Khāled stood motionless as the soldiers surrounded him. All of his friends had run away but he stood alone, a rock still held in his hand. Only six years old, he showed no sign of fear. This only angered the soldiers more. They leveled their rifles at him. “Who taught you to throw stones at us?” one shouted. “If you don't tell us, we will kill you! There are no cameras here! No one will know that you're dead!” Khāled relented. “My brother, my brother Mohammad.”
The soldiers rushed to Khāled's home, certain that they were about to arrest a major leader of the rebellion. Khāled's parents opened the door. The soldiers demanded to see Mohammad. “We will not return your other son until you bring him!” they shouted angrily. “Bring him now!” A smile passed over the father's face. He went inside and returned with a small child. “Here is Mohammad,” he said. “He is three years old.” The soldiers were stunned, unable to speak.
In the confusion, Khāled broke free from his captors. He ran to his brother and held him close. The story took a gruesome turn: “This time you come with us and strike them with rocks too. Don't be scared! Alright?” Mohammad nodded his head and said: “I too will come so that I can hit them with rocks.” At that moment, the Israeli officer slammed the butt of his rifle into Mohammad's head and warm blood spilled onto Khāled's hands (Fig. 1).Footnote 1
FIGURE 1. “The Palestinian Teacher,” Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/2007.
“The Palestinian Teacher” appeared halfway through the third-grade primer, in a corner of an Islamic Republic primary school curriculum, carefully gauged to solicit outrage from its young audience. With its stark depiction of malice highlighted by the soldiers’ almost cartoonish cruelty, the lesson traced for its readers a world of manifest evil in which the injustices suffered by the dispossessed, even by children such as the irrepressible Khāled and Mohammad, went unredeemed. A call to arms, Mohammad's martyrdom prefigured the courage expected of Iran's “children of the revolution” even as it darkly warned them of the fate that awaited those who would lose their land.
Their task was to bear witness to crimes unseen or ignored by much of the rest of the world. Iran after 1979 had proclaimed itself advocate and agent for the rescue and revival of the oppressed of the world, above all the community of believers, or ummat al-Islām. As such, the boundaries of Iran's imagined community extended in the post-1979 era beyond the borders of the traditional “Guarded Domains of Iran” to include its Arab and Muslim neighbors, now conceived as both participants and beneficiaries of the Islamic Revolution.Footnote 2
This new internationalist aspiration was in reality the latest iteration of an older nationalist project of Irāniyat, fostered by the late Qajar and Pahlavi states primarily in the early twentieth century and rooted in the distant traumas of the nineteenth century.Footnote 3 In the new reverie on what it meant to be “truly” Iranian, the plight of the forlorn Arab served as symbol and reminder of the indispensability of preserving Iran's sovereignty against foreign encroachment; the dismemberment of Lebanon and Palestine in the twentieth century was less an inspiration for global struggle than it was a contemporary reminder of the catastrophes of Golestan (1813) and Turkmenchai (1828), two early nineteenth-century Perso-Russian treaties that resulted in significant territorial losses for Qajar Iran in the Caucasus.Footnote 4
Drawing upon three decades of postrevolutionary textbooks, this article traces the development of the Arab Muslim as a recurring character in the early elementary curriculum of the Islamic Republic, set against the historical context of Iranian modernization and state formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote 5 Whereas the Pahlavi state had portrayed the Arab as an abject figure incapable of redemption other than by the grace and intervention of Iranian civilization and culture, he was rendered merely pitiful by the Islamic educational system.Footnote 6 Sympathy for the Arab by the postrevolutionary state in its primary school materials included a rebuke and an affirmation: Look at what has happened to the Arabs who were not able to defend their homes and their homeland, and look at what has not happened to us.Footnote 7
As he has throughout Iran's modern history, the imagined Arab remains an object in constant need of rescue, stripped of any meaningful agency or subjectivity. The Islamic Republic of Iran's innovation was to place him within a narrative of national failure. Iran's strident advocacy on behalf of the region's dispossessed reveals itself to be ultimately inseparable from the Arab's inability to protect himself, or from Iran's deep-seated desire to demonstrate its superiority over its neighbors, a compensation for its own weakness in the world.Footnote 8
Set against Arab suffering and defeat in the Islamic Republic's elementary textbooks are the accomplishments of American scientists and inventors who feature prominently in the postrevolutionary curriculum as sources of emulation for young readers. Star turns from Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville and Wilbur Wright invite a reconsideration of the role of the foreign Other in the construction of Iranian national identity, notably the expectation that the dispossessed constitute natural allies in Iran's ceaseless struggle against “the West.”Footnote 9
More than just primers, the Persian textbooks presented in this article provide young students with their first exposure to the ideology of the revolution and the official values of the Islamic Republic. These textbooks matter to the field because they contain what Mandana E. Limbert refers to as official “wish images,” idealized projections manufactured by elites of the perfect (and obedient) members of society against which daily life can be measured.Footnote 10
Unique among media in Iran, textbooks come with a guaranteed readership, making them an important source for understanding the shaping of Iranian historical consciousness among an increasingly literate population.Footnote 11 Textbooks more broadly serve as markers of Iran's participation in a universal modernity, a participation that takes place within the framework of a distinctive Iranian culture. By reproducing the most advanced and modern knowledge in the standardized format of a national curriculum, textbooks act as an instrument of indigenization and mediation “between the parochialism of national identity and the universalism of modern knowledge.”Footnote 12
The organization of a coherent and consistent ideological message in textbooks after 1979 has been haphazard, at best.Footnote 13 Immediately following the revolution, and acting on their own initiative, several groups within the nascent regime began to till the pedagogical soil in which a new school system could be sown. Their self-assigned task was to produce the goals and philosophy suitable for an Islamic education. With the Ministry of Education in disarray, these early efforts were confined to the Office of Investigations housed in the Organization for Educational Research and Planning, or OERP. OERP has deputy ministerial status in the Ministry of Education and is responsible for preparing, producing, and distributing textbooks. Although the head of the department is a political appointee, OERP has a reputation for being one of the more technocratic-minded and professional elements of the educational structure in Iran.
