. In the words of Renan: ‘A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation’.Footnote 12 As such, the individual is reminded that he has a particular duty to safeguard the sovereignty of the nation, for its existence and viability is concomitant with his own.
Secondly, there is certainly the emotional aspect, which I have already reiterated several times. But beyond this constant emphasis on blood and identity, psycho-nationalism is dependent on a very modern belief in the possibility of change or a utopia which can be achieved in the here and now and which is not postponed to the ‘other-worldly’. In this sense psycho-nationalism is particularly ‘positivist’; it affords its carriers the possibility of achievement. People have to believe in the possibility of the task and psycho-nationalism became a perfect mirage to intoxicate the masses into believing in the promise of total change. To that end, people had to be coded to believe in a better tomorrow through formal re-education – Mazzini and Fichte were great advocates of a new ‘national’ school curriculum and the physical re-education of the individual into ‘healthy’ and functioning citizens. All of these mechanisms were particularly psychological; they were meant to reform thinking and they continue to have an impact on the way politics is absorbed and processed cognitively today.
Eastern Precedents
There is controversy over the genealogy of nationalist thinking in Iran (and the Arab world) in the scholarly literature. But in general, research in Europe and North America tends to locate the emergence of ‘modern’ nationalism in the so-called ‘west’. In a rather more critical study of the subject matter, it is observed that the ‘west’ saw nationalism as the ‘quintessential expression of inclusive tolerance. And this image was then often reinforced by a distinction between the West's “civic” nationalism and illiberal “ethnic” nationalism’.Footnote 13 The non-western world was juxtaposed to this self-image: ‘As the central organising principle of modern politics, nationalism was thus dichotomized between a noble Western invention and an ignoble non-Western imitation’.Footnote 14
While there is overlap due to the intense dialectic between ‘East’ and ‘West’ during the colonial period which created common Euro-Asian spaces, it is principally problematic to reduce the emergence of nationalism to European ideas. The concept of an organised community is central to the canons of eastern philosophy and its belles-lettres. As an example of the latter, the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d.1406) redefined ‘asabiyya’ (social solidarity) from its pre-Islamic origin and Quranic legacy, in the first systematic sociological conceptualisation of a polity in his famous Muqaddimah (Introduction to history) as early as in 1377 ad. Ibn Khaldun followed the line of classical philosophers of the Muslim enlightenment, such as Abu Nasr Farabi, Razi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Like them, he was a distinctly original and cosmopolitan thinker who took full advantage of the pan-Islamic currents of the period. His inclusive conceptualisation of a social community comes out in his depiction of the non-Arab ‘other’, in this case the ‘Persians’:
Thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of non-Arab (Persian) descent … They invented rules of (Arabic) grammar … great jurists were Persians … only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, ‘If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it’ … The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them … as was the case with all crafts … This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana, retained their sedentary culture.Footnote 15
According to Khaldun, asabiyya (social solidarity) is an important factor in the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations and empires. Good governance enhances the social solidarity of the community. Ideally, this socially constructed, politically administered consciousness would strengthen the community against external aggression and internal subversion. Here, Ibn Khaldun reveals himself as a theorist of state power. The more the state is able to foster this sense of tribal community and kinship, the more likely it is to survive the vicissitudes of history. In a clear re-conceptualisation of Aristotle's notion of koinonia, Khaldun emphasises the