Many things have changed in Iran over its modern history, but one thing has not changed: its imperial consciousness and inclination. The country’s name changed in 1935, and what had been “Persia” became “Iran,” and it then became an “Islamic Republic” in 1979.
Throughout, the balance of the state’s ideology would also shift, with nationalism emphasized at the expense of religion at times, most emphatically under Reza Shah Pahlavi, who overthrew the Qajars in his 1921 coup, and religion taking precedence over nationalism at others, most notably with the Khomeinist revolution. Nonetheless, its imperial inclinations never waned, nor did the use of both religion and nationalism.
In the background lies the fact that the Safavids claimed to be descendants of the Imams since converting Iran to Shiism in 1501. The Qajars, however, soon came to see themselves as the sect’s guardians and exploited the broad popular sentiment that the collapse of Safavid rule had paved the way for their suffering at the hands of Afghanistan’s rulers, who not only persecuted Iran’s people and homeland, but also regarded the Persians’ sect as inferior to their own.
In the 19th century, Iran’s pride was wounded by the financial and commercial concessions that were granted to foreigners and by its defeats at the hands of Russia. As a result, Iran lost control of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other territories; meanwhile, to the east, the Afghans hardened their provocative rule over the city of Herat.
The Qajar authorities ultimately collapsed because their rule was no longer suited to imperial inclinations: they tolerated domestic fragmentation that granted regional and provincial leaders the upper hand over the center, as well as the split of the empire into Russian and British spheres of influence in 1907. Even eleven years earlier, in 1896, the country was shaken by a development of enormous magnitude, the assassination of the Naser al-Din Shah Qajar. The assassin was a disciple of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the theorist of “Islamic League”- that is, one imperial consciousness had seemingly assassinated another.
Reinforced by oil revenues and driven by his megalomania, imperial pomp struck its biggest blow under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. First, nuclear ambitions emerged, and they were met by the West German company Siemens, alongside a lavish armament program and the development of a massive army. Second, the Shah crowned himself emperor and his wife, Farah Diba, empress in 1967.
Third, in 1971, opulent celebrations costing hundreds of millions of dollars were held in the ancient royal city of Persepolis. To mark the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire’s founding, the Shah put on the most extravagant celebrations the world had ever seen up until then, inviting some world rulers to the heart of the desert, where he showcased his unrestrained flamboyant vanity.
Fourth, Iran seized three Arab islands in the Gulf in 1971, and it then intervened to quash an uprising, supported by South Yemen at the time, in Dhofar in the Sultanate of Oman. Accordingly, some scholars developed the term “sub-imperialism” to characterize Sassanian Iran.
The Khomeinist regime, as is well known, took all of these the Sassanian style even further, supplementing them with his theory of “exporting the revolution,” the creation of armed militias, and calling the shots in several Arab countries.
This imperial consistency, which cuts across time and regimes, albeit with interruptions and contradictions, can also be seen in other countries with deep imperial histories, such as Türkiye and Russia. Under the Ottoman sultans, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, his secularists and military men, and then under the Islamists of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as the Russian tsars, Lenin and his communist heirs, and then with Vladimir Putin, all shared this imperial inclination and justified it through either strategic and security national interests, or the promotion justice and liberation in the name of human progress, or both.
However, imperial consciousness always entails a contradictory sensibility that we could call the mass body sensibility. On the one hand, scale generates a sense of entitlement, but on the other hand, it warns that this entitlement demands more than just size, especially when the body has become flabby.
There is another contradiction born of this sensibility of the mass imperial body. On the one hand, it urges those subjected to it, who have no say in its affairs, especially those in the regions far from the center, to cooperate with any outsider who violates that body. This was particularly evident during the Second World War, when many in the outer edges of the Soviet Union collaborated with the Nazis. On the other hand, it sparks indignation and leaves a narcissistic wound in the center and its orbit, making the defense of the homeland, whatever the regime, akin to a defense of the soul.
The first dimension tempts foreign actors to intervene, or to take their interventions further; the second deters intervention - the way in which Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran strengthened and perpetuated the Khomeinist regime comes to mind. Since then, the various threads of the region have become entangled, and they remain entangled to this day.