Work in the Office of Investigations stopped altogether with the absorption of groups into the newly resurrected Supreme Council of Education (SCE). The SCE was restored in early 1980 under the auspices of the governing Revolutionary Council after a nearly three-year hiatus.Footnote 14 As an agency, the SCE fuses both legislative and executive functions. Its mandate is to devise the goals and curriculum appropriate for an Islamic society, as well as to implement educational policy. Importantly, as the ultimate legislative authority over matters of education, the SCE has the final word on the annual goals of the curriculum, although since 1984 any new major policy initiatives mounted by the SCE must first be approved by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, or SCCR.
Although this article focuses primarily on the Arab Other in the context of contemporary Iran, it points to future research on depictions of the Persianate in national settings other than Iran. If the Arab has an outsized presence in the curriculum of a purportedly post-nationalist, post-Persianate Islamic Republic, then what becomes of him when his story is told by other Persian speakers—the Tajik, the Afghan, the Uzbek—whose voices are notably absent in the Iranian curriculum? How do these countries reckon with their own Persianate pasts and how do they come to terms with the Iranian, whose contemporary descendants lay exclusive claim to the Persianate world? The question of who gets to be the inheritor of Persianate legacies ultimately rests on a fallacy.Footnote 15 As Fani argues elsewhere, students of Iranian and Persianate studies would do well to step back and view nationalist projects transregionally—not to adjudicate which one is more historically authentic, but to critique the epistemic circle within which they all stand, whether it be in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.Footnote 16
The Immemorial Iran
The embrace of Iranian chauvinism is hardly to be expected from a curriculum and revolution whose leaders routinely, and quite loudly, condemn nationalism as conspiracy, an instrument of imperial rule designed to sow division within the developing world. The purpose of Islamic schooling is neither patriotism nor the preservation of sovereign borders but preparation of the public for the defense of the ummah. The nation–state, at best, plays a subordinate role in what is understood to be an endless struggle against oppression and injustice.Footnote 17 For stalwarts like the following high school principal interviewed in Tehran in 2008 by the sociologist Mohammad Rezaei, the denial of nationalist projects constitutes a profession of loyalty as well as a commitment to professional duty:
We especially condemn nationalism. Imam Khomeini held nationalism to be a source of division. We must not propagandize nationalism in the school. This would be like teaching racism. . . . Are we teaching the Koran? Do we start the morning assembly with the name of God? Do we have prayer in the morning? . . . We must not do anything that would lead to the flag taking the place of the Koran. It's not important whether or not there is a flag but the Koran must be present, velāyāt (guardianship) must be present, the Imams and the holy sites must be present.Footnote 18
In truth, the rejection or acceptance of nationalism has not been an issue in modern Iran, before or after 1979. Religious and secular camps have not been “at two opposite extremes along a spectrum, with secularists propagating nationalist ideals and religious leaders opposing those ideals.”Footnote 19 Although some ideologues claim to reject nationalism, Aghaie notes that “their actual writings and speeches relied heavily upon nationalist concepts” shared by their rivals.Footnote 20 These include assumptions about Iran's primordial and organic character as a 2,500-year-old nation with an uninterrupted history that “looms out of an immemorial past and glides into a limitless future.”Footnote 21
Official denunciations of nationalism have had, in any case, almost no impact on textbook content. Indeed, gaps between official talk and textbooks, rhetoric, and pedagogical practice are hardly a new phenomenon in modern Iran, as Farzin Vejdani's research on the early history curriculum shows. Despite conventional belief that Pahlavi nationalist historians considered the introduction of Islam to Iran to be the source of backwardness, history textbooks throughout the twentieth century “neither ignored Islamic history nor claimed that Islam was the cause of Iranian decline.”Footnote 22 Closer to the present day, there is a growing if nascent literature dedicated to tracing the presence of Iranian nationalism in educational design after 1979. This research demonstrates that Islamization of the curriculum since 1979 has not come at the expense of Iranian national identity but as its expression.Footnote 23
Textbooks as primary sources therefore present a powerful corrective to conventional thinking about education in postrevolutionary Iran. Far from being static, impermeable instruments of dogma and ideology, textbooks have been highly unstable, subject to the same forces of disruption that plague other social, cultural, and political realms in Iran.Footnote 24 Tracing curricular content over time as historical artifact reveals the massive gaps that exist between official rhetoric and formal practice, allowing researchers and analysts to better assess schooling's purpose and effects, as well as to elucidate how expressions of Iran's place in the world and engagements with its perceived Others may shift over time.
