**Came across something interesting about chosing between the Heroes in Irani Culture.
- Shah’s Iran**
A state-sponsored nationalism emerged in the 1960s Iran. The Persian kings Cyrus and Darius were adopted as golden age icons needed by a centralized nationalism. The country’s Islamic heritage was largely ignored.
The late Shah fashioned himself as heir to the great old Persian kings. He presided over an age of massive industrial and economic modernization. The oil riches that poured into Iran with the dramatic 1973 oil price rise only boosted his confidence. In the old tradition, he called himself King of Kings and Light of the Aryans. He was proud of Iran’s ancient Aryan roots, perhaps because it differentiated Iran from its Middle East neighbors, perceived to be inferior in the Shah’s (and many Persian) eyes. The Shah draped his kingship in pre-lslamic symbols of the Persian past, particularly glorification of Cyrus
and Darius. Though he paid lip service to prominent Muslim holidays, the message was clear to Iranians: The only history worthy of their attention was pre-Islamic.
2. Khomeini’s Iran
Khomeini ignored Iran’s pre-Islamic history of kings and empire. After the 1979 revolution, attacks on Cyrus and Darius as “imperialist tyrants” became commonplace. Khomeini, in describing Iranian kings of history, said that “even those who were reputed to be ‘good’ were cruel and vile.” In the culture wars preceding and after the revolution, there was, in a sense, a battle of these dueling golden ages.
**3. Nature of conflict in choosing heroes
For the Shah, the Iranian hero was embodied in the kings Cyrus and Darius and the mythical hero Rostam from Iran’s eleventh-century epic the Shahnameh. For Khomeini, the hero to be admired was the Shi’a Imam Hossein and Imam Ali. The Shah’s aggressive nationalism and Khomeini’s exclusivist Islam forced Iranians to choose, however, between Imam Ali and Rostam, between Cyrus and Hossein. Several prominent intellectuals in the Shah’s era chose Hossein and Imam Ali, Jaial al-e-Ahmad, a prominent essayist and writer in the 1950s and 1960sF ridiculed what he called “a mania for honoring the ancient past , . . for competing and boasting vaingloriously and stupidly of Cyrus and Darius, and for basking proudly in Rostam’s reflected glory.”
**
4. A situation we also see in Pakistan
The revolutionary and popular Intellectual Ali Shariati said: “Our people remember nothing from this distant past and do not care to learn about the pre-Islamic civilizations.... Consequently, for us a return to our roots means not a rediscovery of pre-Islamic Iran, but a return to our Islamic, especially Shi’a roots,” Today many Iranians are displaying a renewed interest in their pre-Islamic roots, repudiating Al-e-Ahmad and Shariati.
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5. Fusion to compensate**
Iranians, for their part, had long accommodated Iran’s pre-Islamic history within its Islamic traditions notwithstanding the elite attempts to stoke the differences. A legend grew that the “Prince of Martyrs,” **Imam Hossein, had married the daughter of the last Sassanian king, Yazdegird, thus seamlessly linking pre-lslamic Iran with Shi’a Iran. In coffee shops across earlytwentieth- century Iran, the celebrated storytellers wove tales celebrating both Imam Ali and Rostam. In the zurkhanehs (houses of strength), where traditional Iranian men gather to exercise with heavy wooden planks, the pictures on the walls include both Imam Ali and Rostam.
**
6. Folklore to accommodate both views
Qasim writes: “Persians have never viewed the more ancient past as something totally rejected by their present day Islamic culture. They succeeded in absorbing the deepest elements of that past into their Islamic culture rather than rejecting it.”
In one of these zurkhanehs in Tehran, 1 stumbled upon anecdotal evidence of NasrTs assertion. **I asked a sweating, heaving mustachioed man what he thought of the duality between Imam Ali and Rostam. **
“My friend,” he said, “let me tell you a story I heard in my uncle’s village. Imam Ali and Rostam took part in a friendly wrestling match. The two men were equally matched, and it was about to end in a draw. At the last moment, Imam Ali asked God for help. God helped him and Imam Ali won the match and the two heroes shook hands and embraced. Only God could have tipped the balance against Rostam. In all other respects, Rostam was equal to Imam Ali.”
I had heard the story before. It represented a way for people like Haji Agha and the traditional wrestler to reconcile their pride in Ferdowsi and Iran’s pre-Islamic past with their religion. Dr. R.K. Ramazani, the distinguished Iran scholar at the University of Virginia puts it this way: “There is no sense denying the Islamo-Iranic nature of our people. Both are important. One does not trump the other.”
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7. Points for discussion**
How do you see Iranis owning, disowning and then owning their culture?
Why we Pakistani could not appreciate our Pre-Islamic heroes? Is it due to the fact that our part of world had no links with Arabs like Iranis had and they could come up with relationship of their king the family of the Prophet? - referring toYazdegird’s daughter married to Hazrat Hussai (RA)
