IRANIAN NATIONALITY
AND THE PERSIAN LANGUAGE
In this insightful study of Iranian cultural history and national
identity, Shahrokh Meskoob, one of Iran's leading intellectuals,
reviews the roles of three social classes, the courtiers and bureaucratic
officials (ahl-e divan), the religious scholars (ulama), and the
Muslim Gnostics (Sufi poets and writers), in the development and
refinement of the Persian language during the past one thousand
years and gives the reader a fresh perspective on Iranian cultural
heritage and the struggle to forge a distinct national identity.
Dr. Ali Banuazizi's foreword and interview with the author sets
the stage for a fuller appreciation of this invaluable and wide-ranging
contribution to Iranian intellectual history.
Foreword and Interview
with the Author
Translator's Preface
Author's Preface
Iranian Nationality vis-a-vis Language and History
The Government Establishment and Persian Prose
The Muslim Clergy and Persian Prose
Sufis and Persian Prose
Epilogue
What comprises the Iranians' sense of "Iranianness"--that
unique amalgam of shared history, religion(s), language(s), myths,
artistic expression, sentiments, and traditions that has provided
them with an enduring and resilient cultural identity as members
of one of the world's oldest civilizations? How widely--and deeply--is
such an identity shared by the various ethnolinguistic groups
that live within the boundaries of the present Iranian state and
by those in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Caucasus who share
their language and much of their cultural heritage with Iranians?
And how variable has been this identity in the various periods
of Iran's cultural history? While these questions are certainly
not new, they have gained much greater significance with the political
upheavals that followed the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the initial
efforts of the Revolution's clerical leadership to forge a new
cultural identity for Iranians as an "Islamic nation,"
and, more recently, the surge of ethnic assertiveness and conflict
in several of Iran's neighboring states in Central and Southwest
Asia.
Of the various elements that constitute Iran's cultural identity,
four have traditionally been judged the most salient. These include:
(1) the country's pre-Islamic legacy, which took shape over a
period of more than a millennium, from the time of Achaemenians
to the defeat of the last Persian dynasty (the Sasanians) by the
invading Arab armies in the middle of the seventh century; (2)
Islam, or, more specifically, Shi'ism, the religion of over ninety
percent of the country's present-day inhabitants, with an all-encompassing
impact on every facets of Iranian culture and thought; (3) the
more diffuse bonds, fictive or real, established among peoples
who have inhabited roughly the same territory, with the same name,
faced the same enemies, struggled under the same despotic rulers
and conquerors, and otherwise shared the same historical destiny
for over two millennia; and finally (4) the Persian language,
currently the mother tongue of a bare majority of the population,
but long the literary and "national language" in Iran
(as well as in parts of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and parts of
the Indian subcontinent). The relative weight to be given to each
of these, partially overlapping, elements in defining the Iranian
national identity has generated much controversy among the successive
generations of modern intellectuals in Iran, particularly since
the last decades of the nineteenth century when the question of
national identity moved to the center stage of the political discourse.
The focus of the present work by Shahrokh Meskoob, one of Iran's
leading contemporary authors and cultural historians, is on the
last of the above elements--i. e., the Persian language--and its
role in forming and sustaining the Iranian national identity.
The author stresses the fact that following the Arab conquest
of Persia in the seventh century C.E., it took Persians well over
two centuries to recover from their humiliating defeat, a defeat
which entailed not only the crumbling of their political order
and subjugation to foreign rule, but also the imposition of a
new religion and language on them. In the struggle to regain their
cultural identity as a separate people, their most important recourse
was to their pre-Islamic history, as remembered, imagined, and
reconstructed, for the most part, in the mytho-historical narratives,
"books of kings" (the shahnamehs) composed in this period,
of which Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (1010 C. E.) is the preeminent example.