Modernity's Dilemma: Setting the Arab Apart
The 1979 Revolution did little to disrupt the belief that Iranians were a people assigned a unique destiny, if not by God, then by History. Nationalism remained “the determining ideology of modern Iran,” the essential reference point “to which all competing ideologies have ultimately had to adhere, and within which most have been subsumed.”Footnote 25 If there were a utopia to be found (or recovered) by the new Islamic order, it would be achieved by the formation of the Iranian nation, promoted through, not despite, religious precepts and values.Footnote 26 Salvation's path once again ran through Europe and North America, also the source of torments.Footnote 27 The trauma of military defeat and the subsequent loss of sovereignty over large swaths of territory in the early nineteenth century convinced Iranian reformers that the country could only be saved by adopting western technology and modes of government, a judgment largely shared by the leadership of the Islamic Republic.Footnote 28 Constituting a “dilemma of modernization,” generations of nationalizing elites faced the difficult challenge of bringing development to Iran by importing foreign knowledge without sacrificing Iran's cultural identity.Footnote 29
Efforts by early Pahlavi reformers to localize modernity while remaining true to an “authentic” self corresponded with a concomitant desire to fix blame for Iran's degradation on the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia in the seventh century. Modern Iran would be defined by the concepts and knowledge imported from the West, but its national identity would be formed against the Arab, who represented negation, the absence of Iran itself.Footnote 30 The impulse to blame the Arab for Iran's decline quickly ran headlong into the imperative of historical continuity.Footnote 31 The logic of modern nationalism dictated that there be an Iran that “has always been there,” an unbroken presence from time immemorial. This was incompatible with the claim that the victory of the Muslim armies over the Sassanid empire represented a rupture in that historical timeline, marked by “silence” and loss.Footnote 32
Interwar educational planners found their way out of this intellectual thicket in part by reimagining Islam in civilizational terms, a phenomenon with origins outside of Iran but belonging to all of humanity. “Islam,” Vejdani writes, “[has been] a positive historical force, one that highlighted the equality of believers, rather than the ethnic hierarchy that elevated Arabs over Iranians.”Footnote 33 With the playing field leveled, the Iranian flourished, no longer deemed a victim of conquest but as the Islamic world's most vital and creative component.Footnote 34
The revolutionaries who took control of the Ministry of Education in the late winter of 1979 embraced their predecessors’ approach. Islam was again separated from its origins as an “Arab” religion, done so in a way that would enable the ascendence of Iran while maintaining official commitments to pan-Islamism.Footnote 35 In postrevolutionary textbooks, patriotic stories appear alongside lessons in the content and practice of religious faith, as components—not rivals—of a shared national identity. Emerging from the pages is an authentic Iran, triumphant, that could rightfully claim its status as the first among equals.
First among Equals (But Iran Makes Everything Better)
The Iranian would first need to be made into the Arab's equal. This task falls to the third-grade lesson “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” (Bartari be chist?) Released with the initial wave of curricular revisions following the revolution, the lesson opens inside a mosque. There, the Prophet Mohammad and his companions are engaged in conversation. Suddenly, the Prophet's close friend and follower Salmān al-Fārsi arrives for worship. Mohammad smiles, pleased by this unexpected encounter. He beckons al-Fārsi, a Persian and one of the earliest non-Arab converts to Islam, to come sit next to him. The gesture is not well received by the others. One of Mohammad's companions loudly voices his objection. For him, al-Fārsi is beneath contempt: “Salmān is a Persian speaker and we are Arabs! He should not be included in our group nor should he sit alongside us. He should sit at a level below!”Footnote 36
The Prophet swiftly reprimands the individual, condemning his outburst with an impromptu sermon on the true nature of Islam: “Being a Persian (fārs) or an Arab,” he exclaims, “is not a reason for thinking better or worse of a person. Neither our color nor ethnicity makes us wiser. Nothing save piety and faith makes us better.”Footnote 37 Mohammad reminds those gathered there in the mosque that Islam is an experience without boundaries or limitations, available to all comers. “We Muslims know each other as equals and as brothers. Accent and language do not separate us from one another. Where we live, our ethnicity, or our color must not separate us from one another.”Footnote 38
It would not have been lost on the students reading the story that Mohammad makes his oration on behalf of the only other named character in the story, and its only Iranian. As Persian speakers, as Iranians, these same pupils learn that they must never accept second-grade status within the ummah.Footnote 39 It is a pointed message, delivered with uncommon passion by the founder of the Islamic faith himself. The final paragraph steps outside of the story to address students directly through the narrative fourth wall:
As you can see from this important guidance, we Muslims know each other as equals, neither our accents nor our languages can separate us from one another. Where we live, our race and our color will not divide us. We do not count anything other than piety and faith (taqvā va imān) as sources of superiority.Footnote 40
From the story's title to its pallid insistence that Persians be treated as equals, the story “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” reveals the insecurity of a revolution in its earliest days. Extraordinary even by the heightened passions of the postrevolutionary curriculum, it conveys an unmistakable message of defiance and dignity, staged behind an official line of Islamic solidarity and struggle. It is a line that invariably fails to hold, typically at the expense of Arab characters who soon tumble into ruin and loss.
