Doing research for an article about US-Iranian relations coming (relatively) soon to a newsstand near you, I encountered some eye-grabbing verses from the Shahnameh (”book of great kings”), the national epic not only of Persia/Iran, but the whole expanse of the Airyanem Vaejah (modern Persian: Iran-vez, whence the name “Iran”), the “Aryan lands” divinely consecrated by Ahura Mazda and civilized by Cyrus the Great (Old Persian: Kurush Xsyathiya Vazraka) and his descendants. The epic poem was composed by Ferdowsi c. 1000 years after the birth of Jesus and somewhere between 1100 and 7000 years after the birth of Zoroaster (Avestan: Zarathushtra, modern Persian: Zartosht). It includes these lines:

zeh shir-e shotor khordan-o soosmaar
arab-ra be kojaa resaandast kaar
keh takht-e kiani ra konad arezoo
tofoo bar toh, ey charkh-e gardoon, tofo

This translates, roughly, as:

Drinking camel’s milk and eating lizards
Arabs have reached where?
That they may desire the throne of Kian
Spit on thee, oh fate[/universe/the planet/lit. 'oh rotating thing'], spit!

To clarify, kian is one middle Persian rendering of Avestan kavi, the name of the legendary proto-Aryan forerunners of the Aryan people, from whom the regal authority of the Persians over the Aryan lands is derived; kavi is also the root of the Avestan word khvarenah, a kind of catch-all term for the Zoroastrian package of concepts of glory, kingship, authority, divine ordination, etc. The idea persisted until the Khomeinist revolution ended the Persian/Iranian monarchy after a pretty good 2500-year run; in fact, the crown of the Qajar dynasty, which preceded the Pahlavis, was called the Kiani Crown.

So Ferdowsi is accusing Arabs of attempting an unholy usurpation of the divinely-ordained rule of the Aryans, of transgressing the laws of nature and of a God older and more powerful than the deity of Arab religion. Consequently, he is both praying for and predicting that Arabs would suffer the wrath of eternal if dormant Mazdaic justice, the revenge of the pre-Islamic universe or pre-Islamic fate (depending on how one translates charkh-e gardoon). That’s some fairly primal cursing going on — juxtaposed, in a neat bit of high-low pyrotechnics, with the camel’s milk and lizard-eating epithets. (How’s that for a rich language?) In other words, pious, supposedly God-glorifying contempt of Arabs is sewn irrevocably into the foundational text of the Persian world — a contempt Ferdowsi substantiated by refashioning many of the legendary villains of ancient Aryan and (especially) Avestan mythopoeic “history” — villains whose place in Aryan legend was secure long before Aryan peoples had a concept of Arabs — into demonic Arab tyrants. The upshot is that enmity between Persians and Arabs goes back a long, long way.

Such mutual antagonism predates Ferdowsi by centuries, presumably going back to the battlefield at Qadissiyyah, where the Arab forces of the Rashidun Caliphate decisively defeated the armies of Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanian or Zoroastrian ruler of Persia, conquered nearly the whole of the ancient Airyanem Vaejah from Iraq (Middle Persian/Pahlavi eraq, “lowlands”) in the southwest to Khorasan (Avetan/Pahlavi Khorshid/Khorshan, “land of sunrise”) in the northeast with Parsa (middle Persian Pars, modern Persian Fars because Arabic influence robbed the language of many of its p-sounds) at its center.

The new rulers then set about imposing Arabic writing and religion on a much older civilization, destroying many of its cultural treasures — the large majority of Zoroastrian and Avestan literature is lost forever, much of it literally burned by the conquerors — and subjecting its people to centuries of foreign domination. (Is there really anything surprising, given all that, about Iran being the primary bastion of Shiism out of identification with dispossessed, betrayed, and slain Ali, amid hostile Sunni neighbors on all sides?)

Hence it was no coincidence that Saddam Hussein had the name “Qadissiyyah” inscribed on the uniform of the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war. I’m substantially less familiar with Arabic literature and historiography than with Persian — i.e., don’t know the language at all and scarcely know any more by way of translation than your run-of-the-mill, too-big-for-his-britches scrivener on the internet — but I do know that, mirroring Persian loathing of Arabs, the traditional Arab conception of Persia/Iran is of a decadent seat of heathen impiety in desperate need of true Muslim (i.e. Arab) cleansing and civilizing. In modern days, that sentiment was expressed in such publications as Three Whom God Should Not Have Created, a propaganda pamphlet by Saddam Hussein’s uncle Khairallah Talfah published in 1981 to boost religious and patriotic fervor for the war with Iran (the “three” of the title are Persians, Jews, and flies), but which Talfah actually began working on in the early 1940s.

So presumably, Arab anti-Iranian partisans have a narrative of the justification of contempt for Persia/Iran about as elaborate as the Iranian narrative of antipathy for Arabs. If the Persian narrative of anti-Arab feeling seems to reach an exceptional emotional pique, bear in mind that Persia was both older than Arab civilization by millenia, and was the vanquished party in the conflict. That’s bound to produce complexes.

Now of course, it’s possible for animosities between traditional cultural and ethnic enemies to be overcome, and there are a surfeit of individuals on both sides of Persian-Arab hostility who have overcome it. (Particularly among both cultures’ western and especially American diasporas, I would be stunned if such feelings of antagonism persisted as anything more significant than old wives’ tales. Being situated in cultures in which Persians and Arabs are treated as one and the same group — i.e., Muslim, or else Arab by default, which is really galling to non-Arabs — is bound to change things a bit.) And in practice, an array of other, independent factors bear on relations between Persian and Arab societies, alongside the realpolitik and constantly calculating, shifting allegiances of regimes from Riyadh to Tehran to Kabul.

Nonetheless that mutual animosity persists strongly enough to be a rallying point for both sides in war that claimed one million lives as recently as 1980-1988. Which is unsurprising, given that the roots of the antagonism between the two cultures touches on some of the earliest roots of those cultures themselves, could not possibly go any deeper or further back in time than they do, and substantially guided the formation of modern Arab and Persian culture and conceptions of self-identity.

One cannot begin to understand the international politics of western Asia without understanding that history, and one cannot acquire a truly serviceable, strategically useful understanding without further grasping at least in part the byzantine complexity of the tribal, ethnic, regional, national, religious, and linguistic loyalties on which the foreign affairs of middle Eastern and central Asian states supervene.

But fuck it, that sounds like a lot of work. Let’s just call them all Islamofascists and bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

(credit to my friend Rod for help translating the Ferdowsi verses)

Tags: epistemology, iran