The use of Persian in these and other works gradually established
it as the principal literary language and, as such, the feature
that most distinguished the Iranians from the rest of the Islamic
world. In Meskoob's words, "Only with respect to two things
were we Iranians separate from other Muslims: history and language,
the two factors on which we proceeded to build our own identity
as a people or nation. History was our currency, the provisions
for the way, and our refuge. Language was the foundation, floor,
and refuge for the soul, a stronghold within which we stood"
(p. 13). This reclaiming of cultural identity by the Persians,
it must be emphasized, however, never acquired the character of
an anti-Islamic impulse. Indeed, the acceptance of Persian as
the second language of Islam brought to it a certain measure of
sanctity. The increasing acceptance and use of Persian, especially
in its written form, in the Iranian world as the principal language
for formal communication and literary expression served as one--if
not the key--link among the many peoples that comprised the Iranian
civilization.
The core of Meskoob's book is his assessment, through a careful
review of hundreds of literary, religious, and mystical works
by Persian-speaking authors from the tenth to the end of the nineteenth
century, of the role of three major social groups--the courtiers
and bureaucratic officials, the religious scholars (the ulama),
and the Muslim mystics (the Sufis) in the spread and flourishing
of Persian in the Iranian cultural world. Of the three groups,
he finds the ulama contributed the least to the development of
Persian; the most eminent among them preferred to write in Arabic,
and their use of Persian was mostly for purposes of oral communication
with the masses. The two groups that served as the "guardians"
of the language and helped in its flourishing and further refinement
as a major literary, diplomatic, and administrative language in
Iran and elsewhere were the Muslim Gnostics (the Sufi poets and
writers) and those in the employ of the royal court and state-bureaucratic
apparatus (ahl-e divan).
It is precisely this emphasis on the role of particular social
groups in the development of the Persian language and literature
that sets Meskoob's analysis apart from the more conventional
approaches to Persian literary history as pursued, for example,
in the works of Edward G. Browne, Jan Rypka, and Zabihollah Safa.
Where the latter authors followed a chronological approach to
the development of Persian literature in relation to its general
historical and cultural contexts, Meskoob seeks to show how the
particular sociocultural positions held by the aforementioned
groups helped determine the nature and extent of their respective
contributions to the development of the Persian language. His
study, therefore, offers an excellent example of a sociologically
sensitive analysis of Iranian cultural history and identity.
Meskoob's examination of the role of the Persian language in the
formation and continuity of Iranian identity ends with the Constitutional
Movement of 1905-11. He maintains that with the political and
social changes that took place in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, and with Persia's increasing contact with the West, the
three social groups on which his analysis is focused lost their
significance as the principal guardians, practitioners, and promoters
of the Persian language. In all these capacities they were gradually
replaced by a new social group in the Iranian society, i.e., a
secular intelligentsia consisting of journalists, writers, poets,
etc. An analysis of their role vis-a-vis the Persian language,
and in relation to the masses and the state, as the author rightly
points out, lies beyond the scope of the present work.
Aside from his deep knowledge of cultural history, what the author
brings to his survey of the evolution of the Persian language
and its relation to the Iranian national identity are his insights
and skills as one of Iran's foremost literary critics. His own
masterful use of the Persian language, his interpretive works
on Persia's most celebrated classical poets (Ferdowsi and Hafez),
and numerous other translations, literary and philosophical essays,
and short stories give special authority to his views on what
is undoubtedly one of the most difficult problems in Iranian intellectual
history.* We are also very fortunate to have had Michael Hillmann,
one of the leading scholars of Persian literature in United States,
translate this work into English with extensive notations that
clearly enhance its value and usefulness to the English reader.
The following interview , part of a more wide ranging series
of interviews, was conducted on March 25, 1989, with Shahrokh
Meskoob in Boston. It is part of a more wide-ranging sseries of
interviews It was translated from the Persian and slightly edited
by Ali Banuazizi.
Ali Banuazizi: Let me begin by asking you about the circumstances
under which the lectures upon which this book is based were given,
and your state of mind at that time.
Shahrokh Meskoob: I gave these talks, spread over ten or
so sessions, in the late spring and early summer of 1981, a little
over two years after the revolution. The state of mind of the
Iranian exile community living in Paris at that time is not difficult
to imagine. Many of the intellectuals who had left Iran during
or shortly after the revolution were experiencing a sense of disorientation
and shock. They were much more inclined in those days to get together
and to talk about what had happened to them and to their country.
