Event details

This talk discusses the origins of racial Iranian nationalism by revisiting the work of Fath’ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two Qajar-era intellectuals. In their efforts to make sense of a difficult historical situation, these thinkers advanced an appealing ideology termed as "dislocative nationalism," in which pre-Islamic Iran is cast as a golden age, Islam is reinterpreted as an alien religion, and Arabs become implacable others. Dislodging Iran from its empirical reality and tying it to Europe and the Aryan race, this ideology remains the most politically potent form of identity in Iran.  As Dr Zia-Ebrahimi will discuss, Akhundzadeh and Kermani's nationalist reading of Iranian history has been drilled into the minds of Iranians since its adoption by the Pahlavi state in the early twentieth century.