the identity

In 1971, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi staged a spectacle at Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. The ruins of Darius's palace were illuminated for visiting heads of state; Maxim's of Paris catered, and Maison Jansen designed the tents. At the center of this display was the Peacock Throne - or at least, a contested version of it. The original was likely looted by Nader Shah in 1739, taken to Delhi, and subsequently lost to history. Its presence at Persepolis was a perfect metaphor: a mythologized object of authenticity whose provenance was uncertain and whose symbolic power far exceeded its material reality.

The party cost between $22 million and $200 million, though estimates vary wildly. Orson Welles narrated the official documentary, and the Shah declared Iran the inheritor of Cyrus the Great, author of the so-called "first declaration of human rights." This claim was dubious - the Cyrus Cylinder is standard Mesopotamian conquest propaganda - but it resonated with Western audiences and served the Shah's modernization narrative.

Eight years later, the monarchy collapsed.

The Persepolis celebration encapsulates a fundamental tension: Iranian identity is often constructed through strategic historical amnesia. The Shah positioned himself as the spiritual inheritor of Cyrus while serving as a distinctively modern autocrat installed after the 1953 Anglo-American coup. The women in Dior gowns and men in self-awarded medals performed continuity with an ancient past while embodying a modern dependency.

This selective memory extends to how Persian culture is consumed globally. Consider how Rumi circulates in the West. His ubiquity is largely due to Coleman Barks, who produces popular "translations" despite not reading Persian. Barks systematically excises references to the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, leaving behind a vague spiritual yearning optimized for modern consumption.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

The original Persian does not say "wrongdoing and rightdoing." It says iman and kufr - faith and infidelity. The distinction is theological, not semantic. Barks' Rumi is palatable precisely because he has been de-Islamified.

This appropriation mirrors how Iranian nationalism often treats its own literary canon. Hafez is read as a purveyor of wine metaphors divorced from Sufi mysticism; Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is viewed as pre-Islamic nostalgia, ignoring that it was composed by a Muslim for a Muslim court. The claim that Islam destroyed Persian civilization is a modern invention of the Pahlavi era (1925-1979), designed to position the nation as Aryan, ancient, and therefore "European."

To maintain the narrative of "Persian glory vs. Islamic oppression," specific catastrophes must be ignored. The actual event that nearly ended Persian civilization was not the Arab conquest, but the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.

Genghis Khan's campaigns began in 1219. By 1258, Hulagu Khan had sacked Baghdad, destroying the Abbasid Caliphate. Contemporary estimates suggest the Mongols killed between 70% and 90% of the Iranian plateau's population. Infrastructure was razed, libraries burned, and irrigation systems destroyed.

Yet, the Mongol catastrophe is a footnote in modern discourse. For secular nationalists, acknowledging it admits that the pre-Mongol Islamic period was a cultural golden age. For the Islamic Republic, it highlights the fragility of religious authority against military might. Because it serves no political narrative, the greatest demographic collapse in Iranian history is met with silence.

Iranian identity is not a monolith; it is an engineering project.

In 1501, Shah Ismail I conquered the Iranian plateau and imposed Shia Islam on a predominantly Sunni population. This was not a gradual evolution but a violent state project. The Safavids imported Arab clerics from Lebanon to create a distinct religious identity in opposition to the Sunni Ottoman Empire. The "traditional" Iranian Shiism invoked today is a 16th-century political technology, younger than the Sistine Chapel.

The Pahlavi dynasty later attempted a similar engineering feat, but based on race rather than religion. Reza Shah's 1935 request that the world use "Iran" ("Land of the Aryans") instead of "Persia" was a plea for inclusion in European racial hierarchies. In 1936, Nazi Germany even declared Iran an honorary Aryan nation.

Both projects required the suppression of internal "Others." The Pahlavi state promoted "Persian" culture while marginalizing Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis, and Arabs. The Islamic Republic has largely maintained this linguistic dominance. Azeris constitute roughly 25% of the population, and despite high integration - even the current Supreme Leader is ethnic Azeri - their language and culture face systemic constraints. Meanwhile, the Kurdish and Baluchi regions remain militarized or economically neglected.

The binary of "Persian culture" versus "Islamic oppression" erases these hierarchies. It presents Iran as a victimized monolith, obscuring the internal colonization of minorities by Persian-speaking elites.

In the wake of the 1979 revolution, a fourth historiography emerged: the frozen memory of the diaspora.

In places like Los Angeles, Nowruz (New Year) celebrations function as ritual performances of a Tehran that existed in 1975 and exists nowhere now. The imagery - the pre-revolutionary flag, the Azadi Tower, the tomb of Cyrus - constitutes a curated heritage that excludes the last four decades entirely. This is grief performing as nationalism.

This version of Iran is class-specific (urban, Westernized) and ethnically specific (Persian). It cannot account for the social changes within Iran since 1979. It treats the past as recoverable and the Islamic Republic as a temporary aberration - both assumptions that history contradicts.

There is no synthesis that reconciles these contradictions. The secular and religious visions of Iranian identity are mutually exclusive, just as the Persian and multi-ethnic realities cannot be harmonized through rhetoric alone.

What remains is not a single identity, but competing performances of belonging. The Peacock Throne - looted, lost, possibly mythological - remains the enduring symbol. The object of devotion may not exist, and its history is certainly fabricated, but its power persists because it serves the needs of those who invoke it.