Intellectual Movements in Iran - History of Iranian Modernity

History of Iranian Modernity

Long before the European Renaissance generated the radical ideas that eventually reshaped Europe and the United States, Persian statesmen, artists, and intellectuals had formulated ideas that strikingly anticipate those of modernity. Since more than thousand years ago there has been a conflict in Persia between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism.

Some twenty-five hundred years ago, when Herodotus was writing his Histories, Persia was the West's ultimate other.

It has been a common belief of scholars that modernity began in the West and is by its philosophical nature, economic underpinning, and cultural exigencies a uniquely western phenomenon. All other cultures, those who have lived on the darker side of Renaissance must emulate the Western experience, if they want to be modern. From Max Weber to Milan Kundera, many Western scholars and writers have argued that everything from representative democracy and rational thought to the art of the novel and the essay are not only western in origin but also uniquely suited to its culture, and native to its temperature climes.

Persia with its impressively rich and varied cultural legacy had a formative role in shaping Western consciousness. The Bible is replete with profuse praise for Persia and its kings. The Bible's praise for Cyrus the Great was partially in recognition of his role in freeing the Jews from their Babylonian captivity; of equal importance was the fact that the vast Persian empire of the time was a paragon of religious and cultural tolerance.

Hegel whose writings are considered by many as the apex of the Western philosophical tradition, uses superlatives in praising the role of Persia and Zarathustra in history.

Following Hegel in 19th-century Germany, Nietzsche wrote his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra that similarly touched upon this key figure of the Persian imagination. Nietzsche's book offers a radical critique, almost a total debunking, of the whole Western tradition of philosophy. It is no mere accident that Nietzsche chose to articulate his critical views in the name of Zarathustra. The end of the 19th century was not the only or the last time Zarathustra played a prominent role in shaping Western consciousness and philosophic discourse. In 1990s Persian influences on the millennial fever, and on other New Age themes, were so strong that Harold Bloom, the eminent American critic, suggested that the last decade of the twentieth century should in truth be called "a return to Zoroastrian origins."

Western art, no less than history and theology, bear testimony to the ubiquity of the Persian presence in antiquity. Of all the extant works of Greek tragedy, for example, the only one that is about a non-Greek subject is Aeschylus' play The Persians.