I was asked to participate in a lecture series that had included
talks by Nader Naderpour on Iran's major classical poets and by
Mohammed Ja'far Mahjoub on Iranian folk literature The lectures
were given at the Pierre Brosselette School in Paris, where the
Iranian poet Yadollah Roya'i had organized Persian-language classes
for elementary and secondary school students. (With the influx
of thousands of families from Iran, Persian had been recognized
as a second language by the French educational authorities. )
My lectures were third in this series, and I had been asked to
discuss topics dealing with language and literature. As the lectures
progressed, however, certain ideas nascent in my mind began to
crystallize and come to focus. My thinking gradually shifted from
specific literary issues to the problem of the Iranian national
identity and the role played by Persian history and language in
its formation during the third to the fifth Islamic centuries
[ninth to eleventh centuries C. E.]. I had initially prepared
some notes for what I thought would be a series of no more than
two or three lectures, but it quickly became apparent that the
topic was too complex to be dealt with so briefly. I expanded
the talks, but at the time I had no intention of having them appear
in print. However, after seeing the transcripts, I thought that
it might be worthwhile to do so, and so I went over the transcripts,
added a few notes, rewrote a few pages, and had them published
in Paris in 1982.
Ali Banuazizi: Do you think that your own reaction to the
Iranian revolution and your decision to leave the country and
to live in exile in France had much of an impact on the tone and
the content of the lectures--the whole emphasis on the theme of
identity, for example?
Shahrokh Meskoob: The concern with the question of identity
did not begin with my leaving Iran. From the time that I was in
the seventh or the eighth grade, I developed a strong interest
in Persian classical literature. In fact, I would say that increasingly
Persian poetry and prose, and later, the Shahnameh, became the
very cornerstones of my thinking and sense of personal identity.
After the 1979 revolution and the many attacks on Persian language,
literature, and, in particular, on Ferdowsi by several prominent
members of the new regime, my concern with the problem of cultural
identity became much more than a personal preoccupation. What
was being attacked, I felt, was something that belonged to an
entire society. Our whole sense of identity as a people and a
nation, I thought, was in jeopardy. I don't have that fear anymore.
In Paris, I think the intellectual aspects of the problem began
to interest me more. In other words, after the emotional pain
and turmoil that I had experienced in Iran, I could take some
distance from the problem and reflect on it more objectively.
Perhaps this would not have happened if I had remained in Iran.
Ali Banuazizi: It seems that your experience of exile was
quite different, then, from that of people like the late Gholamhossein
Sa'edi, who was also very much concerned with the fate of culture
in Iran after the revolution. For him, as you know, life in exile
was filled with frustration and anguish.
Shahrokh Meskoob: I think our problems were quite different.
I never experienced the feeling of estrangement in Paris that
he did. In Iran, a good deal of my interest and attention was
focused on the West. After coming to Europe, however, I became
more preoccupied with Iran--in a sense, I have "lived"
much more in Iran since leaving it than I did when I was there.
But all this has been more at the intellectual rather than the
emotional level.
Ali Banuazizi: As I recall, you were in fact among the
small minority of intellectuals in Iran who, in the years leading
to the revolution, did not participate in the fashionable gharb-setizi
movement--i.e., the ideological crusade against the West and its
culture that was spearheaded by Al-e Ahmad, Shari'ati, and Naraqi,
among others.
Shahrokh Meskoob: No, in fact, at about the time that that
movement was at its height I was struggling with Luckacs'sTheory
of the Novel. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding the
book the first time I read it. It was the first book that I began
to reread the moment I finished it; even after the second reading
I could only understand bits and pieces of it because I was not
familiar with some of the basic elements of his argument. But
each passage that I understood opened a new window, revealed a
new literary insight for me.
