On the long list of things that bother me about much of the left today, especially in the West, is its allergy to patriotism. In my own understanding of human commitments, loving your country and holding socialist ideals are not contradictory commitments. One can easily maintain both. But the history of the left shows that there has never been anything obvious or untroublesome about this combination of allegiances. My own story helps to explain why. My path to this dual identity has been long and winding. Born in 1988 in Tehran, I grew up in the immediate post-Soviet era when most varieties of leftism had gone seriously out of fashion, especially among my fellow teenagers in a country that had fallen victim to its own revolutionary utopianism. But I had already been swimming against the current — I identified myself as a Marxist in my early teens, whatever one could mean by such labels at that time. But this identification never made me any less of an Iranian patriot or, to use a common Persian term, Irandoost, roughly translatable as “Iran-lover.” Despite my Marxist politics, I remained a typical Iranian. Iranians are known for their strong pride in their country and their culture, and I shared that pride then as I do now. I took pride in Iran’s long and beautiful civilization and how our story has often been central to world history: who else is mentioned both in the Bible and in ancient Chinese chronicles? As a writer, my primary vehicle for my love for Iran has probably been the Persian language, a tongue spoken in its current form for centuries. It was my love for this language that propelled me to become a writer in the first place: I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than crafting sentences in Persian, throwing around Persian words like playdough. I still regularly revel in the fact that I share a mother tongue with Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Their medieval poems all sound so uncannily contemporary, some essential vitality in the Persian language having been preserved throughout its long evolution. I could go on and on about Iran’s cinema, and Iran’s social movements, and everything else that makes me proud of my origin. Yet we have a tendency also for self-glorification, and I am not proud of this particular attribute. Our national pride can border on obsession, on excessive self-love. We must always beware of it. It must be criticized as a self-centered attitude that, like so many forms of nationalism, ends up blinding many to their country’s flaws and tensions, and making them less open to the world. Worse, it leads to blind embrace of national mythologies and to the smug disregard of our actual history. In the Iran of my youth, even quotidian patriotism had a subversive edge to it. The Islamic Republic that ruled us was based on an austere and militant ideological Islamism, which meant that so many of us who opposed it ended up, knowingly or otherwise, championing a form of national identity as resistance. We were hoping to resist the regime’s quest for the creation of a New Islamic Man by our insistent perpetuation of historically rooted Iranian traditions. The nation would frustrate or thwart or bring down the theocracy. An old civilization would defeat a new tyranny. Of course, like most revolutionary regimes, the Islamic Republic understood that, if it was to have any chance of survival, it needed to co-opt a form of nationalism. By the early 1980s, it had already given up on the more radical plans of its early years to ban Nowruz, the national new year, or to raze the tomb of our fabled medieval poet, Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh, or the Book of Kings, is perhaps the single most beloved book of poetry for Iranians. But the regime continued to prohibit many forms of open patriotism. National traditions celebrated for centuries by millions of Iranians, such as the fire festival held on the last Wednesday of every Persian year, remain officially forbidden. Moreover, the regime presents a very restricted vision of Iranian culture, and it heavily censors its expressions. On the pages of the officially approved textbooks, or in the halls of the regime-run cultural centers in Sarajevo or Mexico City, you will find an Islamist narrative of Iranian history that excludes many of the great achievements of Iranian culture, old and new. No poetry by great poets such as Ahmad Shamlou or Forough Farrokhzad, no films by great directors such as Abbas Kiarostami or Dariush Mehrjoee. As a result, something as simple as championing Iranian arts and culture has long been seen as a form of national resistance to the hated clerical regime. I kept to this vision of patriotic resistance even after joining a clandestine socialist group that was harshly anti-religious as well as anti-nationalist. I debated with the other members about the legitimacy of patriotism. I agreed about socialist internationalism, but weren’t we, after all, also fighting for Iran, for our particular country, to save it from the clutches of a hated dictatorship? Surely one could be both an internationalist and an Irandoost? Well, maybe not so surely. I left that group behind a long time ago and my politics has had its ups and downs since. But that contradiction has never quite gone away. When I was twenty years old, I left Iran to study abroad. In Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, I naturally joined leftist groups and then came to marvel at how much of their politics seemed to be rooted in a form of oikophobia — hating all that your country stands for. Of course, it would make sense for leftists to hate how bad things were in their country — they were agents of change, after all. And it would make sense for the citizens of the world’s foremost imperialist powers to critique its reach — they were seeking justice, after all. But could politics be possible without a positive vision
Irandoost, or Confessions of a Patriot
