Introduction: Iranian or Persian? The religious landscape of Iranian identity

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This book has been a part of my continuing journey to excavate the socio-religious identity of Iran, and in the process to learn a thing or two about my ancestral past. Persia is an ancient land, possessing a long-standing cultural heritage that few others, apart perhaps from the Greeks, Egyptians and Chinese, could boast. Persia's mystique is probably owed to the early Orientalist scholars who set up the picture of the East, in particular Persia, as the exotic other – and especially as the source of all mystery, in the way that Egypt captures the imagination today. This attitude of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, that is, thinking of Persia as the origin of religious ideas, has since been revised, but it is one which regardless lingers in the discourse of contemporary Iranians. Interesting as it may be to entertain such notions, Persia would be better thought of as the land of extraordinary innovations. Possibly much to the dismay of my Iranian readers, Persia did not invent “everything”, but Persians have certainly been among the finest innovators: from empire building, religion, culture and language to architecture, alcohol and astronomy. The centralized geographical location of the land itself lends to the nature of her people.

Iran differs from the Arab nations of the Middle East and should not be lumped together with them. Iran is, in fact, part of an Indo-European heritage, complete with its own distinct language, separate from its Semitic neighbours in the Near East. Sure enough, one of the most remarkable aspects about Iran is that it has retained its unique cultural, and to a degree its religious, identity through many episodes of invasion (Greek, Arab, Turk, Mongol), the most lasting of which has been the Arab (Islamic). And while noticing how Iran’s theocratic regime has received a great deal of negative portrayal through tabloid media, we need reminding that the nation has always had a strained relationship with the UK and US as more recent invasive powers.