Losing Their Religion
Loss, above all, of the land. Postrevolutionary textbooks from their first editions draw clear connections among worship, faith, and the possession of mihan, or homeland.Footnote 41 These earthly bonds are affirmed by the story “Oh Iran, Oh My Homeland” (Ey Irān, ey mihan-e man), which first appeared in 1979. The third-grade lesson delivers a full-throated defense of Iranian territory and soil as the source of national identity, one that is unambiguously Islamic:
Oh Iran, oh my glorious home. Your tall mountains are the symbol of the glory and dignity of your children. Your wide fields are symbols of your freedom and liberty. The rush of your rivers is a reminder of the shouts of freemen yelling “Allahu akbar!” Oh Iran, oh my glorious home! Oh land of the pure and brave, oh land of free Muslims. Oh, land of Islam and faith. I pledge allegiance to you.Footnote 42
This is a corporeal love, tied to the permanence of geography, consecrated by the blood of martyrs:
Oh Iran, oh my homeland! Oh Iran, my glorious home. I love you, the laughter of your children. The shouts of your youth, the clamor of your people, I love them all. Oh, glorious home, its pure soil colored by the blood of martyrs. I respect you. Each morning and night I kiss the red tulips that grow in your cemeteries.Footnote 43
There is the land, only the land, to be defended in ceaseless devotion against all enemies, foreign or domestic:
Oh Iran, oh my glorious home! Oh, land of the pure and brave, oh land of free Muslims. Oh, land of Islam and faith. I pledge allegiance to you, I strive with love for your development. I love the true faith of your free people and stand ready to assist them. With anger and hate I destroy your enemies.Footnote 44
The pervasive concern that Iranians might fail to defend their homeland animates the narrator's loud defiance. To lose one's country is to lose everything. The burden of statelessness ultimately falls not to the Iranian, but to the Palestinian Arab, whose torments are described in vivid detail in a series of tragic stories across the elementary school curriculum. “An Adolescent from Palestine” appears immediately after “Oh Iran, Oh My Homeland” in the third-grade primer. A rather pitiful scene opens the story. A young Palestinian boy, distraught, stands alone in a refugee camp. The story's narrator, an Iranian of a similar age, attempts to initiate conversation and discover what is troubling the young Arab:
I went closer and sat next to him, but he didn't notice, his heart seemed to be somewhere else. I greeted him and he replied in kind, but then returned back to his thoughts. “Brother! I see that you are upset . . . your sadness has made me upset also.” “Brother! I wish for you to tell me your troubles so that I can perhaps help you to lighten your load” (Fig. 2).Footnote 45
FIGURE 2. “An Adolescent from Palestine,” Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1359/1980.
The Palestinian replies with a series of rhetorical questions that reveal the reasons for his silence:
He lifted his view from the ground and calmly looked at me and said: “Have you ever heard of someone being run out of their own home, taken by force by another and when the owner complains, his complaints are answered by bullets . . . ? Have you ever been in a classroom that has its roof cave in because of a cluster bomb? Have you ever heard of a hospital destroyed with the infirm still inside? Have you ever heard of dolls that bring death to children?Footnote 46
The details of the occupation are graphic and unsparing. There are no safe places or activities available to the narrator: the classroom, hospital, and even children's toys are potential sources of death and devastation. The Palestinian's only hope lies with those willing to come to the aid and rescue of his people. Bearing witness, the young Iranian proclaims his determination to participate in the struggle:
Brother! These are the sufferings that weigh on our hearts and on the hearts of all free people everywhere and I will help my triumphant and Muslim people save the house and homeland of my comrades.Footnote 47
The narrator addresses his audience directly in the final sentence, breaking the fourth wall between the lesson and the reader to issue a final challenge: “And you brother! How will you remember us while we are on this path?”Footnote 48
“An Adolescent from Palestine” (Nowjavāni az felestin) received a dramatic makeover in the late 1980s. No longer a passive victim, the story's authors transformed the boy into a warrior by replacing the image of a humble refugee languishing in a desert camp with one of an armed militant prepared for battle. Now instead of casting his eyes to the ground, the young man looks directly in the direction of his enemy with a rising sun in the background, presumably signifying a day that will bring him and his people closer to victory. Despite his young age, the young Palestinian has already seen and experienced more than his share of the violence. Written in a dispassionate third-person narrative, and with his Kalashnikov at his side, he details all the horrors that occurred after the Israelis drove his family out of its home:
He remembered incredibly bitter days. Days in which the Israeli executioners had forced them to leave their homes, forced out by bullets and fiery bombs. Anyone who dared to complain was answered with a hail of bullets. . . . Days in which the enemy's bombers had reduced the camps to dirt and blood, the tents shot full of holes. Refugee camps whose population was filled mostly with brave, innocent Muslims, who ended up as martyrs. . . . He remembered these bitter days along with hundreds of other bitter days and held his rifle even tighter.Footnote 49
Denied a proper childhood, the Palestinian's only joys in life have been “the sweet days of resistance and struggle,” the memories of which drew “a beautiful smile across his face.”Footnote 50 Inspiring audiences to bear witness is no longer enough. The last version of the lesson before its removal in the 1990s ends with the Palestinian leaving for the front, taking up arms and dispensing with asking for aid from his Iranian readers. Its message to the reader is clear: Muslims must take action to defend themselves.