importance of social organisation (or ijtima) for this dialectical interaction between state and society. Human social organisation (al-ijtima al-insani) would be moulded by this ideal state in order to bring out the inherently civilised (madani) nature of the citizenry. Khaldun wrote during a period of internal division of the Muslim empire partially caused by external threats. While he had a clear interest in re-inscribing the authority of the state as a prophylaxis to internal divisions, he emphasised that no state can exist without fostering social cohesion among its citizenry. Hence, Khaldun shared this preoccupation about the social construction and maintenance of a community with western theorists of modernity, such as Emile Durkheim and Ernest Gellner:
Both Ibn Khaldun and Ernest Gellner have developed persuasive theoretical models that challenge such views and place group solidarity at the heart of long-term social change. Moreover, their work demonstrates how difficult it is to generate and maintain cohesive networks of individuals over longer periods of time, and how changed social conditions profoundly affect patterns of group solidarity: while for Ibn Khaldun the opulent urban lifestyles inevitably corrode social cohesion built in the shared ascetic living of tribal warriors, for Gellner modernity forges a new form of solidarity built around the promise of continuous economic growth, moral equality and cultural homogeneity among citizens inhabiting their own nation-state.Footnote 16
Even Ibn-Khaldun's largely sober and research-led inquiries about world history were abused as tropes in psycho-nationalist narratives. As discussed above, Ibn Khaldun was a complex thinker, whose concepts were nuanced and balanced. He did not have a dichotomous notion of self and other, or an aggressive manifesto for political action. And yet, he became a major reference point in the discourse of Arab nationalists, in particular at the beginning of the twentieth century when Arab nationalism was sponsored by British and French imperial strategists as a means to weaken the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 17 For instance, in the voluminous writings of Sati Al-Husri (1882–1962), the Ottoman-Syrian nationalists whose ideas became a pillar of Ba'thist ideology, Ibn Khaldun appears as a purveyor of Arab nationalism. Al-Husri borrowed generously from the German romanticists, von Ranke and Fichte, in his reinvention of Khaldun as an Arab nationalist. In typically psycho-nationalist fashion, he reconceptualised asabiyya as a spiritual bond among the members of a nation which is defined in terms of language and a shared memory or historical consciousness. According to this view, there is a metaphysical kinship between society and the nation.
In al-Husri (and his contemporaries such as Michel Aflaq), we find all the ingredients characteristic of psycho-nationalism that I have discussed so far: the nation is represented as the protective mother that Arabs need to honour and sacrifice for; love for the nation entices the individual to unite and fight for a better, utopian tomorrow; nationalism motivates ‘just’ struggles and revolts; politics is configured as an arena of blood, sacrifice and honour; passion is presented as a potent psycho-cognitive force with an ideological edge.Footnote 18 In the words of al-Husri: ‘We must remember that the nationalist idea enjoys a self-motivating power; it is a driving impulse to action and to struggle. When it enters the mind and dominates the soul it is one of the motive ideas … which awakens the people and inspires them to sacrifice’.Footnote 19 The psychological elements are obvious here and they are far removed from anything Ibn Khaldun had to say about politics in general and asabiyya in particular. Al-Husri is clearly constructing a psychologised narrative, dotted with anthropomorphic language, which is geared to create an anatomy of his idea of an Arab superstate. In a final ideological stroke which links his psycho-nationalism to the idea of a nation-state, al-Husri says: ‘When the language became the heart and spirit of the nation, then the people who spoke one language possessed one heart and a common spirit and therefore formed a nation. It then became necessary that they create one state’.Footnote 20 Ibn-Khaldun would have probably smiled at such a hysterical and anti-philosophical definition of a nation.