With regard to the anti-Western climate of those prerevolutionary
days, I recall a meeting at the Plan Organization with the Undersecretary
for Planning, the Minister of Culture and the Arts (one of the
"official" promoters of the campaign against the West),
the head of the High Council on Culture and the Arts, and several
others. I was attending the meeting as a staff member of the Cultural
Planning Bureau of the Plan Organization. After listening to their
many laments and attacks on the ills of the West, I could no longer
contain myself and said, "I think we Iranians are, on the
whole, culturally lazy. Although we have had dealings with the
Greeks for over 2,700 years, we still don't have a good translation
of Aristotle, one the main pillars of Western thought. The West
is not only pornographic films, sex, violence, and money"--as
these were the things that they were mostly criticizing. "These
are only the negative aspects of Western culture. It is also Dante,
Cervantes, Goethe--if these, too, are the West, then I long to
be 'Westoxified.'" I said, "We repeat the criticisms
that they themselves make of their own culture and throw it back
at them without bothering to understand the essence of Western
culture." Given the predominance of the Western culture in
our world today, I believe we have no choice but to learn as much
as we can about the West and its achievements. No, I did not take
part in the anti-Western crusade of those days, and I never considered
it to be something that one could take pride in.
Ali Banuazizi: You made the point in passing that the anxiety
that you had felt about the new Islamic regime's position vis-à-vis
Iranian culture has dissipated, and that you are no longer concerned
with such a threat. What was that anxiety based on in the first
place?
Shahrokh Meskoob: In the months immediately after the revolution,
there was a concerted effort on the part of many within the new
regime to denigrate alll aspect of the pre-Islamic Iranian history
and culture, to cast the history of the Islamic period as nothing
more than a history of corrupt [taghuti] kings and rulers (except
for Karim Khan Zand), to reject all that had beenb achieved under
the Pahlavis by way of modernization , to attack such unifying
national symbols as the celebrations of No-Ruz and Charshanbeh-Suri
as pagan--all in an attempt to "return" history to its
only acceptable beginning, i. e., the just rule of Imam Ali in
the mid-seventh century. There were attacks even on the Persian
language itself.
Ali Banuazizi: Whom do you have in mind?
Shahrokh Meskoob: I remember, for example, that after a
trip to the Persian Gulf islands and the Arab Emirates, Sadeq
Khalkhali had commented in an interview in Ahvaz that these were
all Islamic territories, and we should not insist on calling them
the Persian this or that; we are all Moslems and should not insist
that these places necessarily belong to Iran. The Persian Gulf
could just as well be called the Islamic Gulf. They started to
place a great deal of emphasis on Arabic as the most significant
language after Persian, suggesting, among other things, that Arabic
should become Iran's diplomatic language. Today, Arabic simply
does not have the wide usage and applicability of English or any
of the other Western languages. We cannot acquire new scientific
and technical knowledge through Arabic. This is not to deny that
for understanding our own culture, Arabic is a tremendously important
language. But for purposes of comprehending today's world, Arabic
is not a particularly effective tool.
In the first year or two after the revolution, they were also
directing some of their attacks on Ferdowsi. They changed the
name of Ferdowsi University in Mashhad and removed copies of the
Shahnameh from many bookstore shelves--the latter representing,
in all likelihood, an act of self-censorship by the store owners
and not a deliberate government policy. At times, they acted as
if Ferdowsi were their enemy. But somehow I had the confidence
that Ferdowsi would not be defeated and would ultimately impose
himself on them. All in all, it appears that the attempts to slight
the Iranian national identity by attacking the country's ancient
historic traditions and the Persian language failed totally and
have now been largely abandoned--or at least moderated considerably.
In some ways, this was a repeat of what happened under the Safavids--many
examples of which I have given in the book.
Ali Banuazizi: Some people think that the symbolic attacks
by officials and spokesmen of the postrevolutionary regime to
which you are referring were not necessarily anti-"Iranian."
Rather, in derogating those symbols that you have described as
elements of our national identity, they were attempting to champion
their cause of "Islamic universalism" against what they
would characterize as "nationalistic sentiments." Otherwise,
they, too, must have realized, particularly after the Iraqi invasion
of 1980, that Iran's territorial integrity and political survival
as a nation are very closely tied to such unifying symbols as
the Persian language and our long-standing cultural traditions,
be they religious or secular.
Shahrokh Meskoob: If true, this would demonstrate further
that the hold of the Iranian culture is even stronger than I had
thought. What I must make clear is that I am not necessarily passing
a value judgment in favor of the totality of the Iranian culture.
