Where Cyrus Meets Khomeini

WHERE CYRUS MEETS KHOMEINI

How an Islamic Republic Grapples with an Unshakable Pre-Islamic Infrastructure

by Kyle Newman

The 1979 Revolution undoubtedly marked a significant cultural shift in Iran’s history. The new Islamic Republic birthed a movement — led by Ayatollah Khomeini and promoted by Iran’s Islamic Republican party — that changed Iran’s national identity. During the Cultural Revolution of 1979 to 1983, Khomeini and his supporters sought to remove all remnants of pre-Islamic symbolism and cultural supremacy from the Pahlavi era. They were led by Khomeini’s prevailing pan-Islamic ideology and narratives of religious martyrdom. This effort proved to be unpopular from the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, when prominent leaders realized Islamic identity could not serve as the stand-alone motivation to continue a war against Iraqis. Therefore the Islamic Republic forged a new nationalism that merged pre-Islamic Iranian and Shiite Islamic cultures into a singular all-encompassing Iranian identity.

The Roots of a Balanced Culture: Pre-Islamic and Islamic influences merge

The revival of an Iranian culture that integrates both its pre-Islamic and Islamic roots is in no way new, bearing its own historic genealogy that starts with the Abbasid Caliphate. Before the Abbasids, the Umayyads sought to “de-Zoroastrianise” Iran by changing the administrative language throughout the empire to Arabic and dismissing the last of the Zoroastrian officials of the Sassanid empire. It was not until the successful rebel movement led by the Iranian Abu Muslim Khorasani — who toppled the Arab ruling class of the Umayyad Caliphate — that Iranian converts to Islam gained the same status as Arab Muslims in the later Abbasid period. Khorasani created a hybrid Iranian-Islamic discourse, installing Shiite Imams into power to distinguish Iranians from their Sunni Arab counterparts and claiming the restoration of Mazdean or Zoroastrian rule. This phenomenon led to the predominance of the Buyid dynasty after Abbasid rule, which was the first uniquely Iranian and Shiite Islamic power base of the Muslim world.

Buyid leaders took on the pre-Islamic title of Shahanshah and claimed royal Sassanid lineage. The Buyid merger of Shiite and pre-Islamic cultures was arguably strong enough to persevere an interregnum in Iranian history when Mongol and Turkic forces took the reins of Iranian society for about 500 years. After a long period of silence, this cultural merger reappeared in the 16th century Safavid dynasty. Although Iran’s Islamic practice was still significantly diverse at the time of Shah Ismail I’s hegemony, efforts were created by the Shah to institutionalize a clerical Ulama composed of Twelver Shiite scholars from the surrounding region. The Safavid rulers from there on gradually reinforced a narrative that interpreted Shiism as being uniquely Iranian and adopting aspects of pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Until the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and Reza Shah Pahlavi’s modernization campaign, Iranian national identity would be defined by a fairly consistent cross-talk between the clerical class and the monarchy. The monarchy would recognize the religious authority of the clerical Ulama while the Ulama would legitimize the rule of the monarchs, who often served as representatives of both Shiite Islamic and pre-Islamic Iranian culture.

The 20th Century: Revolution after Revolution and changing nationalist discourse

While the mutual adoption of both Islamic and non-Islamic influences in Iranian culture proved a strong model for national identity, 20th century modernization efforts created a significant but temporary shift in this dynamic. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 destabilized the back-and-forth nature of governance between the Ulama and Shahs. Despite the elimination of the previous power dynamic, the revolution preserved the clerical class and made it a prominent political body in the new Iranian Majles (parliament). The Ulama was further weakened when Reza Shah came to power because of his attempts to emphasize Iran’s pre-Islamic roots. In order to legitimize his rule, Reza Shah argued that he had lineage related to Cyrus the Great. Reza Shah went so far as to ban the chador or women’s veil and replace the Islamic lunar calendar with the pre-Islamic solar calendar.

