Do not take it out on Leonidas!
We suffer from a severe case of identity crisis!

 

I have not seen the movie “300” yet, so I can not comment on its details. However, I have seen a documentary on the History Channel about the making of the movie. I do intend to see the movie at some point only because I want to see first hand what all the controversy is about.

I am not going to take your time by detailing the “historical inaccuracies” of the movie, because the last thing this movie should be perceived as is a “historical” remake of the ancient battle at Thermopylae. Instead I want to talk about a very well concealed problem in Iranian community abroad. I stress “abroad” because I have lived abroad for almost 30 years, and that is the Iranian community with which I am more familiar, however, I dare suggest that what I am about to say may also apply to Iranians as a whole.

We Iranians suffer from a severe case of identity crisis!

This problem has its roots in Iran’s long history of being a conquering and conquered nation. A history that is a succession of incompetent, self-indulging, and sometimes plain mad rulers occasionally interrupted with bright spots representing reformers who brought some order into an otherwise long and turbulent history covered with warfare. This, mind you, is not unlike the history of any nation or ethnic group that has a legacy extending over the last millennia or more.

If you take the history of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman empires and remove the names of individuals, places, and dates, you will be left with the same main theme of glory, defeat, honor, deceit, prospering, suffering, freedom, and suppression. Iranian history is no different; however, what sets us apart in present time is what happened in more than half century of Pahlavi dynasty and what followed it.

During the Pahlavi dynasty there was a conscious effort to create a national identity. One which would unite all Iranians under a central banner and government, one that was much stronger and more stabilized than the weak and unstable governments preceding the Pahlavis under the Qajar Dynasty. This program started with a systematic change in the way history was thought to the Iranian youth as public school system was reformed. With the spread of public schools across the country, history books that thought us the official version of our history tended to emphasize our common glorious past. This trend reached its peak in October of 1971 when the Iranian government celebrated 2500 years of Iranian Monarchy. By then the majority of Iranian kids who were educated under that system were well rehearsed on who the Achaemenids and their great Persian Kings were.

To put this in perspective, the Pahlavi Monarchy’s attempt to streamline and sometimes doctor the country’s history was not anything new. It has been done and continues to be done by many, if not all, nations including the good old US of A.

By 1975, the 50th anniversary of Pahlavi Dynasty, majority of Iranian youth regardless of their political affiliations or ethnic background had a proud Iranian in them who saw the great Achaemenid Kings as their ancestors and took pride in their glorious history. Then came 1979!

The Islamic Revolution brought an end to Iranian Monarchy, and with it came a total and complete dismissal of everything Iranians had learned to be their glorious history.

Like any new ruling system anywhere in the world would do, the Islamic Republic started a systematic campaign of re-writing Iranian history. The problem was that their version was in a direct collusion course with everything that Iranians had been thought over 54 years of Pahlavi Monarchy. The conquering Arab armies, who were represented as ruthless barbarians, were now presented as messengers of Islam spreading the words of Prophet Mohammad, and the glorious Kings of our years past were reintroduced as ruthless tyrants who had to be overthrown in the name of God.

As if that was not enough, in 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, starting a bloody war that lasted 8 years, killed over one million people, and ironically revived Iranian nationalism in way that distinguished it from its neighboring Sunni Arab nations; not unlike what had happened under the Pahlavi Monarchy, but this time with a Shiite vs. Sunni flavor. The fact that many Sunni Arab countries gave Iraq their financial and political backing did not help matters.

During the 70s a large number of Iranians started migrating abroad. Arguably the most prosperous and therefore influential of these Iranian migrant groups was the one that settled in California. These Iranians were now caught in a dilemma. On one hand they desperately longed for a national/ethnic identity, on the other hand many of them were reluctant to associate themselves with the new ruling system in Iran. This model was replicated in other countries in various magnitudes depending on the size and influence of the Iranian migrant communities there.

Many Iranians decided to introduce themselves as “Persians” and not “Iranians” because the world “Persian” served two distinct and strong purposes; first it disassociated them from what had been going on in Iran since 1979, and then it associated them with everything glorious about Iran’s past. The same glorious past that was thought to them during the Pahlavi Monarchy.

The fact of the matter is that today’s Iran is at most only one third of what constituted the Persian Empire under Achaemenids. That Empire covered a vast area from parts of Eastern Europe to North Africa to India and neared the borders of today’s China, and much like today’s Iran, its ethnic makeup was very diverse. Any unbiased student of history would be hard pressed to define a unique look for our Persian ancestors unless (s)he focuses her/his efforts on the ethnic origins of the founder of the Persian Empire Cyrus the Great who before becoming a Great King was a leader of Persian people in Anshan located in Fars province in today’s Iran.

So, that brings us to the movie “300”. While no one can be certain what Cyrus, his people, and his eventual successors including Xerxes looked like, it is safe to assume that they were not 8 feet tall drag queens. But that is not what bothers most Iranians about the movie. What bothers us is the fact that now we find our adopted identity under a two pronged attack, one that started in 1979 and has picked up steam in recent years by the way of Hollywood.

I say “adopted identity” because our connection to the Achaemenid Persians is more of an ideological connection than anything else. Many of us have or genetic roots not in today’s Fars province, but perhaps somewhere in the greater Eurasian continent. While we all speak Farsi (or Persian if you prefer) many of us can find a great grandparent or near past ancestor who spoke a different language.

On the same token, many a people in Eurasia can claim their ancestry to be Persian, and any unbiased Iranian will have a hard time refuting that claim because it is more or less the same argument that we use when we associate ourselves to the Great Kings.

Don’t get me wrong. My intention is not to dismiss our true or perceived glorious ancestry, or discourage us from making those associations; however, be aware that there is always a chance that by going overboard with some of these claims we may be turning into a character not so dissimilar to the father character in the movie “My big fat Greek Wedding”.

In conclusion, by all means sign every petition that condemns the movie, write articles that better introduce the true face of the Achaemenid Persians, and do your best to nullify the enormous affects of the negative publicity that we are getting as a migrant ethnic group, but please do not take it out on Leonidas and his men! Remember that all they did was to give their lives defending their land in the face of an outside invading force, just like Ariobarzan and his men did nearly 150 years later against Alexander the Great. Comment