If Ibn Khaldun is one of the forerunners of the idea of community, then Ferdowsi must be recognised as one of the icons of the eastern belles-lettres. A supremely gifted poet, Ferdowsi finished the millennial book of kings in 1010 ad. Like Ibn Khaldun, Ferdowsi was concerned with society, politics, community, the rise and fall of empires, etc. But his method was different. Ibn Khaldun spoke as a social scientist; Ferdowsi used the language of romance. Accordingly, the Shahnameh charts the history of Persia from pre-Islamic kingdoms to the Muslim conquest in the seventh century ad. From the perspective of European Orientalists, this emphasis on Iran's pre-Islamic heritage and his interest in using Persian (Farsi) as a literary medium was indicative of Ferdowsi's aversion to Arabs and Islam in general.Footnote 21
Orientalist themes played a major role in turning the shahnameh into a psycho-nationalist trope for Iran's nascent dynasties in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Furthermore, Persian language journals such as Kaveh and Iranshahr, which were published in Berlin by a group of influential Iranian intellectuals with a nationalist conviction, presented Ferdowsi as an icon of a unique and distinctive Iranian national identity. In particular Hassan Taqizadeh (1878–1969), the veteran activist of Iran's Constitutional Revolt who edited Kaveh between 1916 and 22, superimposed western Orientalism on to the legacy of Ferdowsi. Highly influenced in his reading of Ferdowsi by Theodor Höldeke's (1836–1930) ‘Das Iranische Nationalepos’ (the Iranian national epic), Taqizadeh famously proclaimed that Iranians had to embrace everything European wholeheartedly.Footnote 22 It was this Europeanised Seyyed, in Iran's intellectual history, a lecturer at SOAS, University of London, among other prominent institutions, who was instrumental in inventing the shahnameh as a source of Iranian national identity.Footnote 23 In true psycho-nationalist parlance, Taqizadeh argued that Ferdowsi was the one who ‘spun Iranian history and the national story into a perfectly structured narrative, and by establishing this narrative he has created one of the causes of glory for the Iranian nation and has preserved the national story until today’.Footnote 24 Taqizadeh uses a distinctly emotive and modern language in order to present the shahnameh as a source of a purified national pride and consciousness. In this way, he is a psycho-nationalist par excellence and he should be read and understood in conjunction with Fichte, Herder, Mazzini, von-Ranke and others.Footnote 25
Undoubtedly, Ferdowsi was not indifferent to the politics of his day, not least because his livelihood was dependent on the patronage of the Ghaznavid court. As he concedes in the shahnameh itself: when the poet comes to the shah, ‘he cannot choose but sit before the throne’. Comparable to the tracts of Ibn Khaldun, there is a lot in the shahnameh about the conduct in politics, community relations, humanity, governance, and identity centuries before scholars and poets in Western and Central Europe experimented with similar tropes. Yet it is central to my argument that the psycho-nationalist interpretations were superimposed. Neither Ibn Khaldun, nor Ferdowsi advocated worshipping the state and the nation. The hysterical emphasis on romance and love with reference to national sentiments is a typically modern project. A global reading of such historical junctures demonstrates that eastern modernities produced their own pioneers of such psycho-nationalism. Iran is simply one example among many.Footnote 26
Moreover, in Ferdowsi, the ‘other’ does not emerge as ultimately alien, discomforting and fundamentally different, as psycho-nationalists would have it. The shahnameh displays literary genius written in a cosmopolitan mode. The idea that the book presents a manifesto of purely Iranian origin, undiluted by the vicissitudes of history, and an ideological manifesto against everything non-Iranian is a modern fallacy. It is true that Ferdowsi glorified what he imagined to be Iranian culture, but the shahnameh is rather more of a cultural festival than an ideological phalanx pointed against the non-Iranian world. As Dick Davies rightly points out in his extensive research about this subject Ferdowsi also introduced what he considered to be non-Iranians who are portrayed in a positive light, such as women from all over Asia, in particular Sindokht, Rudabeh, Manizheh and Farigis. The only central female character who is portrayed in a negative light is Soudabeh, who is represented as the ultimate ‘femme fatale’ who tries to lie and cheat her way to her step-son Siyavash in order to seduce him. In accordance with the patriarchal reading of society characteristic of his period, Ferdowsi must have thought those rather bad character traits. The husband of Soudabeh, the King of Persia Kaykavoos, on the other side, is repeatedly portrayed as incompetent and reckless. In fact, all heroes of the shahnameh have a mixed lineage and are far from purely ‘Iranian’ or ‘Aryan’: the mother of the main protagonist, Rostam, is part Indian and part of demonic descent, and the mothers of the princes Siyavash and Esfandiyar come from Central Asia and Rum (the Christian West), respectively.
