Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture by Farzin Vejdani (review)

Vejdani’s study of Iranian historical writing and history making from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries works largely with the traditional toolbox of historians. It engages in deep analysis of texts and their meanings, contextualizes sources, and examines conceptual changes over time. Although this study fits squarely within the discipline of history, its methodology and conclusions offer certain interdisciplinary ramifications.

Building on social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas, the book explores how Iranian historians “operated within a field of historiographical production in which their position within institutions and in relation to dominant discourses” shaped their understanding of the past (9). Moreover, Vejdani documents how historians worked within and shaped a modern public sphere of Iranian writers and readers, functioning with relative autonomy from the modern state. Thus were they able to create “new forms of historical writing insofar as a broad spectrum of political and social movements employed history to craft a genealogy for their present-oriented programs” (11). Linking to studies of modern education and literature, Vejdani’s book shows how history writing in Iran accompanied and facilitated the establishment of the earliest modern educational institutions, while contributing to the development of new trends in Persian literature. The book’s interdisciplinary contribution is mainly confined to the fields of education and literary studies.

In exploring how Iranian historical texts (textbooks, translations, pedagogical manuals, and serialized accounts in the periodical press) were produced, circulated, debated, and contested over time, Vejdani focuses on social strata comprised of court employees, state bureaucrats, journalists, poets, students, educationalists, teachers, men, women, Muslims, and ethnic minorities—in addition to those who, by the 1930s, worked as professional historians. Vejdani’s treatment of Iranian educationalists bears closer examination. He argues that in the absence of a centralizing state, advocates of modern-style schooling and private founders of schools in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century had the freedom to compose histories that were experimental in both form and content. This era of relative openness about reflections on the past allowed for “contending visions of citizenship in a revolutionary era” (37).

By the 1930s, a rising authoritarian state assumed a greater role in opening schools and controlling curriculum, pushing historians and educationalists toward more standardized interpretations of both past and present. This development was accompanied by a change in the social background of history writers, who now tended to be university-trained, working for the state as bureaucrats or teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Vejdani’s chapter about the British Orientalist Edward Granville Browne has broad implications for the field of literary studies. Building on recent scholarship, he challenges Edward Said’s claims about the nature of Orientalism and the production of knowledge about the so-called Orient. Holding a Cambridge University chair of Arabic and Persian literature, Browne was more directly engaged in Persian affairs than his European Orientalist counterparts, acting as an ardent critic of British imperialism, supporter of Iranian nationalism, and friend of Iran’s radical and liberal reformers. His ground-breaking work in Persian literature, history, and politics featured extensive input from Iranians and Indians. As Vejdani argues, the “Republic of Letters” to which Browne and his Iranian colleagues belonged “constituted a novel mode for canonizing Persian literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (152).

Making History in Iran is a rich study based on primary sources that makes important contributions to Iranian historiography by situating it within a broad comparative analytical framework informed by recent studies in European, Islamic, and Middle Eastern history. In addition to its essentially historiographical purpose, this work also merits attention as an interdisciplinary study because of its specific contributions to the fields of modern literary and educational studies.