[LINK] "Iran: Whose History is it Anyway?"

[rfmcdonald]

IWPR's Mehdi Baghernejad has an excellent article about the complex relationship between Iran and Persian culture. At one point, the Persian language that is so strongly associated with Iran--also in Afghanistan, as Dari, and in Tajikistan, as Tajik--was the vehicle for a thriving, cosmopolitan culture that extended beyond the more limited realms of the Persian language today. Who is Rumi, the man in Afghanistan who wrote in Persian and in the Persian tradition? What of Central Asians like the doctor Avicenna and the mathematician al-Khwarizmi? The logics of the nation-state run up hard against these questions.

Mahjoob Zweiri is a professor of modern Middle Eastern at the University of Qatar. Of Jordanian origin, he lived and studied in Tehran for many years, and explains that disputes over cultural ownership stem from the fact that the geographical borders of today simply did not exist hundreds of years ago.

The Persian cultural world extended eastwards across Afghanistan into India, northwards into Central Asia, and westwards to include parts of the southern Caucasus. The thinkers and writers of that time – many of them multi-talented scientists and poets – often moved around and ended up a long way from their birthplaces.

In places like Central Asia and Azerbaijan, the creation of “national” poets and other historical figures stems from the deliberate Soviet policy of equipping the USSR’s constituent republics with a sanitised version of history, complete with their own approved cultural icons. This policy was carried over into the post-Soviet states as they embarked on nation-building and sought historical legitimacy. Thus, Ganjavi has been incorporated into the historical narrative of modern-day Azerbaijan.

Many of the figures whom Iranians regard as their own are also described by blanket terms such as “Muslim scholars”, or even portrayed as Arabs because some of their works were written in Arabic, the language of religion and science of the day.

Iranians are dismayed when the likes of Ibn Sina are presented as Arabs. The well-known Tehran University professor of philosophy, Gholam Hossein Ebrahimi Dinani, see this as a part of an “Arab plot” to rewrite Persian history.

“Many of these scientists produced works of literature and science in both Persian and Arabic,” he said.

Zweiri points out that until Islam’s golden age came to an end with the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1257, Baghdad was the centre of science and knowledge. At that time, “Arabic culture” was a much broader and all-encompassing concept.