Divested of psycho-nationalist ideology, then, the shahnameh displays literal hybridity and aesthetic synergy rather than purity and difference. It narrates a ‘society that embodies constant internal contradictions; that has an extremely porous rather than simply oppositional relationship with surrounding cultures’.Footnote 27 The shahnameh shows social life in its heterogeneous manifestations. ‘If there is a unity to be found in these tales it is a unity of diversity, of disunity … rather than of a single geographic area, or of a single bloodline, or of a single tribe … or of a single religious tradition’.Footnote 28 Persian culture, Hamid Dabashi recently wrote, is imbued with global thought and world culture.Footnote 29 Conversely, prominent doyens of ‘Iranian Studies’ such as Ehsan Yarshater are wrong to assume that ‘Iranian identity is clearly asserted in the inscriptions of Darius the Great (522–486 B.C.) who as an Aryan and a Persian was fully conscious of his racial affiliation and proud of his national identity’.Footnote 30 It is problematic, typical and retroactive to assume that language carries identity, that Persian can ever be ‘the chief carrier of the Persian world view and Persian cultures’.Footnote 31 Indeed, I would go one step further and add that imagining an ‘original’ Iran has been the cardinal sin of contemporary Iranian history. As we will continue to find out, several depictions of Iran (or ‘Irans’) have been invented in accordance with political currents. There is no original identity to Iran. Originality is the standard parody that psycho-nationalists routinely display, in Iran and elsewhere.
So the myths of a particularly Iranian or Persian identity were created within a historical context that was geared to psycho-nationalist currents, as demonstrated. Several studies have shown how in the twentieth century the shahnameh was reinvented as a source for Iran's psycho-nationalist project, which was intimately linked to imagining a nation ruled by a monarch represented by the Pahlavi dynasty. The shahnameh as a psycho-nationalist trope was meant to function for the Pahlavi monarchs in at least two ways: first, it was thought to be functional in linking their legitimacy to the emperors of pre-Islamic Persia, and second to emphasise Iran's difference to the ‘Semitic’ Arabs. From this perspective, Islam was deemed ‘other’ to Iran's ‘true’ identity which was invented as Aryan, closer to Europe, even France as the shah argued in 1963 in an article for Life magazine. Hence, a shahnameh ‘industry’ emerged in Iran in the 1920s and 1930s, institutionalised in educational curricula in Iranian schools after the first Pahlavi monarch assumed power in 1925. Subsequently, building on ideas developed by Taqizadeh in the aforementioned Berlin-based journals Kaveh and Iranshahr, Reza Shah sponsored the newly established Society for National Monuments (anjoman-e asar-e melli) to build a mausoleum for Ferdowsi in Tus, located in north-eastern Iran.Footnote 32 The architecture of the mausoleum reflects its political utility: it was built in the Achaemenidian style perfectly in tune with the penchant of the Pahlavi dynasty for pre-Islamic Persian empires. Uniformity in discourse facilitated uniformity in culture, which subdued the mosaic, multicultural beauty of architectural designs in Iran. Furthermore, the farvahar, a Zoroastrian symbol central to the empire of Cyrus, satisfied the political quest to disassociate Iranian history and identity from Islam. Not entirely unlike the swastika which has been a prominent symbol in Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist religious folklore for millennia and which was then abused by the Nazis in Germany as a symbol for racial purity, the farvahar too travelled a long way from its neo-Assyrian habitat to Pahlavi Iran, where it was used as an emblem for Aryan/Persian purity.
