In Making History in Iran, Farzin Vejdani pays a long overdue debt owed by academics studying Iran to the historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men and women who wrote history, composed textbooks, and trained teachers. Vejdani describes their contributions and provides a forum for reflecting on the nature of Iranian historiography in the context of the broader, interconnected world.
Vejdani's work is testimony to the emergence of a generation of Iranian scholars, intellectuals, and artists born after the 1979 revolution. Whether in exile or in Iran, they are focused on Iran's developments and engaged in making sense of their own destiny, and that of their country, in a rapidly changing world. Typical of a larger cultural trend in post-1979 Iran, they seek to universalize and internationalize Iran's historical experiences. Vejdani's accounts of earlier Iranian historians reveal that Iran's literary class has a long history of interaction with the wider world. The work of Vejdani and others of his generation signals that, if anything, this interaction is intensifying.
Through his vast archival research Vejdani traces how cultural and political reforms ranging from the introduction of printing houses to the fall of the Qajar dynasty affected the historical writings of Iranians. He depicts how Iranian history moved from court chronicles to a history centered on people, one that used textbooks to advocate for nationhood and citizenship. Central to his discourse, though not fully articulated, is the impact of the Constitutional Revolution on Iranian society and historiography. Despite the thoroughness of his work, Vejdani does not discuss the role of the ulama and religious thinkers in creating Iranian identity and history.
Vejdani questions older accounts that explain Iranian nationalism through “the modernization paradigm,” “as ‘a derivative discourse’ of European Orientalism,” or “a series of narratives emerging out of a broader Indo-Iranian and Persianate world” (p. 5). Instead, he explains Iranian nationalism through the transformation of the production of history writing, the system of education, and the introduction of print culture. He highlights the role of individual historians whose narrations were byproducts of internal, regional, and global interactions of different segments of state and society.
In Iran as elsewhere, patronage and the political environment had an impact on the production of history. By creating the Translation and Publication Bureaus in the mid-nineteenth century, the Qajar court made patronage more systematic while still employing the tradition of biographical writing. The formation of schools, the introduction of printing houses, and the Constitutional Revolution “gave way not only to independent publishers but also to history teachers, principals, and pedagogues invested in an alternative vision of history as a ‘usable past’” (33). It is this interaction that most interests Vejdani.
The Qajar's reforms and the Constitutional Revolution are intrinsically related. The divanis, Persian-speaking bureaucrats, provided the political framework for institutional change, while intellectuals supplied the vocabulary. Vejdani writes, “‘The people’ and ‘the nation’ became the main subjects of history in stark contrast to previous court histories” (57).
When Riza Khan came to power in 1925, he was both the statist champion of the Constitutional Revolution and the gravedigger for its democratic aspirations. In 1911, the Iranian Parliament had approved laws establishing a modern school system. Although Riza Shah extended such reforms, he gave them a statist and militaristic twist. Under him, textbooks were standardized, though their content changed dramatically from the constitutional period. “Historians glorified the head of this army, Riza Shah, as the savior of a homogenous and singular nation,” Vejdani writes, but “often rode roughshod over the diversity of the rest of the population” (95).
Though women were absent in official histories, with the emergence of printing houses they wrote their own “counterhegemonic historical narratives,” creating genealogies for feminist agendas in the late 1910's and early 1920's.” (97). Although Riza Shah partially co-opted the women's movement, these historical narratives continued to have an impact and the women's movement rejuvenated after his abdication.
Riza Shah coerced many people into the modern state of Iran, a process echoed in the historical writings of the period. Vejdani builds on Ervand Abrahamian's view of writings of Kavravi as “integrative” historiography. This historiography defines diversity in culture among the inhabitants of the Iranian Plateau in terms of how the centralized power understood being Iranian. Discourse on any local or regional history was narrated as a part of a larger national history. The shading of these narratives differed by authors and their cultural backgrounds, yet they all belonged to the same production, “an unbroken part of genealogy for the nation” (144).
Poetry is Iran's quintessential art, an idiomatic expression of its memory and history, and the Persian language has been the core character of Iranian-ness. Hence, in the 1920s a “Persian Republic of Letters” emerged, “a community of scholars and writers not bound by the constraints of territories” (147). Their writings were interactive and authentic, subservient and subversive. Vejdani notes that Iranian literary historians focused on “writers who embodied an Iranian national spirit in time of chaos and transition” (166).
Vejdani deftly describes the story of the writers who made Iran's history appear unique, but this story and Iranian historiography belong to the larger interconnected world. Unearthing the universal ideas beneath the particulars, expanding and subverting the meaning of universalism, should be considered the main task of all critical academics and intellectuals.