Certainly, I am not saying that solely because many of its features
have survived for centuries, it is good and should therefore be
preserved. Indeed, I think that its very continuity--agedness,
if you will--poses certain problems and limitations for our society.
Ali Banuazizi: Let me turn to a different question. Your
emphasis on the role of Persian as the main pillar of Iranian
national identity may be interpreted negatively, or indeed offend,
the non-Persian speaking minorities in Iran. I realize that this
is not the focus of your work, but I would still like to know
your views on this issue.
Shahrokh Meskoob: This is not an area about which I feel
qualified to comment. Towards the end of the book, I have pointed
out that today the question of Iranian nationality has assumed
quite a different meaning. And the whole question of an Iranian
national identity--due to such factors as increased mass communications,
international contacts, and the positions of outside powers--has
become ever more intertwined with what goes on outside of Iran.
We can no longer analyze the question of Iranian national identity
from the perspective of language and history alone, as I have
done in the book. It is something entirely different today.
Ali Banuazizi: Does that mean that, in your judgment, the
Iranian national identity is based less on the Persian language
today than during the historical periods that you discuss in the
book?
Shahrokh Meskoob: What I meant to say is that, today, what
we have been calling the Iranian national identity--whether it
be based on the Persian language, history, religion, or perhaps
some combination of the three--is profoundly influenced by what
goes on outside of Iran, and therefore, our analysis of it should
take full cognizance of that fact. The question of the role of
language or languages, too, could only be understood within such
a context. The adoption of Turkish, Kurdish, or Baluch as provincial
languages, for example, would have significant ramifications,
not only for interethnic relations within Iran, but also for Iran's
relationship with its neighbors. The whole problem has become
intensely politicized, and it is only within a political framework
that it can be analyzed meaningfully.
One thing that I am certain of is that promoting the Persian language
should certainly not mean suffocating or repressing Turkish or
Kurdish--and I am referring to Turkish and Kurdish here because
they are the two most widely used languages after Persian in Iran
today. If Turkish, for example, is part of the identity of an
Azerbaijani, who also considers himself to be an Iranian--as indeed
he is-- the use of Persian as the official language should in
no way threaten or negate his cultural identity. The two aspects
of his identity should be allowed to coexist and flourish. But
neither would it make sense to adopt a policy under which Turkish,
Kurdish, or Baluch effectively becomes the sole language of communication
in its respective region of the country. The ideal state of affairs,
I believe, is one in which all these languages could exist and
thrive alongside each other, each in its area of concentration
and in accordance with its own capabilities, but with Persian
continuing as the common language of communication among all Iranian
ethnic groups.
Ali Banuazizi: I take it, then, that you would not favor
a "multilingual" language policy for Iran?
Shahrokh Meskoob: I think we would waste a great deal of
energy and resources if we were to adopt such a policy. Persian
has performed the role of a common, official, or literary language
in Iran and elsewhere for well over a thousand years. There is
every reason for us to think of it as an essential part of our
national identity, both in its historical development and present
actuality.
Shahrokh Meskoob was born in Babol on the Caspian coast in
1925. His major published works include translations of Sophocles'
Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath; he has
also written Moqaddame-'i bar Rostam va Esfandiar [a study of
the ethics of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh]; Soug-e Siavosh [a study of
the myth of martyrdom and resurrection in the Shahnameh]; and
Dar kuy-e dust [an interpretive study of Hafez's views on man,
nature, love, and ethics]. The Persian edition of the present
work was first published in Paris under the title of Melliyat
va zaban. Since the 1979 revolution Shahrokh Meskoob has been
living and working in Paris.
Ali Banuazizi was born in Tehran and currently teaches social
psychology and modern Iranian history at Boston College. He served
as editor of the journal Iranian Studies from 1968-1982, and is
the author of a number of works on contemporary Iranian society
and politics. Send email
to Ali Banuazizi.
Michael Hillmann is a Preofessor of Persian at the Univeristy
of Texas at Austin. He is one of the leading American authorities
on Persian literature and the author and editor of more than a
dozen books as well as numerous scholarly articles. Send
email to Michael Hillmann