RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “average Iranian, though he may sympathize with the Palestinians, cannot identify with the Arabs, whom he regards as an ancestral foe,” Iranian expatriate author Amir Taheri has written. As this occasional series has previously explored, such national historical memories underline Iran’s conflicted relationship with Arabs and the Islamic faith that their past imperialism imposed upon Iran and its ancient heritage.

“The early Islamic conquerors of the seventh century spread Islam and the Arabic language throughout the Persian Empire and attempted a wholesale replacement of the indigenous culture,” Middle East analyst Sarah Katz has noted. Iran scholars have observed that as the

conquest of most of Iran turned out to be permanent, Islam eventually spread among Iranians, and Arabic became the language of religion, literature, and science in Iran. In this respect the Muslim Arab conquest marks a major turning point in the history of Iran.

“Over time, most of the country’s population converted to Islam, but Persia’s historical and cultural legacy proved resilient,” Katz has noted, as at the aptly named Persians are not Arabs website. It has boasted that “Persians actually pride themselves that they fought to remain as Persians, not Arabs,” and “did everything to maintain their language when Egypt and other countries from north of Africa started to speak Arabic.” Iranian-American Amil Imani has concurred: “Unlike the Persians, the Egyptians became completely Arabized, and have little or no nostalgia for their ancient past. Islam has dominated the Egyptians’ lives.”

In contrast, “if you by accident call a Persian an Arab, there won’t be a good scene,” Imani has explained. “If you call the Iranian people ‘Arabs,’ it will most certainly annoy them,” agreed Persians are not Arabs. “Iranians are proud of their glorious ancestry, nationality and culture and are very touchy on this subject! This may have been amplified since Persians and Arabs have been rivals throughout the history.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Iran analyst Michael Rubin has similarly stated:

Perhaps the only thing longer than Iran’s animosity toward the United States is its hatred of Saudi Arabia. The two are divided not only by the Persian Gulf, but also by a Shiite-Sunni sectarian split and a Persian-Arab divide that goes back centuries.

“Iranians remain nationalistic,” former Financial Times reporter Gareth Smyth has noted, based on his decades covering Iran and the Middle East. Iranians “effortlessly juggle the lunar Islamic calendar and a solar Iranian calendar, marking the festivals of both” and “commonly look down on Arabs, with some of those most critical of the country’s clerics resenting them as Arabs.” Iranian-Canadian political analyst Shahir Shahidsaless has likewise noted that

Iranian nationalists glorify Iran’s pre-Islamic civilisation and reject an Islamic system, though not necessarily Islam. They strongly feel that Iranians were humiliated as a result of the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran, which led to the collapse of the Iranian Sassanid Empire in the 7th Century.

Katz has additionally observed that “nostalgia for the Persian Empire’s pre-Islamic past legacy is steadily rising, especially among Iranian exiles and their children in the United States.” Some “call for a complete return to the Persian language as it existed before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors.” For Iranian “radical nationalists, anti-Arab sentiments are particularly intense,” Shahidsaless has observed.

Perhaps Shahidsaless had Imani in mind, as the latter has written that Iranians “consider Islam responsible for 1400 years of atrocities committed against the Iranian people and much of the Islamic world.” He recalled his high school history teacher in Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew Iran’s nationalist monarchy. He “explicitly said that the Islamic creed was imposed on an enlightened, tolerant and free Iranian people at the point of the sword.”

“Most Iranians consider Islam an invader,” Imani has concluded, brought by “savages hailing from the Arabian Peninsula.” They followed “promises of booty and women in this world and glorious eternal sensual rewards in the promised paradise of Allah in the next.” He has elaborated:

Originally, many Iranians and other minorities who lived in Iran were forced to accept Islam to save their lives from the Arab butchers, but deep within their hearts, they never surrendered to the Bedouin Arab culture. That period became the defining moment of 1400 years of resentment Persians kept in their hearts.

Imani has particularly critiqued claims of a medieval “Islamic Golden Age” in areas such as the arts. This

is like saying a group of savages storming into the world’s largest libraries, murdering all the librarians and then claimed to have written all the books there, gives credit to this myth. Islam’s much-vaunted ‘Golden Age’ was in fact just the twilight of conquered pre-Islamic cultures.

Perhaps Islam’s most vivid impressions for Imani have been the Shiite Ashura ceremonies that mark during the Islamic calendar’s first month (Muharram) the 680 Battle of Karbala in modern Iraq. Some devout Shiites on Ashura publicly perform flagellations and bodily cuttings to commemorate the death ofHusayn ibn Ali, Shiite Islam’s third imam, at the hands of Sunni Muslims under Umayyad Caliph Yazid I in an intra-Muslim power struggle. “During my teens in Iran, I called Muharram the month of terror. For two days, I used to lock myself in the basement of the house to read my books or listen to my favorite music. I simply could not witness the savagery and ritual barbarism of Ashura,” Imani has recalled.

Karbala’s memory leaves Imani cold, as “Ashura was a day when two Arab terrorists went to war together over power” in “infighting” among “two enemies of Persians.” While before 1979 Iran’s ruling shah “semi-banned” Ashura, thereafter the Islamic Republic revived the observance. Now Iranians “are forced by the mullahs every year to beat themselves for an Arab man who was a killer of Iranian people.”

The Islamic Republic has presented a dramatic cultural caesura to Imani, who “was born into a non-practicing Shiite Muslim family.” In his “younger years in Iran, Islam was out of people’s life” and merely a “very private matter and to some very irrelevant.” Most Iranians “could not read the Quran in Arabic. And even if they did, they could not understand a word of it or its interpretation.”

Amidst this lax piety, Imani remembered a superficially benign, skewed understanding of Islam. “The type of Islam Iranians practiced during the time of the Shah did not even exist at all. It was only a fiction or a fantasy manufactured out of whole cloth.” In Iranian schools, students “were forced to memorize a few non-violent Surah (verses) from the Meccan period when prophet Muhammad’s beliefs and sayings were relatively innocuous.”

Iran’s subsequent Islamic Republic has been far less innocuous, and its bitter experience has only left powerful currents of Iranian nationalism and anti-Arab animus undiminished. Unsurprisingly, Islamic Republic leaders have often felt compelled to mix their theocratic message with discordant Iranian nationalist elements, as a forthcoming article will examine.