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| Yousef Azizi Bani-Torof |
Empire is a word of Latin origin that literally means power and rule. In the realm of politics, however, the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state.” The Collins Dictionary similarly defines an empire as “a number of nations with different characteristics that are ruled by one ruler or a particular state.”
The Persians established the Achaemenid Empire during the period 550 BCE–220 BCE, which, according to historical sequence, was the eighth empire in world history and, in terms of territorial extent, the tenth largest. Following the fall of the Parthians, the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE) emerged, ranking fourteenth worldwide in terms of territorial size. According to Iranian historians, both of these empires were confederational in character and consisted of autonomous provinces and countries.
Following the Islamic conquests and the collapse of the Sasanian Empire, and until the emergence of the Safavid Empire in 1502, no Persian empire arose. In other words, during the approximately nine centuries after the advent of Islam, there was no polity called Persia or Iran. We also know that the word Iran did not gain international currency as the country’s official name until 1934; Arabs and Westerners knew it as the Persian Empire or Persia. In Persian historiography, we generally know these empires by the names of their ruling dynasties rather than by the name Iran—for example, the Sasanian dynasty, the Safavid dynasty, or the Qajar dynasty.
In the twelfth century, during the Seljuk period, the term Mamālek-e Mahruseh—“Protected Domains” or “Protected Countries”—entered Persian political and administrative vocabulary. By the sixteenth century, it had become the official designation of the Safavid Empire.
The Safavid Empire consisted of four mamlekats: Arabistan, Georgia, Luristan, and Kurdistan. Georgia was separated from the Qajar Empire in 1813 under the Treaty of Gulistan. Thereafter, the empire comprised the mamlekats of Arabistan, Luristan, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Gilan, and Khorasan, as well as provinces such as Isfahan, Kerman, Fars, and others.
During the nineteenth century, the province of Herat and the Caucasian khanates, including Dagestan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, were separated from this country. Finally, in the twentieth century, Bahrain—over which Iran had claimed sovereignty—also became separate. Thus, over the past two hundred years and more, we have witnessed the separation of various countries and nations from the Persian Empire. Throughout history, one of the defining characteristics of empires has been the joining of nations and countries to them or their separation from them.
The political-administrative system of Iran’s mamlekats continued until the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1909, and the term itself entered the Constitutional Law following that revolution. The existence of these mamlekats demonstrates that Iran was not a single country composed of a single nationality, but rather an empire comprising several nations and countries, at times governed as a confederation and at other times as a traditional federation. Despite the change in its designation from the Protected Domains to the Imperial State and later to the Islamic Republic, and despite the abolition of the governments of these mamlekats—which had existed until the beginning of the twentieth century—Iran remains an empire, or more precisely, the remnant of an empire.
The Mamlekat of Arabistan—present-day Khuzestan—or the Emirate of Mohammerah was one of the most important of these political units. Its ruler, Sheikh Khazal ibn Jabir, enjoyed internal autonomy.
Why Do I Call Iran an Empire Rather Than a Nation-State?
A nation-state is a country in which the majority of the population is conscious of a shared identity and possesses a similar culture. In a nation-state, geographical boundaries correspond with political boundaries, and fundamentally, the ideal of the nation-state is to encompass a nation sharing a common ancestry and traditions. This is one definition of a nation-state.
In Iran, there is no comprehensive shared identity. Instead, there are cultural and linguistic boundaries that do not correspond to the political borders. There are, rather, Persian, Azerbaijani Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, Turkmen, Lur, and other linguistic and cultural boundaries.
During his sixteen years of rule (1925–1941), Reza Shah Pahlavi attempted, through repression, identity erasure, Persianization, the forced displacement of nationalities, and the transformation of mamlekats into provinces, to lay the foundations of the Iranian nation-state. His son, the deposed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, followed his father’s path. The Islamic Republic, which emerged from the revolution of these peoples in February 1979, made little change to these repressive methods. On the contrary, it dealt even more brutally with these nationalities, which had found an opportunity to recover their historical rights.