Yet, it is weakness that has put the Palestinian in this position, his people's future put at risk by their loss of a homeland. The purpose remains national emancipation. After all, the goal is not to eliminate Israel so that the Palestinians can become part of the community of Muslims—they already are a part of the ummah. The aim is to push the Israelis out to restore the Palestinian homeland. A variation on the theme of dispossession is found in the second-grade primer, where Israel's occupation again provides the crucible for transformation. Presented in the first-person singular, “Letter from a Displaced Child” (Nāmehʾi az yek kudak-e āvāreh) is written from the perspective of a young Palestinian refugee, marooned in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon.
“Do you know who we are?” he asks the reader. “You and I are brothers. I am a Palestinian, we are Palestinian-Muslim children.”Footnote 51 Bound together in brotherhood by their religion and a shared enemy, “the enemy of all free peoples everywhere,” the unnamed narrator goes on to draw out the critical difference between himself and his Iranian counterpart, noting:
The name of our country is Palestine and the name of your country is Iran. You live in your own country and in your own home. But we are displaced in the deserts. The enemy has destroyed our home and homeland.Footnote 52
The young orphan explains that since “your revolution became victorious,” Israel has become frightened. Unable or too afraid to bring the fight to Iran, Israel has responded by tormenting the much weaker Palestinian people. That Iran is both the remedy and source of the orphan's troubles is left unacknowledged. Only through struggle can there be hope of ever being free again, but emancipation cannot be achieved alone. Once again, the text calls upon its readers, the children of Iran, to consider how they might participate and engage with such a struggle. In doing so, “Letter from a Displaced Child” appears to present a powerful alternative to nationalism, a call to stand in solidarity and purpose as Muslims against a terrifying enemy.
Iranians nonetheless receive a dispensation from the fight. In the postrevolutionary reimagining of what it means to be Islamic-Iranian, it is always the vanquished Arab, never the defeated Persian, who is portrayed in the pages of the textbooks. The Arab is not an ally. He is a warning: The Palestinian has no home because he has no country. Accordingly, the pretense that “Letter from a Displaced Child” is about the ummah disappears in the 1982 edition of the primer. A ward of the Iranian struggle, the Palestinian orphan attributes his people's uprising to “the victory of your Islamic Revolution with the leadership of Imam Khomeini,” in effect inverting the message of universalism found in the earlier lesson, “What Is the Basis of Superiority?”Footnote 53 The experience of shared suffering forms the nation, according to Motahhari, but in the textbooks it is almost always the Arab and his children who must struggle.Footnote 54 The Iranian only bears witness.
And then they were gone. By the late 1990s nearly all of the lessons on militant resistance that had defined so much of the early-childhood curriculum had been removed, replaced by an array of child-centered stories more concerned with replicating good habits and hygiene than with the destruction of Israel.Footnote 55 Along with them went the Arab, forlorn or otherwise.Footnote 56 The removal of the dispossessed Arab from the curriculum can be understood as evidence of a revolution increasingly confident of its ability to protect and preserve itself, even as it reflected the preferences of an Iranian population that had moved on without much fanfare from the dual-cultures debates of the past.Footnote 57 With the successful defense of Iranian territory during eight brutal years of war with Iraq, Iran's leadership could reasonably claim to be the first regime in two hundred years to “not lose an inch of Iranian soil.”Footnote 58
Vigilance against enemies, real or imagined, had lost its urgency in a context where the immediate priority of most students was to find a job.Footnote 59 As merit and the credentialing provided by secondary and postsecondary education became increasingly tied to professional success in the postwar period, Iranian families turned to schooling to get their children into college, not the afterlife.Footnote 60 All roads led to the university and the possession of credentials, understood to be indispensable to success in the job and marriage markets. A school system once vaunted as an ideological apparatus in the service of the state had by the end of the twentieth century become a private resource for the social and economic advancement of ordinary families and their children.Footnote 61
The variability of textbook portrayals of the Arab Other punctures the persistent myth that the Islamic Republic of Iran deploys curricular materials solely as extensions of an ideological state apparatus. The movement away from militant self-defense and toward a greater emphasis on meritocratic achievement anticipates the rise of the technocratic turn in Iranian politics after the death of Khomeini in 1989, a transition from an outer to inner jihad, so to speak, in which revolutionary morality combined with the pursuit of knowledge and expertise. Interestingly, changes in curricular tone and content have historically been out of sync with political developments outside of the classroom, suggesting that they were produced in response to the demands and expectations of parents, teachers, and students.Footnote 62
Learning to Fly: Western Sources of Emulation
Tales of scientific discovery and accomplishment provide the counterfactual to Arab lives of misery, as the possibilities denied to the Palestinian are made manifest by the achievements of American inventors and scientists. If the tragedy of the Palestinian boy Khāled and his family referenced at the outset of this article is to be avoided at all costs, then the adventures of American aviators, scientists, and inventors are lives to be pursued, available for the taking. Western achievement in science and technology belongs to all of humanity as proof of God's favor and presence. Science becomes not only a civilizational gift, but a righteous endeavor, the expression of virtue available to all regardless of national origin or religious belief.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the series of lessons dedicated to tracing the origins of human flight. The saga begins in the second-grade primer. “Feather and Wing” (Par va bāl) opens with the wonderment of Āzādeh, who expresses to her companion ʿAli her longing to join in flight the birds she sees every day in her yard. “Oh how I wish that God had given me wings and feathers so that I might fly in the sky!” she cries out.Footnote 63 ʿAli assures Āzādeh that she can, that there is nothing stopping her from doing so. The seemingly miraculous is within her reach. “How?” asks an incredulous Āzādeh. “God has given us feathers and wings,” replies ʿAli. “Our ideas are our feathers and wings. Others, who like you desired to fly, used their ideas to invent the airplane.”Footnote 64 All humans possess reason, granted (āfarid) by God. The capacity for flight is the birthright of all humans, a provision of God's grace. Flight has a heavenly source, but it is unrelenting human effort that brings it into being, capacities well within the reach of all individuals.
