The Emergence of a Pre-National Iranian Identity in the Eighteenth Century

This paper analyses the evolution in collective identities across medieval and early modern Iran, specifically outlining the emergence of a newly conceived collective, one which could be described as a pre-national Iranian identity. While Iran’s modern national identity has received significant academic attention, the same cannot be said of the collective identities in Iran prior to the modern era of nation-states. This paper will challenge the conception that there was a distinct Iranian identity throughout the post-Islamic period. It will engage with the works and views of Ehsan Yarshater, Ann Lambton, Abbas Amanat, Ahmad Ashraf, and others who subscribe to the notion of a continuous and distinct Iranian identity or “Irāniyat” during said period. Building on the work of Bert Fragner, this paper attempts to expand on the idea of Iran as a regionalist conception. It will differentiate between the existence of the idea of Iran as a realm, and the existence of “Irāniān” as a distinct and self-conscious cultural community, arguing that a collective Iranian identity only emerged in the eighteenth century. In order to do so, it will be necessary to provide a brief overview of collective identities during the medieval and early modern—particularly the Ṣafavid—period of Iran’s history. By examining the historiographical and literary traditions of medieval Iran, and understanding how anachronistic notions of Iranian identity are frequently read into the sources, we will aim to demonstrate how the concept of Iranian identity during the medieval era is misleading. The establishment of Ṣafavid rule over Iran, commonly held to be a reassertion of Iranian identity, will be investigated using Ṣafavid state documents such as royal decrees, diplomatic correspondence, political-theological treatises, compendiums of poetry, chronicles, and numismatics. A survey of how these materials engaged with notions of collective self-representation and identity, will allow us to explore how Qezelbāsh, not Irāniān, came to be the predominant collective identity in Ṣafavid Iran. This will provide the background to our discussion on the transformation of the meaning of being Qezelbāsh, and crucially, its synonymisation with Irāniān during the post-Ṣafavid eighteenth-century. Integrating several discourses on this newly emergent Irāniān identity from state-patronised and non-patronised sources from both inside and outside Iran, in Persian and other Iranian languages, we hope to proffer a nuanced understanding of how and why this conception of the pre-national Iranian self emerged.