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The intellectual 'invention of Iran' is a potent image that owes its birth to the Orientalist practice of archaeology and historiography from the mid-19th to the latter 20th century: an intellectual enterprise that originated from the myth of Aryan race theory, the hypothesis of Aryan migration to the Indian subcontinent, and the subsequent positioning of Persian ethnie to be the sole author of Iran's 'glorious national past'. This Eurocentric narration has given rise to 'Persianness' as an ethnoracial form of supremacy akin to the role of Whiteness in Europe and the US. In this article, I not only examine the epistemic foundations of Iranian nationalism but, more importantly, show how the enduring legacy of the Orientalist interpretation of Iran's past animates the work of contemporary Persian scholars and elites. I argue that the historical construction of Persianness as a privileged identity has essentialised seeing, thinking, knowing, and speaking like a Persian and thereby presented it as a natural order of things. This raciolinguistic invention sustains a habitus that perceives and treats the non-Persian histories and memories only through the lens of Persianness – in which they are by definition less-than.
Ahmad Mohammadpour (Mon,) studied this question.