Few occasions have symbolised the power of Iranian delicate energy fairly as successfully as an activist in Chicago final April urging his attentive American viewers of ‘trainee protesters’ to chant ‘marg bar Emrika’ (‘demise to America’). The bizarreness of the episode, footage of which was extensively shared on social media, was made all of the extra acute by the dawning realisation that the chanting contributors had little concept what they had been being taught. There appeared at that second to be few limits to the attain of Iranian delicate energy, as Ayatollah Khamenei, chief of the Islamic Republic of Iran, thanked college students on Western campuses for his or her ‘help’.
There may be little doubt that the devastating warfare in Gaza has been a (modest) boon to the picture of the Iranian state overseas, even when it has didn’t galvanise its personal inhabitants in help of the Palestinian trigger. Most Iranians, drowning in an ocean of home issues, are bewildered by the obvious attraction of the Islamic Republic past its borders.
Some elements of that attraction may be simply defined, particularly the expansion of Iran’s regional affect. Western fatigue and indecisiveness have created a vacuum within the Center East that the Iranians, effectively versed within the diplomatic arts, have been solely too eager to take advantage of. An appreciation of regional languages, tradition, a shared faith (however the frictions between Shi’ism and Sunnism) and, above all, private networks, have labored to Iran’s benefit. These have been helped by a liberal disbursement of funds and arms – and a willingness to thumb their noses at america.
This final level has proved essential in enhancing Iranian status, particularly because the US has proved reluctant to answer its provocations, lots of which have taken the type of rocket assaults by Iranian-backed native militias towards US and different Western forces within the area. The notion of American weak point has inspired some states, similar to Saudi Arabia, to hunt their very own ‘peace’ with the Islamic Republic, drawing away from an explicitly Western orbit within the course of.
This affect nonetheless has its limitations. Because the Chilly Conflict within the Center East has from time to time turned sizzling, Arab states have proven themselves reluctant to accede to all of Iran’s calls for. It was notable that when Iran determined – unusually – to flex some exhausting energy in the direction of Israel in April 2024, a variety of key regional states, not least Jordan, had been unwilling to provide it a free hand.
Responsible fools
But when Iran has labored exhausting to domesticate its regional affect – albeit with combined success – it’s a lot more durable to clarify its persevering with attraction within the West, to which it has finished little or no to domesticate affection and really a lot to impress hostility. One reply in fact lies in its express and sometimes daring antagonism in the direction of Western governments, which appeals to many disaffected and disenchanted constituencies whose antipathy in the direction of the US, and capitalism extra broadly, trumps all.
The late Fred Halliday described this because the ‘anti-imperialism of fools’. On this telling, Iran turns into the plucky hero towards a Western hegemony so malign and incompetent that Iran’s personal misdemeanours are both justified or defined away. Requested, in 2015, whether or not the ‘demise to America’ chants had been proof of an Iranian need to destroy the US, then secretary of state John Kerry replied: ‘I’ve no particular data of a plan by Iran to truly destroy us.’
Certainly, the sense that the West owes Iran for previous misdemeanours (actual and imagined) extends to many in workplace, and if the ghost of 1953 (the Anglo-American coup which overthrew prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq) hangs heavy within the public creativeness, few admire simply how distant the present regime is from Mosaddeq’s secular liberal beliefs. Guilt concerning the previous interprets into beneficiant interpretations at the moment.
One notable current instance of this in motion was the general public angle to the abrupt and unjustified incarceration of the British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Even when we settle for the notion that Britain owed Iran cash for undelivered tanks contracted earlier than the revolution, there was no ethical or authorized justification for the kidnapping of a personal citizen in pursuit of this declare. But all through the tragic saga the muted criticism of Iran was as nothing in comparison with the opprobrium unleashed towards the British state, which at occasions may need led some to conclude that it was the Overseas, Commonwealth and Growth Workplace that had kidnapped her.
Phrase affiliation
Such positioning, in fact, has much less to do with Iran’s innate attraction and extra to do with a common antipathy in the direction of the US and the broader Western world. It’s in sum a push quite than a pull issue. It nonetheless doesn’t clarify the broader attraction that Iran enjoys regardless of its personal greatest efforts to both ignore or insult the West. It’s at greatest an observer of a course of from which it undoubtedly advantages. Why? For this we want a deeper dive into the West’s relations with Iran, or extra precisely ‘Persia’.
