Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran
by Michael Axworthy (Hurst, £25)
In 1935, Reza Shah insisted that foreign governments, when communicating with him or his ministers, should no longer refer to his country as Persia and instead call it Iran. This was to differentiate his regime from that of the decadent Qajars of the 19th century. Moreover, the term “Iran” is a cognate of “Aryan,” and, of course, in the 1930s there was a lot of stress on Aryanism in Germany and elsewhere. Reza Shah was fascinated by Nazism, though Atatürk’s policies in Turkey were a closer model for his high-handed western-style reforms.
Michael Axworthy, formerly head of the Iran section in the foreign office, explains the choice of title for his history in the following terms: “The centre of Iranian culture [has] moved at different times from Fars in southern Iran to Mesopotamia, to Khorasan in the northeast and central Asia, and to what is now called Azerbaijan in the northwest; and… far beyond the land of Iran itself.” For this reason, he suggests, “we should set aside our usual categories of nationhood and imperial culture and think instead of Iran as an Empire of the Mind.”
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