In a similar vein, reference to the mausoleum of Ferdowsi as the ferdowsiyeh was meant to reinvent the site as a destination for pilgrimage, in lieu of Shia-Islamic mausoleums that were traditionally called hosseiniyeh, itself a religious term invented by the Safavids, as we will find out at a later stage. In this way the public sphere in Iran became the carrier of a new form of theo-nationalistic indoctrination which was meant to signify a new kind of Persian purity. The dynamics, not at all reducible to the Iranian case as we have seen, were quintessentially psycho-nationalist: they were meant to cleanse the ideational archives from any impingement of the ‘other’ in order to simulate a false sense of authenticity and difference as opposed to a gratifying feeling of hybridity and multiculturalism which is closer to almost any social reality, certainly that of Iran. The fact that the engineers of such machoistic and ill-founded Persian pride worked at the nexus of power and knowledge, influential figures of the past such as Hassan Taqizadeh and Hassan Pirnya in Iran, or the army of Persian chauvinists outside of the country today, demonstrates the salience of this psycho-nationalist discourse. So deep runs Iranian psycho-nationalism, that leaders of the contemporary Iranian state, the Islamic Republic which at the beginning of the revolution was repulsed by the nationalistic innuendo of the Pahlavi dynasty, repeatedly reignited the country's pre-Islamic past as a source of identity. For instance, the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised the Cyrus cylinder when it was lent to Iran by the British Museum. In several statements, Ahmadinejad described Cyrus as an Iranian monarch who brought justice to the world ‘look at Cyrus. He had taken over the whole world, but he said, “If anyone does anything unjust, he will have to come and face me.” He said he would do everything within this Declaration of Rights’.Footnote 33 Ahmadinejad was quickly reprimanded by the clerical leadership who reminded him that Cyrus was not a Muslim and that he was a symbol of the Pahlavi monarchs. The Iranian state today is caught between such repeated bouts of Irano-centric psycho-nationalism and its Shia-Islamic corollary. Allow me to set a few signposts for the story of the latter.
Rostam ↔ Hossein: Shia Mind Games
The previous section developed my argument in two directions. Firstly, it showed that psycho-nationalism is a truly global phenomenon that has occurred in different regions at different periods of time and that it is analytically flawed to pinpoint a western origin to nationalist thinking. Secondly, it demonstrated how texts and ideas travel and how they develop into something very different in response to political necessity and/or ideological expediency. The shahnameh of Ferdowsi is a book of literary genius, a set of fables that are a testament to Persia's cosmopolitan heritage at the crossroads of cultures and ideas. Yet even this intricate mosaic of Iran's historical reality was shattered by psycho-nationalists from Taqizadeh and Kazimzadeh to Kermani and Akhundzadeh. It was then adopted by the Pahlavi dynasty, not as a trope to bring Iranians together in a civil, pluralistic, democratic nation-state, but to legitimate a new form of authoritarianism in the name of a Persianist ideal with racist undertones.
In order to put those dynamics into a global perspective the Pahlavis could have referred to the shahnameh in the same way that the Portuguese refer to their very comparable national epic today. For the Portuguese Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads in Portuguese), an epic poem authored by Luis Vaz de Camoes in the sixteenth century, which celebrates Portuguese discoveries in the East, has ceased to be a document for psycho-nationalist mobilisation. Like Ferdowsi, Camoes' poetry is embedded in a thick national repository which has been abused for ideological ends, exactly because of its folkloric stamina. Until today his death is celebrated as the national day of Portugal, yet without much nationalist hysteria anymore. This was different in the past when the same day served as a focal point for the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar (1889–1970). For instance in 1944, Salazar referred to the national day as the day of the ‘Portuguese race’ (Dia da Raça), in close affinity with psycho-nationalist terminology.Footnote 34 For this dictatorship Camoes was as suitable to cognitive mind control as Ferdowsi was for the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran. At the same time, some countries, including Portugal at this point of history as a part of the European Union, have embraced a form of post-national politics that divests nationalised tropes and heritage of their aggressive identitarian punch and turns them into a carnival of positive emotions. This is politics after identity, if you like. Yet such consensual, non-confrontationist, agonistic approaches have not been implemented by successive Iranian states. Admittedly, the stakes have been higher than in the case of Portugal given Iran's sensitive geostrategic position in the Persian Gulf and the interference of foreign powers in the internal affairs of the country because of oil politics.Footnote 35 But this historical trajectory should not divert attention from the fact that contemporary Iran has been governed by a chauvinistic, hegemonic and rather hysterical and pathological form of politics which I have termed psycho-nationalist. Successive Iranian rulers have attempted to code the cognition of the populace along nefarious themes such as blood, honour and sacrifice – in the end rather unsuccessfully, as we will see.
