Legend, Legitimacy and Making a National Narrative in the Historiography of Qajar Iran (1785–1925)

Amanat, Abbas

doi:10.5040/9780755610426.ch-007

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…77 Incidentally, it is in this same period, between 1869 and 1892, that several French works on Napoleon and French history were published in translation in Iran. 78 These, together with a number of books on other aspects of French history, found a place in Naser al-Din Shah's personal library. 79 Towards the end of his reign, the same ruler also commissioned a translation of James Fraser's History of Nader Shah, which was not published until 1902, though.…”

Section: Nader Shah In Europe's Eighteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

The wrath of God or national hero? Nader Shah in European and Iranian historiography

Matthee

2023

JRAS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the way in which Iran's eighteenth-century ruler Nader Shah was portrayed in contemporary Europe as well as in Iran, and how the resulting image—half national hero, half ruthless warlord—has resonated until today. In an age short on ‘great’ leaders, Nader spoke to the imagination like no other contemporary ruler, Western or Asian. Nader's subsequent record can be read as a palimpsest, a layered series of images of multiple world conquerors, from Alexander to Napoleon. The latter, who shared Nader's humble background and evoked a similar ambivalence, represented the closest analogue, turning him into the European Nader Shah. In the modern West, Nader no longer speaks to the imagination. Modern Iranians, by contrast, have come to see him as the Iranian Napoleon. While still ambivalent about him, they admire him as the ruler who regenerated the nation and ended foreign occupation, yet his undeniable cruelty and imperialism make him an awkward national hero.

show abstract

Section: Nader Shah In Europe's Eighteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

The wrath of God or national hero? Nader Shah in European and Iranian historiography

Matthee

2023

JRAS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Yarshater 2011: 583-84.38 Amanat 1989. See also Amanat's relevant entries on the historiographies of the Qajar and the Pahlavi periods in Encyclopaedia Iranica.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Occidentalism and Historiography in Modern Iran: Fereydun Adamiyat, One of Twentieth-Century Iran's Foremost Historians, and His Assessment of the Rise of National Socialism in Germany and the Fall of the Weimar Republic

Bast

2016

Iran

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Turning away from the stance initially adopted by scholars of Iran who had been inspired by Said's Orientalismthesis, a line of academic enquiry that one might call "Iranian occidentalism", i.e. the study of Iranian perceptions-or perhaps, (re)constructions-of the West, has been gathering considerable momentum in the last decade or so. While work has been done on several different facets of this "Iranian occidentalism"-e.g. its manifestations in travelogues, poetry and prose literature, the arts, or academic philosophy-no attention has so far been paid by scholars to the question, how, if at all, historians working in Iran have studied the history of the Occident in their academic writings. This essay addresses this question and breaks new ground by analysing the rare instance of one of twentieth-century Iran's most venerated historians-the "father of modern Iranian history", Fereydun Adamiyat (1920-2008)-writing on a completely non-Iran related, major topic within modern European history-the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the fall of the Weimar Republic. This analysis begins by explaining Adamiyat's account of the destruction of Germany's democracy in the 1930s in its unexpected context-a book on social democratic thought in Iran at the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) published in Tehran for the first time in 1975. It then proceeds to assess Adamiyat's account of the triumph of National Socialism in 1930s Germany in terms of its merits as a contribution to scholarship, before enquiring into the potential of a present-day political agenda on the part of Adamiyat, who chose to write on this particular topic at a specific time, during the mid-1970s, when Iran seemed to have reached a level of stability and (sudden) wealth that could not have been more different from the troubled final years of the Weimar Republic. In so doing, this essay does not only open up an entirely new chapter in the study of Iranian occidentalism, but also makes an original contribution to another burgeoning field, the study of the development of history as an academic discipline and as a politically contested body of knowledge in twentieth-century Iran.

show abstract

Legend, Legitimacy and Making a National Narrative in the Historiography of Qajar Iran (1785–1925)

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The wrath of God or national hero? Nader Shah in European and Iranian historiography

The wrath of God or national hero? Nader Shah in European and Iranian historiography

Occidentalism and Historiography in Modern Iran: Fereydun Adamiyat, One of Twentieth-Century Iran's Foremost Historians, and His Assessment of the Rise of National Socialism in Germany and the Fall of the Weimar Republic

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About