A Royal Romance

The Islamic Republic's flirtation with the pre-Islamic past is a reflection of deeper societal truths.

For it is only when it is threatened with destruction from without or from within that a society is compelled to return to the very roots of its identity; to that mythical nucleus which ultimately grounds and determines it. (Ricouer)¹

There is nothing new with the Islamic Republic’s affectation for the pre-Islamic past². Faced with regular crises and the increasingly obvious limits of revolutionary Islamism, they have never been shy about mobilising history, of the non-Islamic variety, to the service of the present. The magnitude of the present crisis means that they have ‘turned the dial up to 11’, and Khamenei’s public endorsement on this occasion does indicate a shift on his part having previously been rigorous in his public contempt of all things pre-Islamic.

At its inception the Islamic Republic was naturally allergic to all things monarchical, eliminating all related symbols not least on the country’s flag, erroneously believing that the ‘Lion and Sun’ (popular among Iranians) was a foreign inspired token of ‘imperialism’. Matters took a ridiculous turn when the province of Kermanshah was renamed ‘Bakhtaran’ in 1986, to avoid mention of the word ‘Shah’, an absurdity - that took a decade to reverse - which was soon apparent to anyone familiar with Persian culture. The word ‘shah’ is often used to describe things that are bigger and better. But most obviously, Iran’s ‘national epic’ was the Shah-Nameh - the Book of Kings, and no one was realistically thinking of renaming that.

Quite the contrary, the Shahnameh was regarded as integral to the identity of Iranians and the Islamic Republic became comfortable supporting it as an authentic antidote to the promotion of the Achaemenids that the Shah had supported. Indeed, paradoxically the regime argued that the Achaemenids were a work of fiction conjured up by ‘Jewish fantasists’.³ There were even rumours that enthusiastic revolutionaries had been keen to bulldoze Persepolis, though whatever their veracity, wiser counsel prevailed.

Indeed President Rafsanjani (1989-97), with a keen eye and a soft spot for the national narrative, took the bold step of making an official visit to Persepolis in 1991. Identified with the Shah’s great ‘imperial party’ in 1971, Rafsanjani was careful to couch his visit in terms of what the site could teach about the perils of decadence - an Ozymandian style placard was erected to commemorate the visit. In practical terms, it ostensibly laid the ghost of the Shah to rest and henceforth embracing Persepolis was considered legitimate. Throughout the 1990s the growth in visits to such sites was matched by the growth in ancient themed trinkets, busts of kings, friezes of Persepolis, which were increasingly available and clearly in demand.

The return of the king - Shahpur I

That the regime would tolerate and to some extent endorse such popular appreciation was taken as a sign of political stability and maturity. For their part it was safer to focus on the other historical tradition as expressed in the Shahnameh and other repositories of the country’s myths. These developments were to accelerate under the Reformist President Khatami when he famously pronounced at the United Nations in 1998 that, ‘The ethical myth and the myth epic indicate the spirit of Iranians...the Book of Kings [is] the symbol of Iran.’

Of course not all aspects of the Shahnameh were welcome. The ‘revolutionary’ character of Kaveh the Blacksmith, was treated with some suspicion by the authorities, though as I have noted in a previous post, the regime found it difficult to resist the popular clamour for commemoration of this particular myth of emancipation. Khatami for his part sought to do what medieval Persian historians had endeavoured to achieve: the marriage between the distinctive secular and religious traditions of Iran.

A lengthy drama series which entered production during his tenure, sought to emphasise the compatibility between the myths of the Shahnameh and Iran’s Shia heritage, with a final evocative scene showing Imam Ali (the first of the Shia Imams) being supported by the assorted heroes from the Shahnameh. Support for such heroes - really the central theme of the Book of Kings despite its name - was also relatively cost free for the Islamic Republic, since it was the heroes that regularly had to rescue Iran from petulant and incompetent kings, and the regime naturally assumed that no one would identify the kings of the past with the current leadership.

An impressive statue of the greatest of Iran’s mythical heroes, Rustam, in Sistan province. Rustam regularly had to save Iran from the petulance of its kings

Such distinctions were cast to the wind with the emergence of Iran’s next President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13) whose enthusiasm for the Hidden Imam was matched only by his excitement for all things imperial and Iranian. A thorough populist, Ahmadinejad understood the appeal of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and he sailed very close to the wind for many orthodox clerical figures in claiming Iranian origins for most things. One of his senior advisers was roundly admonished for claiming that Abraham, hailing as he did from Mesopotamia (ie Iranshahr), was in reality an Iranian.

It was Ahmadinejad who brashly drafted in Iran’s mythical heroes - notably Arash the Archer - to the service of Iran’s nuclear programme suggesting that such virtuous paladins would have defended Iran’s ‘right to enrich’. None of it made sense, but it didn’t have to. Its purpose was to emote. Perhaps his most controversial promotion was of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenids, though he was no doubt paying attention to wider societal developments. Be that as it may, his apparent request to host President Putin (then on his first lap as President of Russia) in Persepolis had too much of the whiff of the Shah about it and he had to make do with a mock up in Tehran.

