Kia Mana. Persianate selves Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

Stanford University Press, 2020. — 337 p. — ISBN13: 9781503610682Every year on the vernal equinox, my mother opens at random a collection of poems (dīvān) by Hafi z of Shiraz (d. 1389) and reads the fi rst full poem her eyes fall upon. As Persians around the world celebrate this day as the fi rst of the new year, they join my mother in consulting Hafi z, the
Voice of the Hidden World (lisān al-ghayb). His poems indicate what the new year holds,2 and readers with the most refi ned insight can understand the poem’s deepest layers of meaning as prescience. Th is Hidden World was where God as Truth resided, made potentially accessible through the form and substance of Hafi z’s verses. Like his poetry, which can be read as the
celebration of hedonism or union with the divine, this act of consultation has layers of meaning. It is simultaneously a quintessentially Persian act (poetry on the new year) and an act of hermeneutical engagement that defines Islam (supplication to God).3 Far from contradictory, these different meanings are an enduring remnant of what it meant to be Persian before nationalism.
Growing up in a large immigrant enclave in southern California, I was often asked, “Where are you from?” It was an attempt to gain purchase on another question—“Who are you?”—and then, inevitably, “Iranian or Per-sian?” I was taught to respond, “I am Persian.” Being Persian foregrounded the Persian language and selective elements of its culture, such as pre-Islamic
political history and a “classical” poetic tradition that ended with Hafiz in the fourteenth century. This modern selection of culture elided Islam and its supposedly degrading effect on Persian. Claiming a separate identity, it also promoted distance from images of turbaned ayatollahs whipping crowds into a frenzy, of women swathed in black, or of US embassy hostages, who domi-
nated media coverage of Iran in the years after 1979. This culture, however, had come from a place. The term “Persian” and its signifiers—lyrical poetry, epics of mythical kings, and exquisite miniatures from across Asia—became associated with the territory that is now the nation-state of Iran.