Matthee on Zia Ebrahimi

Book Reviews | Comparative Politics a policy. The primary strength of Getting Paid for Taking Time is that it offers extensive histories of paid parental leave policy at both the national and state levels. It contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the important role that women’s organizations have played in policy passage. This is a great reference book for those who are looking for the most up-to-date policy developments on paid parental leave policy. COMPARATIVE POLITICS with moral degeneracy. French and German scholars completed this idealized image by positing a clear distinction between mentally agile Iranian Aryans, creative people open to multiplicity, and Arab Semites, unimaginative monotheists. Modern Iranians have found this reading of history reassuringly attractive and appropriated it for their own purposes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, they twisted it into a story of regeneration and redemption following defeat and humiliation by two bullying adversaries, Russia and Britain, nations that Iranians had never thought their equals, let alone their superiors. The British, in particular, also provided the impetus for a discursive change in Iranian history writing. John Malcolm, Britain’s first ambassador to Iran, historicized Iran in his A History of Persia (1815) by describing the country’s trajectory, in a secular mode, as linear and purposeful. Translated into Persian, works like that of Malcolm, together with new archeological findings, offered a template for Iranian literati intent on creating a national identity. The two pivotal figures whose writings provide the connective tissue in this study are Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Kermani. The former, a Russian from the Caucasus who served the Tsarist government, Iran’s main enemy, is an unlikely advocate of Iranian nationalism, although that fact is usually left unmentioned. Both were fervently anticlerical, and especially Kermani espoused the kind of virulent, racially inflected anti-Arab sentiment that in the twentieth century became commonplace among Iranians. Akhundzadeh and Kermani established the myth of pre-Islamic Iran as a powerful, literate, and humane society that was destroyed when the Arabs, lizard-eating Bedouins, invaded the country in the seventh century and robbed it of its identity by imposing Islam on it. The twentieth-century secular elite, led by Iran’s foremost modern historian, Fereydun Adamiyat (1920–2008), who wrote a biography of both men, canonized their assertion that Iranians have always loathed Arabs. The Islamic Revolution and its perceived rehabilitation of the Arabs and their religion only further hardened Iran’s secular classes, which include most Iranians living in the diaspora, in this conviction. The author does a good job showing how the lineage that modern Iranians claim for themselves is a hodgepodge of mythology and mumbo-jumbo—an invention of an unbroken tradition covering up a reality of rupture and discontinuity. He shows how the Iranians had but a dim idea of their pre-Islamic past until the Europeans The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation. By Reza Zia-Ebrahimi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 312p. $60.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/S1537592717002304 — Rudi Matthee, University of Delaware In the West, Aryanism as a concept denoting ethnicity has been discredited since World War II and now only thrives on the right-wing fringe of the political discourse, mostly in cyberspace. In Iran, by contrast, Aryanism as a signifier of identity is fully legitimate and proudly proclaimed by many, not just on the Internet but in everyday discourse and popular writing. Used to buttress a claim to the nation’s purportedly unbroken link to preIslamic times, it is employed above all to demonstrate how close Iranians are to (Western) Europeans and how different they are from Arabs—from Semites. Even the representatives of the Islamic Republic are not immune to this conceit; indeed, many would all but agree with the ruler they toppled in 1979 that Iran’s location in Asia is a mere geographical accident. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s richly evocative and provocative study explores the origins and exposes the fallacies of this self-view. He sees Iran imagined as Aryan as the outcome of “dislocative” nationalism, a self-view of mostly foreign origin that equates Islam with backwardness and that nostalgically and therapeutically harkens back to the great Persian Empire of Cyrus “the Great.” This self-image, he contends, combines ideas from the European Enlightenment and its quest for origins with the theories of nineteenth-century Western scholars who proclaimed the distinction between Aryans and Semites to be not just deep but unbridgeable for being ethnically determined. The mythical type of nationalism that resulted celebrates the famous cylinder of Cyrus as the original human rights manifesto and denies the Arabs any positive influence on Iran. Zia-Ebrahimi shows how European travelers “rediscovered” Persepolis in the sixteenth century, noting that the Iranians lacked a historical memory of the site and called it the Throne of Jamshid (referring to a mythological king). European scholars, beginning with the eighteenthcentury French Orientalist Anquetil du Perron, next laid bare the pre-Islamic roots of Iran. Following a classicist reading of history, they lauded the wisdom and justness of the Akhaemenid kings, extolled Zoroastrianism as the country’s original faith, and disparaged Islam, equating it 1166 Perspectives on Politics Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 205.153.92.178, on 21 Nov 2017 at 22:22:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717002304 “rediscovered” it. He correctly recognized the aversion to Arab and Turkish elements in Iranian culture as mostly the dichotomy between an old desert versus sown, culture versus barbarism dichotomy. He reminds