Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet: On the History of Iranian Nationhood

With the goal of harnessing the untapped potential of Iranian-Americans, and to build the capacity of the Iranian diaspora in effecting positive change in the U.S. and around the world, the Iranian Americans’ Contributions Project (IACP) has launched a series of interviews that explore the personal and professional backgrounds of prominent Iranian-Americans who have made seminal contributions to their fields of endeavour. We examine lives and journeys that have led to significant achievements in the worlds of science, technology, finance, medicine, law, the arts and numerous other endeavors. Our latest interviewee is Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) analyzes the significance of land and border disputes to the process of identity and nation formation, as well as to cultural production, in Iran and its borderlands. It pays specific attention to Iran’s shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (later Iraq and Turkey), Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf region. Her book was translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Tehran, Iran and has been released in paperback by Princeton in 2011. It is currently being translated into Turkish.

Building on this body of research, Professor Kashani-Sabet is completing a forthcoming book, Tales of Trespassing: Borderland Histories of Iran and the Middle East (under contract to Cambridge University Press), in which she expands on her arguments about frontiers, nature, and border communities in Middle Eastern modernity. She spent the 2015–16 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Social Science in Princeton, New Jersey participating in the School’s designated theme, “Borders and Boundaries.”

In addition, Dr. Kashani-Sabet has worked extensively on the histories of disease, science, and reproductive politics. She finished a book entitled, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2011), which received the 2012 book award from the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies for outstanding scholarship in the field of Middle East gender studies.

Currently, she is preparing a book on America’s historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world entitled, Between Heroes and Hostages: A Cultural History of US-Iranian Relations (under contract to Princeton University Press). She has delivered numerous public presentations drawn from this research project.

Tell our readers where you grew up and walk us through your background. How did your family and surroundings influence you in your formative years?

I grew up in Tehran, Iran, and we spent many summers and vacations up north in Rasht, Gilan, where my parents met and where my grandparents and our extended family lived. My father was an engineering professor who received his doctorate from Stanford in the 1960s. Despite opportunities to work abroad, he loved Iran and returned home to play a formative role in developing the engineering program at the University of Tehran and elsewhere. My uncles were also physicians trained in the United States. The women in our family were well read and culturally curious. My grandmother supported charitable activities for women, and my mother attended college in the United States. So, I came from a strong academic and socially conscious background, and I have cherished that upbringing my entire life.

As a child, I attended the Community School in Tehran (formerly an American mission school) from nursery until its closure during the revolution. Although in retrospect I wish Persian culture had been better integrated into the school’s curriculum, I believe that the school’s inclusive educational environment opened up my mind to different traditions and cultures at a young age. We experienced real diversity without realizing it at the time. My classmates practiced different faiths and hailed from many countries in the region and the world. In first grade, our teacher made us learn how to count from one to ten in all the languages represented in the classroom. That is why I still know how to count from one to ten in Japanese! My favorite memory was marking a tradition called “International Day.” Every year, each class had to learn about the culture of one specific country and put on a show for the entire school representing that country as part of International Day. This celebration gave us the opportunity to discover different cultures in an inclusive, interactive, and memorable way.

What has been your personal key to success? What were the biggest inspirations for your career?

I have been endowed with at least one virtue: determination. I resolved early on to make the most of my opportunities, for better and for worse, and I was determined to pursue my intellectual aspirations regardless of the obstacles strewn upon my path. I was abetted in this quest with a profound love for literature. I read widely and in different languages, as I still do. In my darkest moments, I turned my fear and disappointment to literature and writing, and I sought out my favorite writers for inspiration. From reading Henry David Thoreau, I learned about “building castles in the air” and laying their foundations in life. From muddling my way through Shakespeare, I discovered that “the quality of mercy is not strained,” and that it is always better to have mercy than to exact revenge. In my French classes, Albert Camus showed that “in the midst of winter I learned finally that there lay in me an invincible summer.” [Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.] And, from reading Omar Khayyam, I discovered that “the caravan of life shall pass” and to treasure the moment. I will always be grateful to these extraordinary writers (and to many more) for showing me the resilience of the human spirit in all the meaningful moments of my life.

What is the biggest challenge you have overcome in your career?