President Ahmadinejad welcomes President Putin to the Achaemenid Court in 2007

It was nevertheless indicative of how far the Islamic Republic had come. The press were unusually excitable about the whole thing with one going so far as to suggest that the ‘king of the slavs’ had come to pay homage at the Persian court! Indeed the rehabilitation of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenids has been one of the most remarkable developments in the Islamic Republic and its gestation was early.

In the early 1990s, even if in hushed tones, the view was gaining ground that Cyrus was a ‘religious figure’ and indeed a ‘prophet’ (a reading clearly drawn from the Bible), while the view that he was the Dhul Qarnayn of the Quran was legitimising him in Islamic terms. Negotiations to have the British Museum loan the Cyrus Cylinder bore fruit in 2010. Ahmadinejad was ecstatic, barely concealing his emotion when the cylinder was unveiled - presented as a long overdue homecoming. In the accompanying ceremonies, ‘Cyrus’ was even awarded some invented accolade, including what some interpreted as a Palestinian keffiyeh, in a nod to Cyrus the Great’s ‘Muslim’ tendencies.⁴

Just how far this nonsense went would be seen in 2013 in an interview with the head of the Foundation of Iranian Studies, which praised the qualities of the Iranian nation and its contributions to Islam, and proudly announced that Cyrus and his descendants were promoters of monotheism⁵. The most striking aspect of all this was that the head of Foundation was none other than ‘Ayatollah Mohammad Khamenei’, the brother of the Supreme Leader.

Cyrus the Great (and his descendants), as promoters of monotheism

One might reasonably ask why this has not been more consequential. The simple answer is politics. Ahmadinejad’s politics were not only eclectic, ranging from Holocaust denial to millenarianism, but his enthusiastic crushing of the Green Movement in 2009, when he notoriously described protestors as little more than dust and detritus, left people in no doubt that his Iranian nationalism had little room for the Iranians themselves. The Islamic Republic’s affectation for such things was in praise of an abstract concept of the nation, it had little time for the actual people. Such enthusiasms were in any case shelved on Ahmadinejad’s departure from the Presidency in 2013.

The people meanwhile, increasingly disenchanted with the Islamic government that repressed them, took up the mantle of Cyrus the Great with some gusto. A cultural movement the regime could tolerate, soon morphed into a political one with extensive gatherings around to the tomb of the great king some 4 hours outside Shiraz in Pasargadae. ‘Cyrus the Great day’ (28/29th October) soon became a fixture in the popular calendar, with increasingly large gatherings turning to protest in 2016.

Curtailments followed, with the site closed off in subsequent years, though the cult - much to the late Shah’s undoubted joy - continues to grow, so much so that in last years initial confrontation with Israel, regime loyalists made a bold attempt at appropriation, comparing Khamenei with Cyrus, complete with a reference to the phrase made famous by the Shah in 1971 when he solemnly proclaimed that Cyrus, sleep easy, because we (Iranians) are awake. In this case however and perhaps revealingly, it was not the people who were awake but Khamenei ‘the Great’.

That the authorities of the Islamic Republic should mobilise the pre-Islamic past to the service of the present should surprise no one. Given the dominant position of the Shahnameh in Persian culture, almost every Iranian state worthy of the name has done so. From the late 19th C, with the rediscovery of the Achaemenids, they too have been corralled into service.

That the Islamic Revolutionaries should embrace Iran’s ancient kings with such enthusiasm is a recognition of its social and political pull, though experience suggests that their attempt to harness a nationalism that ignores the Iranians themselves, will be no more, and in all probability, far less successful than previous attempts. But their appeal to such nationalism does indicate one singular point that contradicts the basis of the Islamic Revolution itself:

Iranian identity when it is threatened with destruction…is compelled to return to [its] very roots…to that mythical nucleus which ultimately grounds and determines it.

1. P Ricoeur Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds in A Ricoeur Reader M J Valdes (ed), 484.

2. For readers who crave a deeper dive please see my ‘A Royal Romance: the cult of Cyrus the Great in Modern Iran’, JRAS, 3, 2021, 1-15, and the broader subject of Iranian nationalism in my book, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, (Cambridge, 2012)

3. This was most clearly articulated in a diatribe published in 1979 by the notorious ‘hanging judge’, Sadegh Khalkhali. The thesis seems to be drawn on a literal reading of the Book of Esther

4. Some suggested that the figure represents ‘Kaveh the Blacksmith’ rather then ‘Cyrus’, but this may have reflected some uneasiness in the press at the time about praising the Achaemenid King. Some 2 million people queued to see the Cylinder on its six month sojourn in Tehran.

5. The themes echoed sentiments that were expressed by the leading ideologue of the revolution, Ayatollah Motahhari, prior to the revolution.