Reimagining Iran: How “Iranianness” Became “Persianness”

Mohammed Haedapour

doi:10.65967/istoriya.v7i4.111

Authors

Mohammed Haedapour Bentley University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.65967/istoriya.v7i4.111

Keywords:

Orientalism, nationalism, Iranianness, Persianness, habitus, Persianate world, internal other

Abstract

The idea of an intellectual “invention of Iran” is a striking metaphor rooted in Orientalist archaeology and historical writing that developed from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth. This scholarly project drew heavily on Aryan racial mythology, claims about Aryan movement into the Indian subcontinent, and the related framing of the Persian ethnie as the exclusive creator of Iran’s celebrated national heritage. Such a Eurocentric storyline helped produce “Persianness” as an ethnoracial hierarchy, comparable to how Whiteness has operated as a privileged norm in Europe and the United States. In this article, I investigate the knowledge claims that underpin Iranian nationalism and, crucially, trace how Orientalist readings of Iran’s past continue to shape the perspectives and practices of present-day Persian intellectuals and elites. I contend that the making of Persianness into a favored identity has normalized particular ways of seeing, reasoning, speaking, and knowing as distinctly “Persian,” presenting them as self-evident and universal. This raciolinguistic construction reproduces a habitus that filters non-Persian histories and collective memories through a Persian-centered frame, one that implicitly positions them as secondary and inherently inferior.

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