In one word — nonconformity. The renowned American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson — incidentally, an admirer of the great Persian poet, Hafez — wrote: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.” I am unconventional in my thinking, and I have at times confronted the disapproval of those in positions of power for my nonconformity and for my refusal to succumb to various forms of pressure.

Let me give you a small example: The decision to become a historian and writer did not initially sit well with my family. Like many other Iranians and Iranian Americans, I was expected to settle on a “normal” profession — doctor, banker, lawyer, engineer. I still remember the looks on my relatives’ faces when I gave them the news. “You mean, they shipped you out of Iran for this?” It was not easy at first, but I knew I would languish in an environment that did not allow me to write or to think creatively. I believe that we need more Iranian Americans in non-traditional fields, and it is exciting to see that change slowly creeping into our communities. We need intellectuals, musicians, and poets as much as bankers, dentists, and lawyers. Culture cannot thrive without nurturing the human soul.

In Frontier Fictions, you look at the efforts of Iranians to defend their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explore how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. Could you elaborate on this for our readers?

I was fascinated by the processes by which Iran was forced to define its boundaries in the 19th century — an era that saw the territorial contraction of the country. The story that we were always told was one of Iran as a great expansive empire, but in the 19th century, the opposite happened. Some Iranians were even taken as slaves in some of the borderlands. Frontier Fictions narrated the history of Iran as a tale of territorial loss and chronicled the meaning of this defeat for the country and for those living in the borderlands — people whose identities remained fluid but who were later forced to adopt one nationality over others.

In Frontier Fictions, you focus on geography to explore a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. Could you elaborate on this as well?

As I was researching my book, I realized that the study of modern geography emerged as a popular discipline around the same time that Iran’s boundaries were being negotiated. Of course, it made absolute sense, but little was written on these topics twenty years ago when I was a young graduate student; today, we take this narrative for granted. For my study I collected geographic works, maps, manuscripts on boundary delineation efforts, and pored over many newly founded newspapers of the period to put the interest in geography in the proper historical context.

Nationalism remains a complicated and often ill-executed ideology. It is frequently abused and manipulated to promote the politics of exclusion. Middle Eastern nationalisms typically adopted mono-lingual and mono-ethnic state identities, thereby excluding many of their inhabitants. This was at times no different in Iran, which has historically been home to people of different faiths and ethnicities. However, I argued that Iranian nationalism, unlike Persian nationalism, defined itself principally through territory or identification with a territory — a homeland with vague and shifting boundaries and populations — that accommodated different ethnic and sectarian communities and cultures over time. To be Iranian did not necessarily mean conversing only in Persian, though many Iranians did acquire some knowledge of Persian even as they retained their regional dialects and identities. The constitution revolution ushered in a much-needed legal framework intended to recognize and protect individual liberties, but, as state institutions expanded, Iranianness also increasingly became defined through the Persian language and the Shia faith. As a result, there developed inherent tensions in definitions of modern Iranian identity, and contemporary Iran still grapples with these pressures.

In Frontier Fictions, how does your approach enrich our understanding of Iranian nationalism and nationalism in general? And what is considered to be the beginning of the modern era of Iran?

I offered a paradigm that argued for the centrality of frontiers — and the fluidity of frontier identities — in understanding the process of nation formation in Iran and its borderlands. In doing so, I strove to provide a comprehensive look at the cultural and social impact of these territorial changes in Iran and its borderlands over a century. I put forth a different narrative for approaching questions of identity that emphasized notions of space and the volatility of frontiers, especially in contested tribal and borderland communities. In particular, I stressed the centrality of land and borders as crucial subjects in the historical recovery and creation of modern Middle Eastern nationalisms. Through my work on the delineation of Iran’s boundaries, I considered the fictions that unified lands as well as the frictions, or collisions, along the frontiers that threatened to cleave geographic entities. The unsettled nature of Iran’s borderlands (and frankly those of many other modern Middle Eastern countries) is the best argument for why this analytical lens was necessary, but also curiously missing, from historical studies of the region.

