In order “to present the truth of Islam to the world, we should raise the Iranian flag,” stated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, in a 2010 speech that provoked ideological uproar in Iran. His words indicated how Iran’s Islamic Republic, proclaimed as a global Islamic revolution’s vanguard, has delicately tried to utilize Iran’s national pride, ancient history, and heritage to promote theocracy, with questionable success.
University of St. Andrews Professor Ali Massoud Ansari in 2009 noted that in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, “religion has effectively been nationalized over the last 30 years.” Thus “now more than ever we can talk of an ‘Iranian Shi‘ism.’” Rahim-Mashaei in his 2010 speech accordingly declared that “our understanding of the real nature of Iran and of Islam is the Iranian school” and that that “without Iran, Islam would be lost.”
“Iranian nationalism has never been far beneath the political surface, although at the onset of the Islamic Revolution it tended to be buried within layers of Islamicized rhetoric,” asserted Ansari. Iran analysts at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (IGC) similarly observed in 2019 that “after 1979, Iran’s leaders set out to synthesize Iranian identity with Islam.” The Islamic Republic’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
and his followers recognized that by evoking nationalist sentiments under a religious veneer, they could further advance their ideological potential. Although Khomeini had rejected what he referred to as “nation worshipping” and dismissed the notion of the nation-state as an unholy creation of “weak human minds,” he understood the asset that nationalism was to realize his vision.
The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq only emphasized this utility, as former Financial Times reporter and longtime Middle East correspondent Gareth Smyth noted. Islamic Republic leaders tried to “evoke notions of sacrifice rooted in both Shi’ism and nation.” Ansar agreed that
it became apparent that the people could not be mobilized by religion alone. Confronting an Iraqi regime that had a clear interest in defining the struggle in ethnic rather than sectarian terms, the Islamic Republic was quick to adapt. The “nation” became sacred.
Iranian nationalist feelings emerged all the stronger from this period, Ansar concluded:
The impact of the eight-year war, along with the dramatic growth in literacy, the emergence of a truly mass media, and the consequent rise in political consciousness, all encouraged a vibrant popular discussion of the nature of national identity and the meaning of being Iranian.
Correspondingly, Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013 “began to advocate religious nationalism, promoting Iranian-Islamic identity as a new discourse,” noted Iranian-Canadian political analyst Shahir Shahidsaless. Smith agreed that Ahmadinejad in “many of his actions and rhetoric showed the appeal of nationalism. Ahmadinejad often paid homage to pre-Islamic Iranian figures.” Notably, Ahmadinejad hosted Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on a 2007 state visit in Tehran with a backdrop of the images of guards that adorn the ruined walls of Persepolis, the capital of Iran’s ancient Achaemenid Empire (559-330 BCE).
“Sensing that popular sentiment among Iran’s Muslim majority is shifting away from the mullahs,” CNN reported in 2011, Ahmadinejad in September 2010 had arranged a historic display in Tehran of the Cyrus Cylinder. The British Museum in 2010-2011 loaned to Iran this baked clay cylinder that marks the 539 BCE overthrow of the Babylonian Empire by the Achamenid Empire’s founder, Cyrus the Great. Iranians intensely revere the cylinder, which has achieved global fame as perhaps history’s earliest human rights declaration with inscriptions declaring Cyrus’ intent to respect local religious traditions in his empire.
The cylinder’s yearlong Tehran exhibition brought up to a million visitors, evidence of the propaganda value that Iran’s pre-Islamic past offered the Islamic Republic. At the unveiling ceremony, Ahmadinejad lauded the cylinder’s message of “respect for human beings’ greatness and basic rights.” Meanwhile CNN reported him presenting “indigenous traditions as superior to Arab-imposed Islam.”
Appropriating Cyrus for the Islamic Republic, Ahmadinejad during the ceremony garlanded an actor representing Cyrus with a black-and-white checkered kufiyah scarf. This symbol represented for the Islamic Republic popular resistance in the Iran-Iraq war as well as Islamic Republic-supported anti-Israel, jihadist movements in Lebanon and among the Palestinians. While many Iranian mullahs boycotted the display, Rahim-Mashaei privately referred to Cyrus as a “messenger of God.”
Perhaps most ironic is a 2005 Guardian article about Iranian efforts to promote the historic Persepolis site. “We are determined to revive it,” a senior Iranian cultural heritage and tourism official had said amidst discussions of new restaurants and tourist accommodations. “Exhibitions will focus on the Achaemenian dynasty, seen as the pinnacle of Iran’s pre-Islamic greatness, when Persia’s empire stretched from the Nile to the Danube,” the Guardian reported. That year Persepolis had experienced the highest number of visitors since the 1979 revolution, 35,000 daily during the Iranian New Year holiday.
Yet for Islamic Republic ideologues, “Persepolis was tainted not only by the fact that it represents pre-Islamic Iran, but perhaps more crucially because of its close association with Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,” Ansar had observed. Before being overthrown in 1979, Iran’s monarch had staged in 1971 at Persepolis a massive spectacle marking 2,500 years since the life of empire builder Cyrus. The Guardian recalled a “feast of opulence at which guests consumed 5,000 bottles of champagne.” Attending “international luminaries” included the United Kingdom’s Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne, Ethiopia’s late King Haile Selassie, and former Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Exiled in Iraq at the time, Khomeini had condemned the shah’s monarchy and Persepolis festivities as a “shameful and disgraceful reactionary manifestation” whose participants were “traitors to Islam and the Iranian nation.” Islamic Republic officials after 1979 correspondingly allowed the 51 luxurious air-conditioned tents organized in a star formation on the 160-acre Persepolis site to decay to metal skeletons. Weeds overgrew formerly exquisite gardens on the site, which later served as an army barracks and administrative center.
The Guardian noted how in the Islamic Republic’s intended Persepolis development plans, “Islamic sensibilities will be soothed.” Tourist displays would focus on the 1971 celebration’s “excesses, such as alcohol consumption, female guests in low-cut gowns without hijab, and troupes of dancing girls.” In a similar Islamizing vein, Ayatollah Abbas Ka‘abi, a conservative Assembly of Experts member, argued in a 2017 tweet that if Cyrus were to rise from his grave and see Iran’s power under Islam, he would convert to Islam.
Yet Iranians interviewed by the Guardian found more attraction than repulsion in the 1971 Persepolis pageantry. One anonymous Islamic Republic official showed his children a CD-ROM of the event, who responded with admiration and “were asking what was wrong and where was the problem that we had to have a revolution.” Similarly, one former festival worker fondly remembered a “great day….People were here from all over the world and the message was peaceful. It made me proud to be Iranian. Ancient history is always a reason to be proud.”
Iran’s ayatollahs are repeating the learning experiences of past and present tyrants in places like Russia and China, where nationalism ultimately drew more allegiance than false communist promises of global utopia. In order to have any chance of retaining power, dictators must realize that nations are more devoted to their own individual well-being and identity than unworkable ideologies. No wonder the IGC concluded in 2019 that “Iran’s ruling clerical establishment increasingly views Persian nationalism as a threat rather than a benefit.”