Making History in Iran: education, nationalism and print culture
2015; Middle East Institute; Volume: 69; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Islamic Studies and History
ResumoMaking History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture, by Farzin Vejdani. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 288 pages. $60.Reviewed by Rudi MattheeThis excellent study examines the evolution of Iranian self-identification - how Iranians went from viewing themselves as subjects of a shah to feeling like citizens of a nation. It analyzes the emergence of a public discourse in which history became a science mobilized for national purposes - by inculcating the idea of oneness in diversity and insisting on cultural and political continuity - and sees this as a function of institutional change and development involving print and education. It builds on Benedict Anderson's imagined community model, but also borrows from Ernest Gellner, though without mentioning either the latter's name or his theory.The centralizing state, Farzin Vejdani argues, played an important role in the process by way of facilitating print capitalism and managing public spaces, museums and commemorations. Yet the key players were often not bureaucrats but amateur historians operating within patronage networks. And these did not just slavishly follow the state and its exigencies. The court chronicler, the king of historians, in due time became a petitioner at the gate of the Ministry of Education, but he did so while offering his own narrative, which often pitted mellat, the people, against dowlat, the state. The men who wrote Iran's modern history arose neither from the world of archives, which did not exist, nor from a university environment, which only took shape in the late 1930s.Chapter one charts the transition from Iran's traditional, panegyric and rather solipsistic historiography, to a new type of court history that looked beyond Iran, either to legitimize the Qajar state in new ways or in search of models for reform. True reform and with it the creation of new public sphere came in the form of Constitutional Revolution (1905-9), a watershed event for generating a great deal of new history writing seeking to make sense of this upheaval. The British Orientalist E.G. Browne offered an enormously influential Western template for doing so with his groundbreaking The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (1910). But Vejdani, keen to highlight indigenous agency, also draws attention to Persian-language writings generated in the context of India's advanced print culture (which operated under Western, i.e., British auspices as well).Chapter two examines the development of modern education and its role in shaping history as a scientific discipline espousing a people-oriented nationalism imbued with constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, and democratic values. The focus here is on the crucial role Mohammad 'Ali Forughi played in shaping Reza Shah's educational and cultural policies. This line is further pursued in chapter three, which concentrates on the role of the state in the building of educational institutions, culminating in the creation of the University of Tehran in 1935. It discusses the curricula that were adopted, the periodization chosen, and the civilizational model that was selected as an organizing principle. The men of consequence in this discussion are 'Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, a pioneer of professional history writing, and 'Isa Sadiq, whose American education did much to steer Iran's educational system away from the French model. Vejdani puts paid to the myth that an infatuation with pre-Islamic Iran was a major impulse in the discourse of these and other early practitioners of the new history. Indeed, while the histories written in the interwar years came to emphasize continuity over rupture and emphatically took issue with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dictum that Easterners have no history, they hardly paid any attention to pre-Islamic Iranian history. …
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