The Genealogy of Our Intellectuals by Dariush Ashouri

In the three decades following the Islamic Revolution, in the wake of the shock it dealt to the mind and psyche of the Iranian people and a large part of the world, many questions about the backgrounds and conditions that made this revolution possible were etched in minds. These questions inevitably prompted an inquiry into its cultural and political backgrounds in Iranian history. Apart from investigations into distant historical backgrounds, the inquiry into the century-long history that set the stage from the Constitutional Revolution to the Islamic Revolution has most engaged minds. The question guiding all these searches and strivings is largely based on, “What happened that it came to this?” That is, what happened that a people who, a hundred years earlier, rose up for freedom, the rule of law, and democracy, ended up with religious rule and an “Islamic government”? On this subject, a great number of books have been written by Iranian and foreign researchers in these years. Among them, many doctoral dissertations by Iranian students in Europe and America in the fields of history, political science, and sociology, which have also been published as books.

The question “What happened that it came to this?” rests on the presupposition that we had other expectations, and based on the belief in the principle of progress in history—which is the foundation of the intellectual faith in history—Iranian society “naturally” ought to have moved in the direction of history’s course and achieved freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Now we must see what the “historical obstacles” to this regression were. These inquiries continue to research and theorize based on the long-standing intellectual faith in history and its progress, seeking the reasons for this “historical failure,” and, ultimately, find the cause in cultural backwardness (including “religiosity”), the role of colonial policies, the dictatorship of the Pahlavi dynasty, and the like.

However, a book has also been published that does not approach history with the presuppositions of faith in historical progress and its necessity, but rather, from another perspective, examines the history of the formation of the progress-believing intellectual mentality and its presuppositions in the history of modern times in Iran. The book Indigenous Modernity and Rethinking History (Nashr-e Tarikh-e Iran, Tehran, 1382) by Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi is such a book. Tavakoli, who is a professor of history at universities in America and Canada, using the method of discourse analysis, has approached the phenomenon of the formation of modern socio-political consciousness, or modern intellectual consciousness, in the realm of Iranian culture and the Persian language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD (twelfth and thirteenth centuries AH) and has shown how, in this mentality and its language, ancient words and concepts underwent semantic metamorphosis to express new concepts, and how and whence new words and concepts emerged and shaped this mentality. Tavakoli, in fact, traces the course of a historical rupture that set the stage for a profound crisis in the Iranian cultural world, and this crisis is the very historical displacement that shaped the modern world of Iranian culture and its self-consciousness with its new identity. This historical rupture occurs from the bedrock of the ancient, closed indigenous world with its opening onto global history. The new meanings and concepts that this rupture brings with it overflow from the other side of the world, from Europe, into the worlds on this side, into the “Eastern” worlds.

The pioneer in cultivating and expanding this new method of understanding history is Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historical researcher. Pioneers of feminist analytical literature have also greatly utilized this method and its concepts for their own frameworks. Tavakoli, without providing much explanation of his historical method and approach and its theoretical foundations, demonstrates that he is well acquainted with this hermeneutic approach to history and has applied it skillfully. Tavakoli, as evidenced by his research on issues of sexual identity and the “woman question” in Iranian history, including in this very book, shows that he has also closely followed feminist literature and the newly opened field of “gender studies” (gender studies) and has utilized them in his work.

Native Modernity is not a voluminous book (230 pages), but it is a very substantial one, both in terms of data collection and their analysis. In this respect, few books in Persian rival it. It would have been fitting for this book to reach around five hundred pages with further expansion, because there are places where the author passes over the subject briefly, concisely, and allusively, and the reader feels the need for citations from the writings of that time. The book's theme is the same as what I have brought in the title of this article, that is, the genealogy of our intellectualism, or the formation of modern historical consciousness among “us,” of which the “intellectuals” are the bearers and disseminators. In fact, intellectualism (or by its older name, monavvar-ol-fekri)—which is a phenomenon of the age of “Enlightenment” and its globalization—is fundamentally this very faith in history and its teleology (teleology) and the effort to accelerate the arrival of its inevitable, redemptive end. This end is precisely the emergence of a utopian world, or the future “human” world of freedom, happiness, justice, and wisdom, through the destruction of the world of servitude, abjection, injustice, despotism, ignorance, and superstition, which, from this viewpoint, has ruled over history until now.

