Theoretical prejudices in new historiography of Iran

- I had a question about Iranian historiography. How much do you think there is willingness in Iranian historiography to revise and new research and to what extent this historiography stay in the old frameworks?
Shahbazi:
Collection of books and researches that have been provided in recent times in the history of Iran, both quantitatively and qualitatively, are not at a level that is worthy of the history of Iran. It is enough to do a comparison between India historiography or Ottoman Empire historiography and the Republic of Turkey to find out how weak Iran historiography is. We do not have basic research not only in the field of ancient history or the history of the early Islamic centuries or later periods history, but also in the history of the last 300 years, the history of Iran from the eighteenth century AD that we were in a serious confrontation with the colonial centers of the West, a strange poverty dominated our historiography. I think that one of the important factors that affect the growth of our community negatively is lack of richness or better to say is poverty of historiography. Poverty of Historicism is reflected in all aspects of our political life. Why? Because historic knowledge makes base of human political and social knowledge. Historical importance is not just for recognizing the past but it is also for creating intellectual infrastructure for current and future as well. The history is case of a nation. As for knowing a person we should study his case, to identify a community there should also be a case to study and we can use it to plan the present and the future. If we fail in implementing a development model but we do not learn from our defeat and we repeat the same pattern two decades later and we still lose is because of the poverty of historical knowledge.
Another problem is the rule of specific theoretical models over our historiography. Our ancient historiography is mainly dominated by two schools of oriental despotism and Aryanism, and in an overview it is far from new research. The two schools formed spirit of an intellectual and political tendency called archaism which was ruling our official government historiography and especially after the constitutional.
School of Aryan and theory of pasture
Aryanism school was formed in the nineteenth century with colonial purposes by people such as Friedrich Max Müller. Max Muller began his research for the British East India Company and later became a member of the Advisory Council of Queen Victoria. Despite the fact that Iranians are the only nation that officially considers themselves remains of "Aryan" by the effect of the school new theoretical research in this field does not have any reflection in Iran. The school is associated with an ultranationalist in a way that critical discussion about it finds friction with the "taboo" and chauvinists "sacred". Backers of the school pretend that as if this is a pride for the Iranian nation to know themselves from "Aryan" tribe, while firstly, archeological data does not acknowledge the presence of these people and their migration to the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent. Secondly, this school in fact humiliates the historical background of the Iranian land and people and limits the history of civilization in this land to migration of Aryans. In other words, school of Aryanism turns an important part of the history of Iranian civilization, such as the great civilization of Elam, to pre-historic era. It means that the true history of civilization in the Iranian plateau starts with the migration of Aryans, from the late second millennium BC. This means humiliation and mitigating the history of civilization in Iran. Note that two neighboring civilizations, Assyria and Babylon, respectively, start from the fifth millennium BC and the second millennium BC. According to Aryanism school, Iran was barren in the era.
Basically, the spirit of theory of migration of Aryans is the same spirit of migration that exists in Jewish mythology, and it has spread it to the entire world and to all peoples. Max Muller even knew Celts (who are ancestors of Scots and Irish) as Aryans. The myth of Aryan tribe, which was created by the school of Max Muller, is based on the "pasture theory" that a Jew named Myers raised in his book called "the dawn of history". He said that Aryans were a nomadic tribe in the steppes of Central Asia (North) who looked for "empty lands"; note: "empty territory" means the plains of the Indian subcontinent and the Iranian plateau (south). Today the "theory of pasture" has been seriously criticized. For example Nagndranat Gauss, who is a great anthropologist and professor at the universities of Calcutta and Dhaka and is Hindu not Muslim, has a book called "Aryan history in Iran and India". Summarize of his criticism to "pasture theory" is this:
First, there is no doubt in fertility of vast steppes of Central Asia, which has been the cradle of prosperous nomadic communities till today. Why should the so-called Aryan people abandon ancestral lands and attack "south"? Only geographical factors can explain this migration, such as the occurrence of important natural disasters such as glacial periods, drought, and so on. If such a major accident has occurred, Central Asia should be deserted and empty for a while in the late stages.
Second, if we accept "theory of pasture" as material base of Aryans migration, it should also be accepted that they were hungry people and they were in search of livelihood. This is in contrast and conflict with Aryanism ideological principles that know migration of Aryans as research for "historical mission" and "empire making" and "the creation of Honor".
Thirdly, unlike the "theory of pasture", the lands, not the Indian subcontinent neither the Iranian plateau, were not empty, and both in India and Iran the large human communities traditionally have nomadic and urban flourishing and agricultural life.
Fourthly, due to the presence of large human communities in the lands "immigrants" naturally mixed with indigenous communities and as they were as the minority they were vanished in them, so something called "Aryan race" does not exist.
Many serious researchers of West each one have rejected a part of the Aryanism school in a way and when we put the rejections next to each other nothing will remain from the great and glorious structure . For example, if you read the book of Nyberg Swedish you will see that it is whole critic of theories which form the basis of Aryanism school. Schmidt writes in the Iranica Encyclopedia that there is no archaeological or historical evidence to prove pass of Aryan ethnic from the mountains of the Hindu Kush and their entry into the plains of India and the Iranian plateau.
Oriental despotism
In the theory of our historiography we are influenced by the school of oriental despotism. School of Oriental despotism was formed in the eighteenth century by thinkers such as Montesquieu and it expanded in following centuries by those like Marx and Wittfogel. This view to the history is based on the prejudice that if in the East there has always been centralized authoritarian rules. This view is not accepted by serious scholars. In this regard, I have talked in the book "plutocracy" and I have done a comparison of political structures between East and West.
Even to this day, historiography and political thought in Iran is strongly influenced by the school that sees the political structure of our country entirely under the pure authority of the central government and the king. This picture begins from the Achaemenid history and extends to after Islam as well. This is while, according to Vandenberg, according to archeological data, if we want to talk about the history of the Achaemenid, it is like this that just based on the remains of the Palace of Versailles, we think about the history of eighteenth-century of France. Our look at the history of the Achaemenid is mainly affected by the book "Cyrus Kaznfon's training" that historians after constitution have narrated it in their works in detail, such as the history of ancient Iran Pirnia. Book Kaznfon does not have historical authenticity and in fact its patterning is from the political system of Sparta in ancient Greece which was done in the name of Cyrus.
The Jews - Marranos were very effective in the reconstruction of Persian tribal culture and spread mentality and psychology and culture of themselves among them. In other words, modernization of the Persian tribe took in its present form was done in connection with the Jewish people and the displacement myth of the Persians, who is reflected in totally imaginary and baseless legend known as Sanjan, was a hoax during the tie of Portuguese and Persians. This displacement and psychology myth has strange similarity born to the Jewish culture and Jewish influence on the culture and ethos of the Persians is to the extent that some Indian and western researchers refer the Persians as "the Jews of India". In other words, the Persian tribe in India in terms of the culture was completely renovated and modernized cult. Iranian claim of them is completely fake. If physical anthropology research suggests that Persian are certainly from native people of the Indian subcontinent and of the Dravidian race. Their appearance and face clearly shows that as well. They did not even assume themselves Zoroastrians before connection with the Europeans and Jews and they had no Zoroastrian religious text. All these developments and their familiarity with the Avesta and Zoroastrian texts was due to help of the Europeans and the Jews and through the texts that have been brought from Iran and were placed at their disposal.