us how the nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty fully acknowledged its Turkic roots, which included the Turkish language spoken by the elite, and how absurd it is to blame the seventhcentury Arab conquest for Iran’s “decline” for all of the subsequent 13 centuries. Perhaps most importantly and sensitively, he notes how Iran’s national epic, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, which Iranians see as ethnically and linguistically pure, is a composite work that essentially espouses an Islamic worldview. This study is especially good at explaining how modern Iranians have used the myth of pre-Islamic grandeur to come to terms with the country’s manifest backwardness, to help relieve the pain of national humiliation and restore the country’s badly bruised dignity. Zia Ebrahimi astutely recognizes the indispensable role that the idea of Aryanism played in this myth and how their presumed kinship with Europeans allowed Iranians to engage in what he calls submissive imitation, projecting themselves as subalterns rather than as critical interlocutors—to which their status as a great civilization should have entitled them. The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism falls short on two counts. First, the author gives too little credit to the pioneer of the idea of the “foreign” origins of Iranian nationalism, Mostafa Vaziri, who in 1993 published a groundbreaking book on the topic that proved to be premature and was accordingly ignored or dismissed (Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity). And he pays too little attention to the orthogenetic roots of the culturally imperious attitude embedded in the Iranian sense of self. He ignores the preoccupation with ritual purity of Iran’s dominant faith, Twelver Shi’ism, which into the twentieth century created a distance from non-Shi’is among the devout. He all but dismisses traditional Persian poetry and its representation of Iran as a paradisiacal land of surpassing beauty. And he overlooks a rather supercilious and self-congratulatory attitude vis-à-vis other peoples and cultures that long predates contact with the West, let alone the age of imperialism. This is an original study that shows the immense complexity of Iranian nationalism. Zia-Ebrahimi has also written a courageous book. It will be interesting to see how Iranians react to its unsettling argument and the extent to which they will be willing to acknowledge the racist streak in what has become a most cherished part of their identity. Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law. By Ran Hirschl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 320p. $45.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/S1537592717002316 — Heinz Klug, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ran Hirschl has made an extraordinary contribution to the creation of what might best be described as a selfreflexive vision of the field of comparative constitutionalism. In this third, and I hope not final, book—despite his disclaimer in the acknowledgments—Hirschl again explores “the intersecting worlds of constitutional law and comparative politics” (p. v), producing what Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago aptly describes as “an instant classic,” part intellectual history and part methodological manifesto. In Comparative Matters, Hirschl ably achieves his goal of clarifying “the essence of the term ‘comparative’ as a project and a method” (p. 5). This is simply a seminal work in the field of comparative constitutionalism. The book further advances the field by applying a much-needed critical analysis to the range of studies and approaches upon which scholars in the field have focused: including the choice of specific jurisdictions, described by the author as the “World Series” of comparative constitutional law, as well as the normative priorities of most participants in the field, which, he argues, reflects a “deep liberal bent” (p. 17). Hirschl’s central argument involves a tri-modal analysis that seeks to demonstrate that the “history of epistemological leaps in comparative public law” is rooted in three dynamic motivational forces—“need, intellect and politics”—each of which might in combination or singularly drive the process of comparison at different times and in different places (p. 149). First is the need of “extra-large political entities,” on the one hand, or “minority groups,” on the other hand, to manage diverse communities or to maintain their own identities by “opening up to the laws of others” (p. 148). Second is the intellectual curiosity of scholars, political actors, and members of the legal profession—from judges to advocates and councilors—to understand their “own constitutional setting” by comparing, contrasting, and analogizing their own situations to that of others understood to be in comparable contexts (p. 148). Finally, there is the use by constitutional designers, judges, and politicians of “comparative engagement as a means of promoting a concrete political agenda and worldview,” which may be advanced by exploring the constitutional formulations, interpretations, and laws of others (pp. 148–49). Building on this analytical construct, Hirschl concludes with three important insights: first, that engagement with the laws of others has a long history; second, that this comparative engagement is as much a political act as a legal one (p. 282); and third, that the “dramatic political transformations of the past few decades” has produced a “renaissance of comparative constitutional inquiry [that has been] greatly facilitated by economic and technological interconnectedness” (p. 283). The book is structured in two parts with three chapters in each. The first part explores the “history of engagement with the constitutive laws of others” and serves to identify December 2017 | Vol. 15/No. 4 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 205.153.92.178, on 21 Nov 2017 at 22:22:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717002304 1167