Ghereghlou response to Matthee IJMES 48 (2016)

Criticism arising from disagreement is what advances debate, making scholarship progress. A critical review therefore should leave an author unperturbed—as long as it is honest and fair. Kioumars Ghereghlou's review of my book Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan is neither. Rather than engaging in a serious and substantive discussion of the book's content and argument, it offers a string of innuendo-filled swipes and tendentious statements reflecting a prickly type of modern identity politics. I thus feel compelled to respond. Ghereghlou begins his review by insinuating that I condescendingly view Iran as a nation of megalomaniacs. This is an absurd suggestion, the distorted distillation of an assembly of quotes cobbled together from all over the book, lifted out of context. To say, as I do, that Iranians are—and see themselves as—the proud inheritors of a great civilization is not the same as proclaiming that they are megalomaniacs with a " myopic collective memory " with regard to the collapse of the Safavids in 1722. Yes, I should have spoken of " modern Iranians " as opposed to " Iranians " in my introduction. And I should have been more careful differentiating between scholars and the general public. Yet I stand by my opinion that, all too often, (modern) Iranians lay the blame for their nation's misfortunes on scheming foreigners, thus forfeiting a clear-eyed perspective on their country's history. And even Iranian scholars often look at that same history as a long sequence of perseverance and its reward, regeneration, in the face of loss and defeat suffered by a noble, culturally superior people at the hands of outside invaders eager to sap its wealth and destroy its culture—from Alexander and the Arabs to the Mongols and the Afghans and, in modern times, the British. It is this narrative that I sought to undermine in my book, by talking about rupture, regional variation, and internal conflict, not to denigrate Iranians but to offer a fresh analysis of the forces that brought down the remarkable empire that the Safavids oversaw. My reviewer makes it sound as if I claim to be the first to offer a multifaceted explanation of that same fall. I do not. Many have gone before me, among them Iranians, as I point out, but most have emphasized the moral dimension. If it is true that until the late 19th century Iranian commentators have generally identified internal factors, modern Iranians have more than made up for this by emphasizing external forces. Also, Itimad al-Saltana spoke of the complex reasons for the Safavid decline and fall 130 years before I did, but his main source, by his own admission, was the Polish Jesuit Judas Thaddeus Krusinski, whose eyewitness account of the siege and sack of Isfahan

The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 2008

This survey of the history of Iranian civilization from ancient times to the present is intended for general audiences with little knowledge of Iranian history. The book's nine chapters consist largely of chronological presentations of political history, but occasionally make room for sections on religious movements, society, and the arts. The first two chapters briskly cover the ancient period through the Sassanids. The third runs from the Islamic conquests through the fifteenth century and contains a long section on the evolution of Persian verse tradition. The fourth and fifth chapters cover the Safavids' rise and fall, the development of early modern Twelver Shi`ism, and the tumultuous period leading up to the Qajars. The sixth surveys the late Qajar period and the constitutional revolution, while the last three chapters detail the events of the twentieth century with an emphasis on the 1979 Islamic revolution and what has happened since. As nearly a third of the book deals with the twentieth century, the treatment of the ancient periods and the first millennium of the Islamic era are comparatively spare.

https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com, 2023

Pre-publication of chapter VII of my forthcoming book "Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists"; chapters VI, VII, VIII, IX and X form Part Three (Turkey and Iran beyond Politics and Geopolitics: Rejection of the Orientalist, Turcologist and Iranologist Fallacies about Achaemenid History) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapters VIII, IX and X have already been pre-published. Until now, 20 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 21st (out of 33) to be uploaded. At the end of the text, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in green color. In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents. The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization. -------------------- First published on 23rd August 2023 here: https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2023/08/23/the-fallacious-representation-of-achaemenid-iran-by-western-orientalists/