Not all nationalism is antagonistic and hegemonic. An idea of Iran or any other nation that is imagined and institutionalised along flexible, inclusive and sufficiently complex signposts, that are as thinly ideational as possible, would minimise clashes in the name of identity. So-called ‘historic’ nations such as Iran, comparable to countries such as Russia, China, France, Japan and the United Kingdom and newer inventions such as the United States, seem to carry an identity complex. They repeatedly push, shove and bully the rest of us into believing in their historical mission which is recurrently the source of anguish, pain and suffering on a global scale. Psycho-nationalism does to politics what terrorism does to society: it creates anxiety, angst, destructive emotions that appeal to the worst characteristics of human kind. In other words, psycho-nationalism creates a form of psychotic politics that is akin to terrorism.
In this section I will differentiate and open up the sites of psycho-nationalism further. The conventional literature of Iranian studies locates the emergence of the modern nation-state in the period of the Pahlavi dynasty, in particular the emergence of a nationalised infrastructure including banks, universities, citizenship and/or a national Iranian army under the leadership of Reza Shah who ruled Iran between 1925 and 41. Mainstream scholarship in Australia, Europe, North America and to a lesser extent East Asia and Latin America subscribes to this periodisation. As indicated above, nationalism is routinely analysed from a Eurocentric perspective and this view travels to other places around the world. Accordingly, nationalism in Iran is repeatedly represented as a historical trajectory rooted in European modernity. But as we have seen, such Eurocentric approaches to history overlook the circularity of ideas and the southern/eastern precedents to seemingly ‘European’ inventions. In this vein, I argue that the modern contours of the Iranian nation-state were created as early as the Safavid dynasty which ruled Iran between 1501 and 1722 (with a brief period of reappearance between 1729 and 36). I will add in a second step that the Safavids institutionalised the second prominent psycho-nationalist trope in the Iranian imagination, namely through a set of ‘Shia paraphernalia’. Many of these devices to control Iranians continue to be central pillars of the contemporary Iranian state after the ‘Islamic’ revolution of 1979.
Ironically, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, Shah Ismail, was another product of the cosmopolitan and multicultural reality of Iran. He was born in 1487 to a sheikh of the Safaviyya Sufi order with Kurdish descent. His mother, Halima Begum, had Pontic Greek ancestors and Ismail himself was raised speaking both Persian and Azerbaijani (a Turkish dialect).Footnote 36 From their ancestral home in Ardabil, the Safavids expanded their rule to other parts of contemporary Iran and beyond. Between 1500 and 10, Shah Ismail incorporated Baghdad, Tabriz, Armenia, Azerbaijan, parts of Dagestan, Khorasan and Herat to the emerging empire. A gifted poet in his own right, the aesthetic culture sponsored by Shah Ismail was influenced by the shahnameh of Ferdowsi, which is one of the reasons why he named all of his sons after the characters of the book. It was Shah Ismail, then, who established the contours of Iran's contemporary nation-state long before the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which marked the end of the 30-year war and which is routinely given as the starting point for the emergence of modern nation-states in Europe. Moreover, it was he who used a very particularistic view of Persia as an anchor for his legitimacy. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that the shahnameh too was reinvented by Safavid court poets in order to function as a sub-narrative to the ‘heroic’ rule of Safavid monarchs. The Safavid dynasty understood the importance of (psycho)nationalist identity politics, long before the Pahlavis did (and the Europeans, as indicated).