Subsequent stories make no effort to conceal the origins of the first manned flights, described in detail across a two-part lesson in the third-grade primer. One of the few holdovers from the Pahlavi-era curriculum, “The Story of Flight” (Dāstān-e parvāz), begins with ambition, born of the native curiosity of humans. “Since ancient times humans have desired to fly,” the story reads. “They wanted to fly in the beautiful blue sky, to climb higher than the eagles and to soar through the clouds.” Though many “have made great efforts and sacrifices in order to reach this ambition,” it would be a German who would get there first:
One hundred years ago, in a corner of the country of Germany, a young man dreamed of flying. His name was “Otto.” Otto paid very close attention to the broad wings of birds. Otto said to himself: “If I can build a large and powerful wing, I can fly just like the birds.” He went to work, experimenting and building wings but couldn't fly with any of them. Otto didn't give up hope nor did he stop trying.Footnote 65
Otto persisted until he prevailed, finally achieving his dream of flight using a homemade glider. He went on to make multiple trips, until he tragically died in an accident. Years later Otto's story caught the imagination of two brothers and bike mechanics from Ohio:
Wilbur Wright was a bright and studious young man. One day, while playing, he fell and broke his bones and so was forced to stay home for several years. He read many books during this time of idleness. By chance he came across the story of Otto and his experiments. After reading these stories Wilbur Wright decided to follow in his path. With the help of his brother, Orville, he built wings with which he could safely land from a great height. Not long after this these two American brothers began to think about building a machine for flying (Fig. 3).Footnote 66
FIGURE 3. “The Story of Flight Part Two: The First Airplane,” Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1359/1980.
Three years of experimentation and effort lead to the grassy bluffs of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the first manned flight. The brothers invited their loved ones to bear witness to this incredible historical event:
The flying machine turned on. Inside the two brothers sat with happiness and excitement. Suddenly the plane took off from the ground and began to fly. The flight lasted 38 minutes. They returned to their happy friends, and after landing the plane safely, Wilbur stepped out with pride.Footnote 67
Wilbur and Orville went on to establish the first airplane factory, laying the foundation for commercial flight, and beyond. “Scientists, after great effort,” the lesson concludes, “built machines that could carry humans to the moon and land there. Scientists are once again seeking ways to send humans further into space and to other planets.”Footnote 68 As with the Prophet's admonitions in “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” the Wright brothers’ place of birth is recognized in “The Story of Flight” but ultimately set aside as unimportant. The invention of the airplane is not bound by origin or geography, but was made common to humanity, a gift to be shared without prejudice or limitation.
A Revolution in Values
Education makes the achievement of such civilizational gifts possible by delivering knowledge “that was both practical (scientific) and ethical—the improvement of manners in order to attain a civilized state.”Footnote 69 The western scientist, valued for the utility of his contributions to humanity, is invariably cast as a model of righteous behavior. Already a motif in the 1980s, this became a more prominent and routinized feature by the late 1990s, when a revamp of the textbook design introduced a more expansive morality to the curriculum.Footnote 70
Thus, in the third-grade lesson “Hello, Mr. Bell” (Salām, āqā-ye Bel) a teacher explains to her students that the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell began his career as a teacher of deaf children. The telephone was created almost by accident, a by-product of Bell's desire to devise an instrument to test his students’ hearing. As they did with their chronicle of aviation and flight, the authors take care to place the special genius of Bell within reach of its readers.Footnote 71 The story of the telephone is one of improvement. From the original rudimentary device to mobile phones, each advance builds on the last, a linear path of progress that any person, or nation, can join.Footnote 72
Whereas “Hello, Mr. Bell” appears in the “Science and Scientist” section of the revised third-grade primer, righteous action earns a young Thomas Edison a spot under the “Individual and Social Morality” section. A companion to the lesson “The Sacrificers” (Fadākārān), “An Enlightened Thought” (Fekr-e rowshan) introduces us to an eight-year-old Thomas Edison, whose accomplishments are still far in the future, testing and measuring an array of instruments and devices in his mother's basement.Footnote 73 Young Edison exhibits the persistence and diligence that would make him famous later in life, working well into the afternoon on his experiments. Only when night falls and the room is too dark to see does he abandon his work. On one of those nights Edison calls up to his mother but receives no reply. Worried, he looks through their darkened home, distraught. Eventually he locates her in a far bedroom, stretched out on a bed in immense pain (Fig, 4).