Historians hotly debate the question of Iranian modernity. Most courses in the United States would likely date the modern era with the establishment of the Qajar dynasty in 1796. But, I suppose, an argument could also be made for dating Iranian modernity with the Safavid Empire (1501–1722). It all comes down to what we mean by “modernity” and when historians begin to locate the formation of nationhood. Most scholars now agree that nationalism is a unique political phenomenon made possible as a result of the new ways in which states began to centralize their dominions and manage their subjects. These included better surveillance of the population and a robust print culture that often inculcated patriotic values. I would also include the process of boundary formation as central among them.

In Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford University Press, 2011), you reveal the complex relationship between health, hygiene, citizenship, and gender in modern Iran. Could you explain these complex relationships?

In Conceiving Citizens, I wanted to move the debate about women away from veiling and toward other matters that deeply concerned them — namely, reproductive health. Although it was difficult to recover women’s voices and to document the culture of childbirth in nineteenth-century Iran, I believe that this was a story worth telling because mothering remained a revered (and sometimes reviled) profession for many. I was interested in understanding how modern notions of medicine, midwifery, and nursing affected women’s health and the culture of childcare in Iran, which suffered from high infant mortality. I found it fascinating to trace the transformations in Iran’s culture of midwifery — a field practiced by women and one that became hard to supplant despite the opening of modern hospitals and clinics. I also wanted to chronicle the ways in which the disabled were excluded from conversations about health and vigor in Iran, including the manner in which they were educated and parented. This book therefore chronicled the development of modern healthcare and hygiene with an emphasis on reproductive politics and the culture of motherhood over a period of nearly two centuries.

You have published a novel, Martyrdom Street (Syracuse University Press, 2010). It chronicles the lives of three Iranian women across borders and generations. Can you tell us about your novel?

My novel portrays the lives of three Iranian women of different generations who are grappling with the consequences of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Politics has a corrosive effect on the lives of ordinary individuals who are often forgotten in the grand narratives written about momentous historical events. My characters confront the struggles of newly arrived Iranian immigrants in the United States who struggled to fit in and who tried to make sense of the imposition of politics on their lives.

You are preparing a book on America’s historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world entitled, “Between Heroes and Hostages: Key Moments in US — Iranian Relations” (under contract to Princeton University Press). Could you tell us about your book?

These are hard times for the United States and Iran, and I believe it is incumbent on scholars to explain why. There is also a startling amount of prejudice against Iran (and Iranians) in this country at times, and we have an obligation to address such narratives through well-grounded historical research. For example, the Muslim Ban disproportionately targets Iranians, who have never committed a terrorist act on US soil. Relatedly, it is problematic to view Iran’s role in the Persian Gulf as an aggressive one when in fact the Arabian Peninsula has managed to expand its influence far more pervasively in the twentieth century than Iran ever could, given Iran’s contentious relationship with Great Britain during the same period. As a result, the presence of Iranians or of people of Iranian heritage is systematically being erased from the histories of newly established countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, which maintain strong tribal links to the Arabian Peninsula. If anything, Iran’s position has retreated significantly, and it has been forced to adopt a defensive posture in its backyard. Nonetheless, Iran must try to find a way to coexist with neighboring populations even as it legitimately demands restitution for its historical grievances.

Regarding the relationship between the United States and Iran, I try to identify key moments that have aligned the interests of the United States with those of Iran, but I also point to the fissures, whether cultural or political, that threatened this relationship before the breach of 1979. Some of these key encounters such as the Musaddiq crisis are well known. Others such as the cultural impact of top-down reforms are less familiar. My forthcoming book is not a comprehensive history of US-Iranian relations, but rather a reflection on the political and cultural transformations that ultimately disrupted this relationship.

Can you share your thoughts on your Iranian-American identity? What does it mean to be an Iranian-American to you?

To be Iranian American means to partake of two remarkable cultures. Who else can enjoy Nowruz and March Madness at the same time? We are fortunate to be able to claim two communities that have given so much to the world through their investment in the humanities and the sciences. For me personally, my American identity has enhanced my Iranian upbringing, whereas my Iranian identity has refined my American self. As an Iranian American, I am grateful for having found a thriving home in the United States. I strive to absorb and blend the best of both worlds and encourage the next generation to do the same. But, in true academic form, I also nurture a healthy skepticism of the political forces that demand from us conformity to any one of these identities. Sometimes, it’s okay to be different — in fact, sometimes, it is necessary and welcome. I try to remember this simple idea every time I sit down to write.