The glorification of the past that is reflected in popularizing attempts such as the 1001 Inventions exhibition and book is met with enthusiasm, albeit sometimes a quite patronising one, by the intended audience. The perpetrators of such activities , despite their best intentions, are participating in an exercise that haunts specialists and frustrates a thoughtful understanding of history. By highlighting " episodes " and " ingenuities " of the past, these undertakings serve the opposite of what they set to achieve, deflecting attention away from the intricacies, evidence, and details that create the real context for history. Instead, such undertakings become empty shells of historical " glory " which hold very little of the actual details which has caused them to stand out. While this disconnection between reality and image is easily understood in visual culture, it is harder to pinpoint when considering narrative history. The case of the history of ancient Iran, as presented in two closely related but radically opposing narratives, illustrates this point(Ansari 2003, Ch. III, Katouzian, 2009). One group promotes and glorifies the pre-Islamic history of Iran, while the other considers the period to be fundamentally corrupt and counts the advent of Islam as the beginning of the historical development of Iran as whole. It is interesting, and indeed quite revealing, that both camps take similar episodes from history, most importantly the rise of Islam itself, to make their points, each presenting a different interpretation. Both camps, by essentializing history into few episodes, devoid of context and divorced of historical details, come to create a static image which results in a distorted view of history, similar to the results of the 1001 Inventions exhibition. However, while these two understandings dominate the public sphere, the intellectual milieu is similarly divided into two camps. These are the two, which I call the Ancientists and the Modernists, the second one usually far outnumbering the first. In this sense, the Modernists commonly ignore the pleas of the Ancien-tists to contextualize their arguments. 1 The basic assumption and argument of the Ancientist camps, often plagued by an exuberant amount of historical romanticism , is that Iran, in some form or shape, has existed " from the time immemo-rial, " making it a pre-modern formation and an ur-nation-state. The Modernists, 1 For example see the debate between Zia-Ebrahimi(2010) and Mashayekh (2010).

This paper is concerned with the fortunes of the pre-revolutionary, Pahlavi nationalist narrative in post-revolutionary Iran. The study analyses and compares pre-and post-revolutionary school textbooks with the aim of demonstrating that, for all its revolutionary and Islamic-universalist hyperbole, the Islamic Republic of Iran remained committed to the Pahlavi dynasty's conception of the 'immemorial Iranian nation' (or the 'Aryan hypothesis') as it was first articulated by European scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post-revolutionary Iran clung to the EuropeadPahlavi master narrative of Iranian history, its very basic 'story line'. It was, therefore, subject to the same evolution, the same dialectic of remembering and forgetting, the same successive deformations, and the vulnerability to the very same manipulation and appropriation. This study, then, attempts to establish that the Islamic Republic's apparent shift from 'Iran Time' to 'Islam Time', though it reaches far beyond Iranian borders, nevertheless remains wedded to, and embedded in, the dominant European, secular traditions of the Pahlavi era. Islamic consciousness in Iran does not in any way constitute the basis for an alternative myth to the national myth. Rather, it adds Islamic terminology to the very same myth. Political Islam thus remains within the confines of Iranian nationalism. It is articulated in the framework of the symbols of Iranian nationalism, endowing them with a meaning that is supposedly religious. I wish to thank my colleagues and (above all else) friends Dr Iris Agmon and Dr Gabriel Piterberg for reading the manuscript and offering insightful comments and criticisms.

Making History in Iran is a much-needed examination of how various social and institutional changes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped how the people of Iran wrote about, taught, and understood the past. Farzin Vejdani traces the gradual formation of modern historiography in Iran through periods of shifting patronage networks, the expansion of reading publics, and the adoption of reformist and inter-nationalist revolutionary ideas. These structural transformations made it possible for history to move out of the court and into the hands of amateur writers, private educators, and activists who introduced the nation as a central historical framework. Previous studies on Iranian historiography have focused on how top-down authoritarian reforms of the late Qajar and Pahlavi periods were responsible for writing nationalism into the history books. Vejdani, however, utilizes a wide variety of source materials, such as historical textbooks, training manuals, periodicals, correspondences, and school curricula to argue that such a view excludes a larger pool of autonomous contributors REVIEWS