FIGURE 4. “An Enlightened Thought,” Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/2007.
Edison runs to fetch a doctor, who delivers grave news. His mother requires an operation immediately. Any delay will put her life at risk. With tears in his eyes, Edison beseeches the doctor to begin the procedure right away. “Then why are you waiting? Hurry up!”Footnote 74 The doctor replies that it is too dark. “The light in this home is not enough. I can't operate with one or two candles. We need more light.”Footnote 75 Desperate to help his mother survive the night, and at his lowest point, Edison finds inspiration:
Thomas's tears were falling. He didn't know how he could help his mother. Sadness had gripped the entire house, little by little the pain gripped his mother until she was close to passing out. Thomas thought and suddenly shouted: “I got it! I found a way!”
He ran quickly to the basement. He grabbed every candle there was. He also looked in all of the rooms of the house and wherever he saw a candle, he grabbed it. Then he went to fetch the big mirror of their home. Slowly, slowly he brought the mirror next to his mother's room. He asked the doctor to help him put the mirror on the table. Together they put all the candles on the table in front of the mirror and lit them. The room became drenched, bathed in light. The doctor smiled and said, “Excellent my son, you are very clever.”Footnote 76
Edison then enters into prayer: “While the doctor was busy with the operation, Edison sat in the corner and lifted his tiny hands towards the sky and asked almighty God to save his mother from pain and sickness.”Footnote 77 Edison's wit and quick thinking anticipates the future inventor, but it is his grace and humility that carries the day, his mother's rescue an affirmation of his faith and its reward. The curriculum once again privileges the ethical dimensions of creativity and discovery over technical ability and accomplishment. Knowledge can be lost or misused by nations, but the goodness of an eight-year-old boy who sacrifices his own safety for others, or of a teacher committed to serving deaf children, is forever.
“Let [the Westerners] go to Mars or anywhere they wish,” Khomeini famously proclaimed in Najaf in 1970, “they are still backward in the sphere of securing happiness to man, backward in spreading moral virtues, and backward in creating a psychological and spiritual progress similar to the material progress.”Footnote 78 The many stories of foreign achievement found in the curriculum undermine this conceit, the convention that although Westerns are adept at technology they continue to be hopelessly incapable of possessing the virtue needed to use their knowledge in a worthy fashion.Footnote 79 We see once more the revelatory power of textbooks as primary sources. Rather than mechanically reproducing an official line of unwavering hostility to the West, the curriculum shows the revolutionary state's message to be much more nuanced than the heated rhetoric of its leaders might lead us to expect. Characters like Bell and the young Edison, by modeling righteous behavior, in fact serve as stand-ins for the ideal Islamic-Iranian citizen.Footnote 80
That the two inventors are neither Islamic nor Iranian makes no difference. In the same way that the textbooks dispensed with the Arab origins of Islam, the framing of Western science and technology as free-floating civilizational phenomena, unattached to ethnic or national origins, enables state planners to reconcile the urgent need for outside knowledge, which Iranian leaders have historically pursued with great ambivalence, with the imperative to preserve the country's “authentic” culture.Footnote 81 Nothing is lost by the inclusion of the outsider's expertise, so long as it is rendered God-given, and where possible, Iranian in origin.Footnote 82
Conclusion: Eternal Iran Valorized; the Persianate Subdued
The continuity of Irāniyat has always been premised on the fiction that it is the outsider who needs changing and reform. The seduction of the foreign invader continues to be one of Iran's most enduring tropes, used over the centuries by regimes and reformers alike to elide the memory of loss. Iranians take solace in their national permanence, in the enduring belief that no matter the calamity or the circumstances, their culture will eventually subdue and transform the invading foreigner.Footnote 83 The ancient Greeks, the conquering Mongols and Turkmen tribes, and the modern British, each in turn became better because they became Iranian.Footnote 84 All except the Arab, who finds no transformation in his encounter with Iran, a country now serving as his advocate and protector. The Arab remains abject, an object apart, a permanent warning against loss. For the Arab there is no salvation, no rescue.
But what of the Persianate? With an event like the 1979 Revolution often described and understood as a complete break with the past, what space is there for the Persianate in postrevolutionary Iran? If we assume that the modern period is not necessarily post-Persianate, as many of the contributors to this volume and others insist, what remains of the Persianate in Iran's postrevolutionary context?Footnote 85 After all, the Islamic Republic's official adherence to a set of universal values, shared in a common idiom by diverse populations spread across vast distances and decoupled from the logic of “one land, one nation, one language,” arguably places contemporary Iran closer to the accounts of the Persianate in the twentieth century outlined in this volume than to the high modernism of the Pahlavi state or even the late-imperial model of rule so haphazardly adopted by the Qajar dynasty in its final years.Footnote 86
Despite revolutionary change, echoes of the Persianate frame remain, transposed to the present and made—like Islam and the wonders of science—Iranian. The Persianate, that sprawling, interconnected ecumene where a Persian speaker with the proper training and manners could live and travel from Sarajevo to western China, was never entirely removed from the postrevolutionary curriculum but reduced and reorganized to fit within the sovereign boundaries of a modern, Islamic Iran. No better example may be seen than in the treatment of the poet Ferdowsi in the early curriculum. Despite the fact that Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh was circulated and emulated across the Persianate world and in multiple languages, the poet is restricted to being an icon and savior of the Persian language in postrevolutionary textbooks for second graders in the Islamic Republic.