A great way to discover this proposition is to start out with a primary train in phrase affiliation. In case you ask somebody what they may instantly affiliate with the phrase Iran, the possible response can be ‘Islam’, ‘mullahs’ and, very probably, ‘extremism’. In case you then requested the identical particular person what they may affiliate with Persia, the response is prone to be extra unique, civilised and even romantic. Persia conveys a set of sentiments which I typically summarise as: cats, caviar and carpets. Each phrases relate to the identical place, however one – Persia – pertains to the normal Western identify and studying of the nation. That is ironic when one considers that the Iranian authorities insisted on the native appellation Iran in all worldwide correspondence in 1934 as a result of they believed Persia conveyed a picture of decadence and decay.
Very like the traditional Greeks, from whom lots of the central concepts about Persia descend, Western appreciation of Persia is nuanced and respectful. Persia is a part of the inspiration fantasy of the ‘West’. Consider the centrality of ‘marathon’ races, invented as a part of the fashionable Olympics, and now a function of the sporting calendar of just about each main Western metropolis. Reimagined in 1896 to make a reference to the glories of historic Greece, it principally marks a Persian defeat. (To understand how curious that is one merely wants to switch ‘marathon’ with one other important battle.)
This classical inheritance is essential to any understanding of the connection between Iran and the West, particularly when one recognises simply how lots of the Western political and mental elite would have learn Classics as a part of their common training. Westerners ‘knew’ Iran – or not less than thought they did, and definitely appreciated the inherent sophistication that got here with its longevity. The Iranians – Persians – had been an historic nation which, for all its foibles, commanded some respect.
This was additional strengthened by biblical educating by which the Persians had been offered in a optimistic gentle by way of the dominant position performed by Cyrus the Nice within the liberation of the Jews from Babylon. If the Classics conveyed an aura of oriental despotism, within the Bible Persia had a distinctly enlightened high quality. Cyrus particularly – strengthened in flip by Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (an ideal favorite of many Enlightenment thinkers) – turned a byword for simply authorities and liberalism. The identify Cyrus was in style amongst North American Puritans and stays so within the US at the moment. A minimum of two (very totally different) presidents in current reminiscence – Barack Obama and Donald Trump – have been recognized because the ‘new’ Cyrus, the latter by Evangelical Christians within the build-up to the 2020 elections when Trump-Cyrus ‘prayer cash’ had been obtainable for buy.
Folks energy
Western travellers to Iran within the fashionable interval (after 1600) had been recurrently disenchanted that the truth didn’t appear to match their Persian expectations. However even this by no means fully eradicated Persia’s inherent romance. George Curzon might have painted late-Nineteenth-century Iran as a decrepit and ageing relative, nevertheless it was a relative nonetheless, whereas the famous Persianist Edward Browne was charmed by ‘the versatile and delicate wit’ of the Persians, at the same time as he ridiculed the notion put about within the British press that the shah, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1848-96), was a descendant of Cyrus.
As extra travellers arrived within the twentieth century – Iran was as soon as a part of the ‘hippy path’ – the nation’s distinctiveness proved as charming because the familiarity of Persia. Moreover, there remained delicate areas of familiarity between Iran and the West, not least in language – Persian is an Indo-European language and as such comparatively accessible to Europeans – and tradition, the place Iranians appeared remarkably open-minded, iconoclastic and possessed of a literary oeuvre so huge that it exuded ‘civilisation’.
Iran advantages from the truth that Persia is a part of a broader Western creativeness. There’s a reservoir of cultural goodwill that affords Iran a advantage of the doubt that will be refused others. It’s a uncommon type of political capital that, whereas not wholly spent, is being denuded at some tempo. Not least because the tempo of protests and violent repression will increase, and the gulf between the revolutionary state and unusual Iranians turns into unignorable.
We would all study from Edward Browne, whose Yr Amongst the Persians (1892) taught him to not confuse the individuals with the federal government, a mistake he felt the British authorities had been making and which many proceed to make. If there may be any profit to be given, it must be reserved for the long-suffering individuals of Iran. They’re the actual producers of the nation’s cultural energy.
Ali Ansari is Professor of Historical past on the College of St Andrews. His newest e book is Iran (Polity, 2024).
