Last week, Tehran held a big party. As it is controlled by the hardliner Alireza Zakani, the Tehran municipality is not known for its love of music or public concerts, but this was a special occasion. Five well-known singers sang (all male, as solo singing by women is forbidden in Iran) as a statue was unveiled in Tehran’s Revolution Square.
Based on a rock carving near the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, the statue displays Shapur I, a Sassanian emperor from the third century, lording over a Roman emperor.
The Roman kneels in front of him as Shapur holds his head high, victorious. (The kneeling figure is the Syrian-born Roman emperor Phillip the Arab although it was another emperor, Valerian, that Iran took as a prisoner of war in the year 260.)
The message of the statue is not particularly subtle. As the Islamic Republic reels from the war it fought with the US and Israel earlier this year, it attempts to boost its credentials by resorting to nationalist imagery. Having invaded large swathes of Roman territory across today’s Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Shapur fits the bill.
In case anything was in doubt, the government-run Mehr News Agency affirmed that the statue “sent a clear signal of Iran’s power and deterrence following the recent 12-day war with the Israeli regime”.
This isn’t new. Posters showing Roman emperors kneeling to Shapur went up in Tehran, Shiraz and other cities in the weeks after the war. They were emblazoned with messages in Persian but also in Hebrew. The week before, a statue of Arash the Archer, a mythical Iranian hero, appeared in Tehran’s Vanak Square.
Most markedly, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asked one of his favourite panegyrists to perform a religiously tinged version of Oh Iran, a popular nationalist song, in July.
Iran’s resort to imagery of ancient empires has been analysed as a major shift, with critics seeing it as a cynical and opportunist attempt to curry favour with a population for whom the hackneyed traditional Islamism of the government has lost lustre.
As it connects with a powerful tribalist impulse, nationalism has historically proved a much surer bet as a ruling ideology than its universal revolutionary counterparts such as communism or Islamism.
When Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union in the Second World War, he also resorted to Russian nationalism, which the communists had heavily criticised before. China now runs Confucius Institutes around the globe, even though the ancient Chinese philosopher was heavily criticised by Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic.
The Islamic Republic was founded on avowedly anti-nationalist grounds. Its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had decried nationalism as leading to the “decline of Muslims”.
In the early days of the revolution, his most radical followers had even mused over banning the beloved Persian new year holiday, Nowruz. Although they did no such foolery, many beloved ancient Iranian holidays, such as the fire festival Chaharshanbe Suri, remain frowned upon.
Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic had long ago conceded much to Iranian nationalism and its official line has been an Islamic version of such nationalism. It celebrates Iran’s long history but criticises its pre-1979 systems as unjust. In his speeches, Mr Khamenei has often attacked the Sassanians and the Achaemenids as imperialistic and exploitative.
At the same time, he has left enough space for salvaging some of the achievements of these ancient empires. In a visit to Fars province in 2008, he asked officials to highlight rock carvings of Shapur with Roman emperors as a riposte to Greece’s celebratory monuments of its victories over the Persians.
Speaking about Persepolis, he attacked it as a sign of tyranny that was “devoid of spirituality”, although he accepted that it could also be a “point of honour for us Iranians” as a work of architectural wonder.
But it’s clear that the current foray into celebrating ancient Iranian empires breaks taboos and crosses previous red lines. Aware of its sensitivity, Tehran municipality officials have confirmed that the move has Mr Khamenei’s blessing.
Back in 2010s, the hardliner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had tried celebrating Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Cyrus is particularly controversial since the former shah commemorated him. His liberation of Jews from Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC and permission to return to Jerusalem and build a temple there are an old and favourite theme of Zionists.
But Mr Ahmadinejad cut no corners in his promotion of Cyrus, whose fabled cylinder, held in the British Museum, came to Iran on loan in 2010. In a ceremony introducing the cylinder, Mr Ahmadinejad gave his own keffiyeh to a young man re-enacting an Achaemenid soldier and then a young member of Iran’s security forces. It was seen as a symbolic attempt at linking the Islamic Republic with the First Persian Empire of antiquity.
However, Mr Ahmadinejad’s maverick attempts to push what he called “an Iranian understanding of Islam” and his celebrations of Cyrus landed him in hot water with the regime establishment. Hossein Shariatmadari, then as now the editor-in-chief of the government-backed newspaper Kayhan, sternly criticised him. One conservative lawmaker said Mr Ahmadinejad shouldn’t speak as if Iranians are “something special and different from others”.
Among the then-president’s critics were those who are now considered centrists. Ali Larijani, a former Iranian parliamentary speaker and currently national security adviser, said he shouldn’t “highlight” Cyrus and that he should take his values not from Cyrus’s cylinder but from the Shiite Imams. Ali Motahari, later a centrist MP, also attacked Mr Ahmadinejad. As Mr Khamenei visited the Tehran book fair in 2011, he strongly criticised its promotion of Achaemenid statues and asked them to be taken down.
The Iranian leadership now seems intent on trudging along the path Mr Ahmadinejad had suggested more than a decade ago. Its promotion of ancient Iranian nationalism might very well lead to a thorough transformation of the government ideology as it prepares for a new phase.
