Welcome to my Substack
More History in our Politics
Welcome to my new Substack in which I will outline and discuss my views (principally though not exclusively) on Iran and its wider hinterland – hence the title of this particular newsletter – Iranshahr. The term traditionally denoted the Iranian plateau and its Persianate hinterland, which historically tended to expand and contract according to political – and military – developments, but by and large it was bounded by the Euphrates, the Caucasus, the Oxus, the Indus and the Persian Gulf littoral.
For those anxious that this may betray some tendency to irredentism – fear not – the use of this title is to emphasise my background – and approach – as a historian. ‘Iran-shahr’ originated in the Sasanian Empire (224-659 AD) as the descriptor for the Iranian polity. As it became subsumed within the Muslim Caliphate in the 7th C, the term was increasingly used to denote the cultural orbit of the Persianate world – the Eastern Caliphate where the lingua franca was increasingly Persian rather than Arabic.
As a distinct state re-emerged post-Mongol conquest (13th C) so too the term reacquired its political connotations but was ‘modernised into Iran-Zamin – the land of Iran. The term ‘Iran’ has therefore been associated with this polity for the better part of two millennia and the term - Iran/Iranian - itself is of course older having been cited a thousand years earlier by Darius the Great. Its explicit political association, as the great Italian Persianist Gherardo Gnoli persuasively argued in 1989, is Sasanian.
If there is interest, I may explore this in more detail in later posts but hopefully this brief explanation suffices for now. The main point is that while I will be looking, in the broadest sense, at the politics & history of Iran, my approach is emphatically historical – contextualised and aware of the process of change. A dynamic analysis rather than a static one, one that eschews description for a deeper understanding of the mechanics of change. Put another way I am not interested in how something looks, I am interested in discovering how it works, how it was put together and the direction – and speed – of travel.
Any understanding of current geopolitics benefits from a broader context be that spatial or temporal. As one colleague succinctly put it, ‘if you want to understand a problem get a bigger map’. We need more history in our politics and less politics in our history. Our problem – reinforced by the digital realities of our age – is that we have stopped thinking ‘situationally’ in favour of getting to our destination quickly and with little appreciation of our hinterland. Digitisation has encouraged a ‘sat-nav’ culture of research removing the need to look at our surroundings. In our rush to know, we risk becoming less knowledgeable.
A historian, drawing on the trends of past may project forward, and to coin a phrase, ‘prophesy’, but any attempt at ‘prediction’ is a nonsense, and no serious scholar should engage in it however tempting it may be and however much we are all occasionally persuaded to give it a go. The key is to understand how trends may inform the future while understanding the complex contingency that yields a particular outcome. Unsurprisingly I find myself in strong agreement with the economist Angus Deaton when he says:
‘Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms that are plausible, interesting, and worth thinking about, even if they do not meet the inferential standards of contemporary applied economics.’
Our preoccupation with metrics and our need to measure everything has diminished our ability to empathise and to paraphrase the German historian von Ranke to appreciate the sense and essence of events. This requires judgment of course, an ability to assess evidence that is subjective and as such an imperfect science but which nonetheless brings us nearer to the truths of human experience than any ‘science’ might hope to achieve. The paradox of our age is that while we may enjoy a surfeit of information, we have a paucity of knowledge.
One final point. This Substack will give me the opportunity to explore themes and ideas about the politics and history of Iran, its relationship with its cultural hinterland and the wider world. I may on occasion venture further afield when events require it. I don’t intend this Substack to be reportage though I will, as required, draw on current affairs. Where I am made aware of errors of fact, I will move quickly to correct these and I reserve the right to change my opinion as new evidence, empirical and/or theoretical comes to light. Education is after all, a process.