Our “Eastern” world, until it was confronted with the West and its modern civilization, which is the source of these ideas, was familiar with history and its end through a mythical narrative, based on spiritual eschatology. But secular, worldly historical teleology is the offspring of the historical thinking of modern intellectualism, which carries the banner of “Enlightenment” and considers (or considered) itself the vanguard of history. “Intellectualism” itself is conceived and grows with this meaning of history and within this history, and takes upon its shoulders its “historical mission” as enlightener and savior. It is in pursuit of this “historical mission” that intellectualism steps into the boundless arena of struggle to destroy the old world and erect the new one. The result of the rupture from the mythical understanding of history, which relies on the cyclical rotation of creational time (“Indeed we belong to God, and indeed to Him we return”), to the modern understanding of history based on linear, progressive time, within a mental space that had no connection with the formative conditions of modern ideas and worldview, leads to something that Tavakoli, in the title of his book, calls “Native Modernity.”

Tavakoli, with a method similar to that of Michel Foucault in sifting through books and archives, in search of documentation for his ideas, has pursued his historical inquiry with a patient search through various books and periodicals of a one-hundred-and-fifty-year historical period to show the metamorphosis of the Iranian mentality from “tradition” to “modernity” (or, in our vernacular, tajaddod). He traces a process in which “Iranianness,” in an entirely new sense, gradually takes shape in the form of “Iran” with a new historical, geographical, political, and cultural meaning, a meaning modeled on the template of the modern nation-states of “Farang.” The book Native Modernity, in terms of opening up the historical archive and its meticulous, piece-by-piece rereading, as far as I have seen, has engaged in a far more extensive study of detailed data than any other book in this field, without drowning in the details. Rather, the micro-data find their overall meaning in the light of a new historical vision. One of the book's most valuable contributions is the search Tavakoli conducted in Persian-language travelogues, books, and periodicals in India, traveling there for this purpose and finding untouched historical documents. It seems that before this book, historical research on this era relied more on the influence of modern ideas through Anatolia and the Caucasus into Iran. But Tavakoli shows that with the literary and administrative dominance of the Persian language over Mughal India until the mid-nineteenth century, and the travel of Iranian merchants and cultured individuals to India, that land, which had officially become part of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century, was one of the fundamental channels of Iranian encounter with “Farang” and the “Farangis.” The first travelogues to Farang were also written by Persian-writing residents of India.

The first chapter of the book, titled “The Reconstruction of Iranian Identity in the Narration of History,” addresses the fundamental point that in the 12th and 13th centuries AH / 18th and 19th centuries AD, “cultural encounter and exchange with India and the West… provided the ground for the re-elaboration of [the concepts of] ‘Iran’ and ‘nation’ in the narration of history and the political discourse of Iran.” In this transformation, a new perspective and language for rereading history emerges, as a result of which “Iran-centric historiography” replaces the traditional history-writing of the Islamic world. In this rereading, the “silent and forgotten pasts” of pre-Islamic history rise from the ashes of history with a new splendor and meaning. In this reconstructed past, Keyumars, as the first human and king, takes the place of “His Holiness Adam, the father of mankind.” “Mazdak becomes the theorist of freedom and equality,” Kaveh the Blacksmith the standard-bearer of the national movement, and Anushirvan a “justice-nurturing” and “constitutionalist” king (p. 9). Thus, under the influence of the modern political concept of the nation that came from Europe, a national history is fabricated and elaborated, which is the mirror of the worldly political consciousness of the modern “enlightened” individual and their understanding of their “Iranian” identity. One of the research themes of this book is demonstrating the role of the “Neo-Zoroastrian” sect of Azar Kayvan in the fabrication and elaboration of a legendary pre-Islamic history for Iran and a forged holy book in Persian, whose publication in the 19th century played a significant part in nurturing the new view of ancient Iran and giving rise to the Persian purist writing movement.

In the course of the formation of modern historical consciousness, which is the breeding ground for modern Iranian nationalism, Tavakoli shows how the traditional historiography that began with the fall of Adam and whose task was the description of minor events and the comings and goings of dynasties and kings, and which always saw behind events the eternal destiny and divine will as the mastermind of affairs, transforms into an Iran-centric history. It is in this way that the history of the “Iranian nation” emerges, with a newly defined historical and geographical time and space outside of mythological time and space, in a worldly time and space. The political and military events narrated in traditional historiography are placed within this history and, as events of national history, find a new place and meaning anew within its text.

Indigenous Modernity encompasses the developmental course of modern national historical consciousness up to the dawn of the Constitutional Revolution, and among its subtly analytical discussions is the transformation of the land of “Iran”—with its geographical boundaries determined through the demarcation of the country’s borders with neighboring countries—into the “Motherland” and “Maternal Homeland,” and the transformation of the king into the “Father of the Nation.” In this way, the three enduring concepts of country, state, and nation take shape, which must encompass one another within the single national history, in an organic relationship. But the heart-wrenching part of the story is where the “enlightened” consciousness, which thus opens its eyes to its new, self-made world, modeled on “the West” and “Europe,” finds itself facing a ruined, decaying world captive to the oppression, injustice, and corruption of the king and his apparatus, with a populace afflicted by superstition, abject, and helpless; a world that is a terrifying distance from the Western model of the ideal world. Consequently, its enlightened historical destiny draws it to contemplate history in order to seek within it the source of all this misery and helplessness. For henceforth, the cause of all events must be sought in history, and it is history that becomes the creator of destiny in place of God.