Their school year culminates with a visit to the mausoleum of Ferdowsi, experienced through the primer lesson “Ferdowsi.” The story is presented as a family's memory of visiting the poet's tomb and memorial, albeit as an afterthought to the more important pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza.Footnote 87 “Last year I went with my father, mother, and sister on a pilgrimage to Imam Reza in Mashhad. My father said: “Near Mashhad there is the ancient city of Tus and the tomb of Ferdowsi, the great poet of Iran” (Fig. 5).Footnote 88 Inspired by the convenience of proximity, the father suggests that the family make the trip. “It would be good to go and visit there as well,” he advises the family.Footnote 89
FIGURE 5. “Ferdowsi,” Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/2007.
With everything in its right place and in the right sequence, the family finishes their pilgrimage (ziyārat) at the golden-domed mausoleum, venturing out to Tus after several days. When they finally arrive at the site, they encounter large crowds already gathered around Ferdowsi's tomb, pilgrims of another sort.Footnote 90 The family joins the gathering. A tour guide leads them around the complex, offering up familiar tropes and measures of Ferdowsi's greatness and importance, including that “Ferdowsi labored for thirty years before finishing his book, the Shāhnāmeh.”Footnote 91
The story's narrator—“Ferdowsi” is one of the very few lessons where it is unclear whether a boy or girl is telling the story—asks the father, “What kind of book was the Shāhnāmeh?” The father replies, “The Shāhnāmeh is a great book in whose stories we can read and learn about the great heroes (pahlavān) of Iran.” The father continues, replicating in a more intimate form the lessons that the fatherland (mihan) gives to its citizens: “All of the stories of the Shāhnāmeh are written in verse. Just as you heard [from the tour guide], Ferdowsi worked for thirty years to collect these stories and to put them into verse so that the Persian language, the same language that we speak today, might survive.”Footnote 92 Ferdowsi's importance is in the language and the people he preserved. Without Persian, there would be no Iran.Footnote 93
The remainder of the lesson consists of poetry and a father's promise. Mashhad and the pilgrimage to Imam Reza's shrine already a fading memory, the two agree to continue learning together about the Shāhnāmeh and its many heroes and legends and tragedies. What began as a one-off visit has become a lifetime endeavor. “Today I know the stories [from the Shāhnāmeh] and I derive great pleasure hearing them repeated over and over again.”Footnote 94 The curriculum had come full circle, the lessons of “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” undone. The same Persian language that had been dismissed by the Prophet as a threat to Islamic unity in his defense of Salmān al-Fārsi was now proof of belonging.Footnote 95 If the figure of al-Fārsi—a Persian speaker among early Arabic-speaking Muslims—was meant to convey Iran's unsettled belonging in the Islamic world of the post-1979 order, then Ferdowsi is an embodiment of the assuredness of Persian cultural and linguistic superiority thirty years later.
The Persianate does not seem to persist in the Islamic Republic period as a dominating framework, at least not in primary school textbooks, and certainly not in the ways that nationalism does. But understanding what civilizational ethos replaced it, under what conditions and when, remains an important endeavor to which educational materials may help provide some clarity, whether those understandings come from the Pahlavi era or from corners and spaces of the Islamic Republic left unexplored here. If the stories of Khāled, Edison, and al-Fārsi teach us anything, it is that educational materials are able to narrate a nation's insecurities and triumphs as they change over time. Tracking down that ethos, finding its narrative threads, and tying them together into a coherent story of pedagogy may reveal that the Persianate finds expression elsewhere and in unexpected ways.
Acknowledgments
This essay began as part of the Forum Transregionale Studien workshop Reading the “1979 Moment” in the Middle East, held in Berlin in June 2017. I am grateful to Amir Moosavi for inviting me to this very important gathering, and for pushing me to think about identity beyond Iran and my own “guarded” perspectives. Original research for this study was carried out at the archives of the Iranian Ministry of Education's Organization for Educational Research and Planning. All credit is due to the diligent and generous staff there for guiding me through countless textbooks with patience and good humor. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and constructive comments. Finally, a very special thanks to Kevin Schwartz and Aria Fani for their persistence, and above all their determination to see this article included in this special volume on the Persianate. I am honored to be part of this impressive collection.
Shervin Malekzadeh is a Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Colgate University where he is completing a book manuscript on the contentious politics of postrevolutionary and Islamic schooling in Iran. An earlier career as a public-school teacher fostered his current research interests in the politics of education, national identity, and the power of culture in authoritarian and postrevolutionary countries.