The frustration of the clerical class and their unabashed unity would lead to the upheaval of the Pahlavi regime during the Islamic Revolution and the rise of Khomeinists that sought to erase this new nationalism. Under Ayatollah Khomeini, Shahs were referred to as taghut — an Arabic word referring to evil, oppressive figures. Pan-Islamism in the Shiite conext was promoted in order to erase the ethnonationalism of the Pahlavi dynasty. Despite this shift, holidays like Chaharshanbeh Soori and Nowruz, which are celebrations rooted in ancient Zoroastrian traditions that honor the arrival of Spring, still remained a large part of Iranian society. The survival of pre-Islamic cultural traditions was the first indication to the new regime that they would have to make adaptations to their governing philosophy. The 20th century was therefore marked by a harsh divide between embracing pre-Islamic Iranian tradition and attempting to remove it — a significant break from the soft merge of the Ulama’s Islamic influence and pre-Islamic symbolism of dynasties that preceded the Pahlavi era.

The Islamic Republic was soon met with attempted invasion by its Sunni Arab neighbors, which helped the regime realize a pan-Islamic identity could not single-handedly motivate its constituents to fight for the revolutionary effort. The regime therefore utilized the Shiite Islamic rhetoric of Imam Hussain’s resistance to motivate its troops during the war effort. The story of Imam Hussain’s resistance to Yazid at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE is paramount to Shiite religious identity, which allowed soldiers of the war to channel this spirit of resistance and frame the war as a battle between Sunni Arab and Iranian Shiite. This newer ideology worked hand-in-hand with the concept of Shiism being uniquely Iranian which originated during Safavid rule. In the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, Shiite Islamic resistance to Sunni oppression became equivalent to Iranianness, which created a revival of pre-Islamic Iranian symbolism and art in the mainstream.

The Revival of a Uniquely Iranian-and-Islamic cultural nationalism

The reemergence of an Iranian nationalism that fused Islamic and pre-Islamic Iranian cultures was used as a political tool by the Islamic Republic regime to reinforce its constituents’ support. This new nationalism became important when government efforts, such as the Iranian Nuclear Program, could not be justified through Islamic motivations alone. During Khatami’s presidency, politicians garnered domestic support for the new Iranian nuclear program by asserting their need to defend the longevity of an Iranian civilization that started in the pre-Islamic Achaemenid period. The discourse around Iran’s pre-Islamic roots in the Islamic Republic grew larger throughout the presidency of Khatami and heavily influenced president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well. Due to the contentious nature of Ahmadinejad’s rise to the presidency — famously accompanied by protests in which demonstrators called for an “Iranian Republic” instead of an Islamic one — Ahmadinejad himself channeled heavy pre-Islamic rhetoric during his term to appease the people which angered revolutionary officials and clerics in the process. In 2011, Ahmadienejad attempted to deliver a speech for Nowruz (Iranian New Year) at Persepolis, which he was prohibited from doing because of Iran’s most cherished pre-Islamic relic failing to align with the ideals of the martyrs of the Islamic Revolution. That same year, Ahmadinejad framed the Islamic Revolution of 1979 as “Iranian” in a

speech to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, garnering resentment from prominent clerics and Ayatollah Khamenei. Ayatollah Khamenei and other figures in Iran’s conservative religious establishment wish to promote a narrative that glorifies Iran’s early Islamic period as being more advanced than any other period in its history. The religious establishment therefore stands in stark opposition to the new nationalism that has emerged and actively avoids it. On Ayatollah Khamenei’s website, for example, it is impossible to find transcriptions of his Nowruz speeches while his speeches celebrating uniquely Islamic occasions are both transcribed and translated into multiple languages. Since the Islamic conquest of the Iranian Plateau, Iran has grappled with the duality of both its Islamic and pre-Islamic identities. As a civilization that began during Cyrus’ Achaemenid empire, its people hold onto their pre-Islamic roots despite being heavily attached to Shiite Islamic culture. While Shahs and clerics balanced Islamic and pre-Islamic cultural histories for a long time by legitimizing each other’s power, 20th century Iran witnessed a polarizing shift in this dynamic. The re-emergence of a unique nationalism in 21st century Iran that integrates pre-Islamic and Shiite cultures is yet another sign that both Islamic and Iranian ways of life have a deep impact on Iranian civilization.