Newspaper-writing physicians, in the absence of modern sociologists and philosophers, enter the arena to diagnose the “illness.” Tavakoli, by tracing their medical metaphors, has ably followed the manner of understanding the illness of the “motherland” among the enlightened thinkers of the early Constitutional era. Among these diagnoses, which in later periods played a very significant role in shaping the notions of Iranian nationalism, is the emphasis on foreign invasions, from Alexander to the Arabs and the Mongols. From this perspective, it is these invasions that have transformed a great and glorious nation into a wretched and miserable one. In this context, the Arab invasion, of course, plays a central role. For by converting the native religion, the “Good Religion” (Din-e Behi), to an alien faith, it tramples the authentic and magnificent culture of ancient Iran and replaces it with a wretched and “Arab-struck” culture. This part of the book, too, with the testimonies it brings from the writers of that era, is among its very fine and useful sections. Through it, we can trace the formation of the psychological knots of our Third-World intellectualism and the meaning of its frustrated flounderings in later periods up to the present day, and see the callusing of resentful complexes in our psyche.

One of the innovative parts of this research is its treatment of the image of woman in this process of the metamorphosis of historical consciousness. The essential aspect of this comparison is the assessment of the condition of the Iranian woman and the European woman in travelogues. In these encounters, we come across two entirely antithetical viewpoints. One is the modernist view, which praises the unveiledness, freedom, and cultivation of the European woman. This view, based on this observation, considers the education of women and their liberation from the slavery that traditional culture imposes upon them as one of the necessary prerequisites for modernity in Iran. The other view is the Eastern, populist gaze, which sees nothing in the free behavior and conduct of the European woman but corruption, whoredom, and moral decay. The importance of women’s freedom from domestic imprisonment and from inside the “sack” (javal), as Dehkhoda put it, is one of the crucial struggles of the Constitutional era. Tavakoli, with her Foucauldian-feminist perspective, has magnified and illuminated this part of the story, which, again, as far as I know, other historians have not yet addressed with such precision and insight.

What is missing in this research is the demonstration of those power relations that make such a metamorphosis in “our” view of ourselves and in all the political, cultural, economic, and social structures of an “Eastern” society inevitable. For thereafter, our gaze fell upon a new world; upon “Farang” (Europe) and modernity and its new, unparalleled power resulting from the Industrial Revolution. This reflexive gaze, insofar as it turns back upon “us,” places “us” under its evaluating reflection. This reflexive gaze is what, with its reflected light, brings about “enlightenment” (monavvar-ol-fekri) and its historical thinking and historical duties. And it places “modernity” (tajaddod) on its agenda. It is under the pressure of the reshaping forces of modernity that the collapse of all the structures and institutions of the “Eastern” worlds begins, and their languages commence a new metamorphosis. For they must gradually bear the burden of new concepts and meanings that were previously absent. These meanings and concepts then overflow torrentially from that side. Under their pressure, a new galaxy of concepts and meanings opens the horizon of a new world through language. With the emergence of this new horizon, the turning away from the age-old horizon of the “traditional” world begins, and everything finds new meaning and interpretation anew within this new horizon.

The great benefit of this book for me lies in its exploration of the genealogy of our intellectualism, which is highly useful for our self-awareness as Iranian intellectuals regarding our self-fashioned identity. I have benefited from this book and, for my part, am grateful to its author. This book is, rightly, an introduction to the study of the history of our intellectualism in later eras, which encompasses three periods of historical rupture in which other views and concepts come to dominate the space of intellectual mentality. First, the era of Reza Shah until Shahrivar 1320 (September 1941); second, from Shahrivar 1320 to the coup of 28 Mordad (August 19, 1953); and third, from the coup to the Islamic Revolution. Each of these periods has characteristics that deserve to be pursued with the same style and method of Tavakoli's reading. Books of this kind, in which the author is more or less conscious of their own presuppositions and has chosen a measured method, are rare among “us.” The author's Persian prose is also clear, fluent, and unknotted, and not devoid of tasteful experimentation in word-coinage and word-choice.

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The Genealogy of Our Intellectualism by Dariush Ashouri

A Review of the Book “Native Modernity and Rethinking History”

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