Clash of National Narratives and the Marginalization of Kurdish-Iranian History

Abstract

This article examines in a Kurdish-Iranian context the origins of Iranian and Kurdish national narratives that go back to the process of the transformation of historical consciousness in the nineteenth century. At the same time, it aims at making central to Iranian history a perception of Kurdish-Iranian history, which has largely remained both a marginalized and an understudied subject. In contrast to these national narratives’ construction of the past and their definitions of people, “Kurdish-Iranian” refers to an approach that simultaneously attempts to demarginalize Kurdish (social) history and highlight the impact of almost a century of socioeconomic transformation of Iran on the Kurdish society. An analysis of these narratives’ origins is required to understand the way they interpret history and define concepts. This approach and the absence of such an analysis in both Kurdish and Iranian studies provide for the originality of this article and, inspired by what I hold to be the ascendancy of national narratives due to recent regional and political developments, its immediacy. Methodologically, it is based on theories of nation and nationalism, in general, and the accompanying literature on the formation of modern Iranian national identity, in particular.