But the ‘myth of Persia’ was not the only identity trope that was used by the Safavids to consolidate and expand their empire. When Shah Ismail came to power, contemporary Iran was populated mostly by Sunnis adhering to the Shafi'i and Hanafi legal schools. It must have appeared to him politically and ideologically prudent to differentiate his rule, not only in terms of national identity, but also with reference to God. After all, an earthly sovereignty and legitimacy is easily challenged, in particular because of the overwhelming presence of the Ottoman Empire and to a lesser extent successive Uzbek dynasties in Central Asia. The politics of identity, the antagonistic depiction of the ‘other’, became a major factor in the Safavid–Ottoman rivalry. The Ottomans were the heirs of the Islamic caliphate whose religious legitimacy was primarily based on Sunni traditions. In contrast, Shah Ismail pursued a relentless campaign of forced conversion of the majority Sunni population in Iran to (Twelver) Shia Islam. It is one of the many ironies of global history that before the ascendancy to power of the Safavid dynasty, the Ottomans routinely sent their Islamic scholars (ulema) to Iranian madrasas for their further education in Sunni jurisprudence (fiqh). From the perspective of Shah Ismail, the Safavid empire could only compete with the Ottomans if it were to institutionalise a strong state with a largely coherent and amalgamated nation, a subject citizenry that would accept the divine authority of the Shah who described himself as the reincarnation of Rostam, ‘Jesus the Son of Mary’ and Alexander.Footnote 37
This process of subjectification was discursive and crude. Shah Ismail I administered what has been called an ‘involuntary’ and forced conversion policy, which was largely incomplete given that some areas under the domain of the Safavids retained their Sunni/Hanafi convictions.Footnote 38 But the discursive, psycho-nationalist strategies had long-term effects on the national imagination in Iran. Shah Ismail instituted an authoritarian regime over knowledge and power in the name of a missionary Shia ideology that was increasingly systematic and institutionalised.Footnote 39 Above all, this discursive regime targeted the cognition of the population through strident forms of biopolitical training and enforced socialisation into the Persianised Shia system. These methods included: reintroducing the office of the Sadr (‘leader’ in Arabic) which was responsible for supervising the burgeoning Shia mosque system in the empire and other religious sites and endowments; enforcing the ritual cursing of the first three Caliphs of the Sunna, that is, Abu Bakr, Umar and Osman; and inviting all the Shia living outside of the empire to come to Iran and to accept the Shah's sovereignty as the representative of the hidden Imam. According to Shia orthodoxy, this Imam Mahdi will return to earth (together with Jesus) to deliver the ideal human order. Some of these ideological tenets and the measures that derived from them were relaxed during the reign of Shah Ismail II (1537–77), but with the ascendancy to the throne of Shah Abbas I (1571–1629) they reappeared as a major pillar of Safavid state policy.
Secondly, Safavid psycho-nationalism was carried forward by an emerging caste of Shia clerics (ulema), who had arrived under sponsorship from Jabal Amil, Mount Lebaonon, Syria, Bahrain and Southern Iraq. From this point on, the clerical strata of society in Iran had the opportunity to engineer a new form of institutionalised Shi'ism, which gave them unprecedented access to the corridors of power, and does so until the present day. To that end, education was key. Psycho-nationalism, as I have conceptualised it, is galvanised by a strong nexus between power and knowledge, within a system that produces truth conditions on every level of the state and society in order to bind both together into the organisational outfit of the nation-state. As such, under the Safavids, and in particular during the rule of Shah Abbas I (1571–1629), the idea of Imamite jurisprudence in the Twelver-Shia tradition was institutionalised in the burgeoning madrasas and other educational and civic institutions sponsored by the court. These were increasingly populated by senior Shia scholars recruited from all over the Muslim world. Chief among them was Muhaqiq al-Karaki (also al-Thani, d. 1533), a pivotal clerical figure that readily carried the torch of the state-sponsored Shi'ism institutionalised during that period. In his widely disseminated study, Refuting the Criminal Invectives of Mysticism (Mata'in al Mufrimiya fi Radd al-Sufiya), Al-Karaki established one of the most powerful refutations of