CENTER FOR IRANIAN STUDIES - کانون پژوهشهای ايران شناختی

يادداشت ويراستار

در دهه های اخير، کيستی يا هويت ايرانی، همواره يکی از زمينه ها و درونمايه های مطرح و چشم گير در گفتارها، گفت و شنودها و برنامه های پژوهشی ی جامعه شناختی بوده است و هنوز هم هست. تا کنون دهها مقاله و کناب به زبان فارسی و نیز برخی از زبانهای باختری در اين راستا نشريافته است که نويسندگان آنها، هر يک از ديدگاهی ويژه بدين امر مهم و کليدی رويکرد داشته و به تجزيه و تحليل اين مبحث پرداخته اند. تازه ترين گام را در اين راه، بانو رويا حکاکيان، شاعر، نويسنده، پژوهنده و روزنامه نگار ايرانی ی مقيم آمريکا برداشته و در گفتاری که به تازگی در نشريه ی نامدار وال ستريت جرنال به چاپ رسانده، از ديدگاهی نو به شرح و تحليل آموخته ها و آزموده های خود در اين حوزه ی جامعه شناختی پرداخته است.
خوانندگان گرامی ی اين تارنما را به خواندن اين گفتار آموزنده فرامی خوانم:

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?Persian . . . or Iranian

By ROYA HAKAKIAN

December 28, 2006; Page A14


Holiday parties always seem to bring out the semi-inebriated men who find their way to my corner. There is, as expected, an opening line, which hardly ever leads to a conversation. But if it ever does, and if that conversation shows signs of vitality, even a dim glimmering of erudition, a rhetorical question is sure to follow. They lean into me and murmur: "Did you say you were Persian or Parisian?" They count on the tie, the long-stemmed wine glass, or the exalted titles on their name tags to make flirtation pass as ethnographical inquiry. The "compliment" is clearly a profound insult: When an Iranian proves to be sophisticated, she no longer qualifies as Iranian. She is exchanged into a creature whose cultural currency is tangible for the Westerner. If unfamiliarity with Iran is less shallow than "My college classmate's father was the personal pilot for the Shah" (Royal Pilot number 1,654 and counting), or "Our local Eyeraynian serves great tandoori," then the real biases begin to emerge. The unveiled and urbane Iranian jars the Western mind. For the Anglophone, Iran's history begins in 1979, and the model for an authentic Iranian male is bearded, preferably turbaned and robed; and the female is submissive and veiled. Fist-throwing, frenzied behavior is a plus. The rest are simply the have-beens: exiles who are at best irrelevant, if not thoroughly out of touch. Non-Shiites need not apply. But the Westerner is not entirely to blame. The country's presidential machinery is dedicated to convincing the world of just that. The main task of every ideology is to create identity, which is what Tehran's taskmaster-in-chief is attempting. With the symbolic Palestinian scarf around his neck in the land where public support for the Palestinian cause has been consistently diminishing, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's existential mission is to recast the ethos of being Iranian. In truth, he is peddling a pan-Islamism, by regional extension a pan-Arabism, for which neither Iranians nor Arabs have an appetite. As uranium is enriched, the Iranian identity is plundered. Mr. Ahmadinejad's numerous spectacles, most recently the Holocaust conference, are meant to bring a sense of transcultural and transethnic unity through a common political purpose. On the domestic scene, this is an old act -- a familiar blunder to annihilate Iranian nationalism, or to f! orce it to become subordinate to the Muslim, with Arab undertones. The effort began by Ayatollah Khomeini. He made no secret of his contempt for the non-Muslim dimensions of Iranian life. He injected Persian with so many Arabic words that it confounded the ordinary listener, something for which he compensated by repetitiveness. He did all but officially ban Nowrooz, the traditional Iranian new year with its roots in the pre-Islamic era, and refrained from delivering a traditional Nowrooz message in March 1979 (weeks after the victory of the revolution). But as popular as he was in those early days, the public's backlash against his stance on Nowrooz was so powerful that he, who rarely relented, eventually caved in. Since then, and especially as a result of the arduous Iran-Iraq war, patriotism has been on the rise. Pre-Islamic holidays are being celebrated with unprecedented fanfare. The Persian lexicon has turned into a bastion of nationalism. Numerous Persian synonyms have been invented to replace the most commonly used! foreign words, primarily Arabic ones. To everyone's wonder, the new words have caught on. Yet even the ayatollah was borrowing a page from history. The battle to define the Iranian identity, Muslim versus Persian, is an old one. Since the Arab conquest of the 7th century, Iranians have struggled to maintain their heritage through language and tradition. Though the nation fully embraced Islam, the religion of the conquerors, they made it uniquely their own by Persianizing it, which, to a great extent, marks the historical beginnings of Shiism. A leading Iranian philosopher argues that failure and loss have branded the Iranian psyche. The loss here refers to the loss of the Sassanian Persian army against the Arab Muslim army in the year 636 at Qadesiyyah -- a battle which Saddam Hussein often invoked as he unleashed his army into the Iranian territory. The tension is also a tension between simplicity and complexity. The ruling elite wants to summarize Iran in a formula -- that of another outpost of Islamic fundamentalism, whereas Iranians have always been elusive. The best definition that a typical Iranian would most likely offer of herself is as a poem, which can only compound the enigma. But the poem serves, as poems often do, as an invitation to being recognized as complex, a notion that the Westerner allows and can easily grasp about his European counterparts. The Westerner knows not to reduce its own politics to a few eccentric leaders -- the U.S. to Jerry Falwell, the Netherlands to the late Pim Fortuyn, or France to Jean-Marie Le Pen. To reduce Iran to Mr. Ahmadinejad would be just as grave an aberration. In tangible terms, it means to scratch the nuclear surface to let the light of the other Iran shine through. It means to report the Holocaust conference along with the student demonstrations agai! nst Mr. Ahmadinejad within the same week, or the new grass-roots initiative by women to ban stoning, or the astonishing statistics released by Tehran's Office of Cultural Affairs showing a dramatic drop in the number of Iranians who pray daily. Today, the Westerner can no longer afford to be a bystander to this historical tension. Be it policy makers or ordinary citizens, the decision on Iran will be, on some level, a vote in this ancient referendum. To choose one side or the other is a declaration of the Westerner's position on a pressing political issue; but it is also his proof of recovery from the colonial mindset. To have transcended colonial thinking is not to embrace the displays of fanaticism as manifestations of authenticity. It is to recognize all global citizens as equals, and as such as deserving of the indisputable rights enjoyed in the West. Whatever happens to Iraq and the dream of creating a democracy in the Middle East, Iran is already going through pains of transition. Iranians are turning to the notion of civil society and moderation, not simply as political necessities, but also as ways to define themselves as distinct, and thus to pay contemporary tribute to a past that has, despite the centuries, remained a formative force in their present.

Mrs. Hakakian, author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Crown, 2004), is writing a book about the assassination of
Iranian Kurdish leaders.URL for this article:
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