Excerpt

Prologue: The Land of Hidden Politics

No one is truly happy in their own land. As a born Persian, I never thought that the metaphysical air of Persia was enough for me to live well and judge fairly. I always had a higher ambition than to make myself a mouthpiece for the judgements and acts of my countrymen. And yet, I have always believed that the true meaning of life consists in those moments when civic friendship not only occurs but proves efficacious with one’s fellow human beings in the form of a higher idea. The history of humanity has shown that mankind has the power to cancel gods and tyrants; but this has never been possible without a love of truth and nobility of spirit. This is a task to which many civilisations have set themselves; they all knew that to fight evil they needed to be optimistic as to the nature of mankind and its destiny. We are all too aware, however, that freedom is not given to us all in one go.

Let us consider the idea that Persian civilisation has lost many of the values that helped its greatness and perennity in human history. Yet, the greatness of the idea of Persia is beyond price. And in a world where many values have lost their meanings, having a noble spirit and the idea of a millenary civilisation on one’s side is far better than any form of messianism or heroism. We must also overcome the meaninglessness of nations that disappear in the whirlpool of nationalism. No doubt, the meaninglessness of nations can be passionately challenged with the nobility of spirit and moral excellence of those individuals who, in spite of the predominance of a disease commonly called ‘nationalism,’ have the courage to remain in a state of philosophical and moral conflict with their own past. Courage, at this point, can be defined as the power of the mind to overcome immaturity and superfluousness. Nations, like individuals, are endangered by the threat of infantilism, which drives them to the abyss of self-surrender, to fanaticism, and to extreme violence. Fanaticism threatens a nation’s moral self-affirmation. Thus, it is the task of intellectuals to describe and fight the nature of this moral emptiness. This is only possible if they free themselves from the grip of everyday judgements and search for an answer that is valid within, and not outside of, the historical consciousness itself. Philosophically speaking, one could say that one accepts one’s history as an idea, in spite of a sense of despair about its social and political expressions. What we might call the ‘idea of a nation’ would be the ideal in so far as it obtains expression in the history of that nation. But only a long and unfinished philosophical education teaches people of that nation to separate their despairs or successes from a larger hope, which does not die at the final hour when we cease to exist.

‘A man may die,’ wrote John F. Kennedy, ‘nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.’1 People are haunted by the idea of their nation and its history. Their unquestioning devotion to a particular country and way of living, which they believe to be the best in the world, is the expression of an idea that is the internal life of a nation. As such, the genuine idea of a nation is reflected in its ability to identify itself with the history that has shaped it. We can characterise the historical process of the shaping of the idea of a nation as one of self-cultivation by that nation. The idea of each nation represents its soul. Therefore, each nation, in its truth, is an idea. Just as history is not the work of an individual but of humanity in general, so too the idea of a nation is not that of a single person but the process by which reality and thought are simultaneously engendered. That is to say, the idea of ‘Persianness’ belongs to no Iranian in particular; it is what creates among Iranians the habit of identifying themselves with Iran today, or with, what used to be called, Persia. It doesn’t matter whether one is a nationalist or a patriot, a Persian is someone who thinks solely, or civically, in terms of Persianness. In other words, we can define a Persian (or an Iranian) as someone who expresses their history in relation to the development of the idea of Persia over time. As such, Persia is not justified by the rightness or errors of Iranians; it is the idea of Persia that constitutes the whole greatness and continuity of Persian civilisation. However, as members of an old and fragile civilisation, Persians (Iranians) now need to relive the course of their history and prepare themselves to make a new civilisation, one formed out of the encounter of the great values and ideals of Persia with the world as it is today. No doubt this land, on which so many centuries have left their mark, is a hopeful retreat for Iranians living around the world today. But such a feeling of hope does not honour us until we have the moral courage and the intellectual foresight to examine our weaknesses and criticise our mistakes.

This urges us to understand why present-day Iran is not a true expression of the idea of Persia, and why there is nothing there to inspire and unite us. This might be heartbreaking, but we need to understand, once and for all, that there is something more important than the idea of a ‘nation’ in the perpetual making of the idea of Persia, and that something is the modern idea of freedom.