the Sufi tradition in Iran and set the jurisprudential guidelines for the predominant authority of the jurist based on the Imamite succession.Footnote 40 As a consequence, the usuli (rationalist) school of Shia Islam increasingly dominated the seminaries and pushed back the followers of the traditionalist (akhbari) paradigm. Al-Karaki and other influential clerics emphasised the power of ijtihad or dialectical reasoning and made a strong case in favour of the leadership of mujtahids whose divine decrees would be emulated (taqlid) by their followers.Footnote 41 As such, Al-Karaki's reinvention of a Shia orthodoxy based on a religious hierarchy dominated by a supreme jurist can be seen as one of the main precursors to Khomeini's idea of the Velayat-e faqih or the rule of the supreme jurisprudent.Footnote 42
And thirdly, the Safavid discourse was carried into the heartland of the empire by a caste of men of the pen (ahl-al qalam), a highly educated, urban administrative class of society which maintained the humdrum affairs of the state. The individuals, trained in the ancient etiquette of adab, administered the financial, religious, political, ideological and diplomatic affairs of the Safavid court. These adibs, who were well-versed in ancient Greek philosophy and in the treatise of Farabi, Tusi, Sistani and Ibn Sina, used refined oratory skills and rhetoric as a socio-political strategy, a form of political ethics as a means to ordering society. In many ways the adibs were highly cultured managers of the public mind. They targeted the imagination (khiyal) of the Iranian population through discursive strategies such as takhyil, a particularly sophisticated form of socio-political argumentation through the use of figurative language and metaphors.Footnote 43 In this way the adibs staged and narrated Safavid psycho-nationalism. Comparable to the role of humanists such as Erasmus or Cervantes in continental Europe, the adibs were the directors of an immensely rich politico-cultural theatre populated by metaphors, oratorical speeches, poetry, synonyms, norms and symbols. All of these oral and literary skills were useful in accessing the ancient archives (oral and written) of Iran's cultural and historical imagination, all the fables, books, philosophical tracts, parables, dictums and ideas that were invented to make up a ‘Persian’ or Iranian spirit. No wonder that the adibs found privileged employment in the chancelleries and other prominent institutions of the Safavid Court. Safavid mind games could only be effectively implemented with the help of this flamboyant stratum of society.
And lastly, even architectural styles are affected by the psycho-nationalism of the age. I have already indicated that the Pahlavis sponsored pre-Islamic styles for public buildings and cultural places such as the tomb of Ferdowsi. For instance, the National Museum of Iran, which was constructed from 1933 onwards, was built in the ‘antiquarian Sassanid style’.Footnote 44 The Achaemenid style was used for buildings such as the National Bank, which was inaugurated in 1936, the Police Headquarters Building finished in 1934, the Darband Police Station inaugurated one year earlier and the Anoushiravan Dadgar High School in Tehran (1936). These buildings inscribed the obsession of the Pahlavis with pre-Islamic Persia, and their Aryan ideal, into the infrastructure of contemporary Iran. The imprint of the Safavids had equally important roots in the mechanisms of psycho-nationalism. The first generation of Safavid rulers (Ismail I, II and Tahmasp), in line with their newly acquired Shia persuasion, paid a lot of attention to restoring and extending major Shia shrines in Najaf, Karbala, Kazimiyya, Mashhad and elsewhere. Whereas the Ottomans (like the Mughals in India) marked the expansion of their empire with the construction of magnificent Friday mosques, primarily in Istanbul, the imperial iconography of the Safavids was permeated by the Persian-Shia discourse underlying the claim to divine sovereignty of the shah.Footnote 45 This material portrayal of the Safavid ‘self’ culminated in the Shah mosque in Isfahan, which was completed in 1629. The universal claim was inscribed beautifully into the maidan-e nakhshe jahan, which translates quite aptly into the ‘image of the world square’. The Persian proverb ‘Isfahan is half of the world’ (Isfahan nesfeh jahan ast) was coined during that period. The Safavid shahs did not only call themselves ‘pivots of the universe’, they endeavoured to inscribe their grand narratives onto the architectural fabric of Iran. This is to reiterate that architecture can be identified as another site of psycho-nationalist indoctrination, in Iran and elsewhere.