Over the past ninety years, we have witnessed acts of disobedience by these nations against the rule of the dominant nation, expressed in the form of regional uprisings. Thus, during 1945–1946, we witnessed the establishment of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad and the Autonomous Government of Azerbaijan. Likewise, in the first years following the 1979 Revolution, the situation in the non-Persian regions was explosive and highly tense.
After a period of relative stagnation, Iran has, over the past two decades, witnessed civil, political, and armed movements in Baluchistan, Kurdistan, Arabistan (Khuzestan), and Azerbaijan. These movements demonstrate the role of non-Persian peoples in Iran’s present and future political struggles.
The Iran Human Rights organization announced that, between 2010 and 2018, 118 political prisoners were executed in Iran:
- 65 Kurdish political prisoners (55%)
- 29 Baluch political prisoners (25%)
- 15 Arab political prisoners (13%)
- and the remainder, 9 Persian political prisoners (9%)
This means, according to the author, that the share of executions affecting Persian-speaking society—which dominates the country’s culture and politics and constitutes approximately 50 percent of the population—was 7 percent, whereas Kurds, Baluch, and Arabs, who together constitute 29 percent of the country’s population, accounted for 93 percent of the executions.
Amnesty International recently announced that half of Iran’s political prisoners are Kurdish. Arab prisoners constitute approximately one-eighth, Baluch prisoners another one-eighth, and Turkish prisoners approximately another one-eighth. In other words, seven-eighths, or 87.5 percent, of all political prisoners in Iran are currently non-Persians who are struggling for their national rights.
If we compare this phenomenon with the predominance of leftists among political prisoners during the Shah’s period, and if we add other developments such as the current struggles of these nationalities, we can understand the importance of the role of non-Persian peoples in present-day and future Iran.
Even within the so-called one-eighth attributed to Persian-speaking society, we can find non-Persian prisoners who have been incarcerated because of their participation in broader protests by women, workers, students, and other social groups. Yet the world hears the voices of non-Persian nationalities less frequently because Persians possess a powerful lobby in the West and dominate many domestic and international media outlets, both in the government camp and in the opposition.
In fact, what we currently see of the struggle of non-Persian peoples is only the tip of the iceberg. We should not forget that there is a direct relationship between the Persian center and the non-Persian periphery: whenever the former weakens, the latter gains strength, and the reverse is also true.
Internal Colonialism
In Iran, internal colonialism is imposed through unequal development between the center and the periphery by a highly centralized and authoritarian state.
This form of colonialism possesses the same characteristics as external colonialism but operates within the domestic sphere. The motives behind internal colonialism may be economic, social, or racial. It can take the form of the seizure of lands belonging to nationalities or citizens for the benefit of the regime; demographic engineering designed to alter the population balance of indigenous inhabitants in favor of settlers belonging to the dominant nationality; the displacement of indigenous populations for racial or ethnic reasons; or displacement in the service of large-scale economic projects.
Internal colonialism also produces parallel societies within what is presented as a single society and a single nationality. Citizens belonging to the ruling nationality live in settlements and colonized enclaves separated from the indigenous population—or, more precisely, separated from the impoverished and oppressed classes of those peoples.
Just as Western colonialism justified its occupation of the East through racial claims, internal colonialism also offers racist justifications for its privileges and domination. This constitutes an even more dangerous dimension of internal colonialism. At times, internal colonialism also collaborates with external colonialism in order to marginalize a nation.
As an example, we witnessed this phenomenon in the Emirate of Arabistan, where Tehran and London collaborated in 1925 to overthrow Arab rule in Mohammerah. This resulted in the formation of a non-Arab class that came to dominate the economy of the emirate, transformed its administrative, political, and cultural institutions into Persian institutions, and prevented the development of an Arab bourgeoisie.
The ruling authorities continue to oppose the efforts of the Arab middle class, a class that emerged belatedly toward the end of the 1950s and expanded following the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War.
The Arab middle class currently leads the struggle for the national rights of Arabs, while the Arab working class struggles within the framework of the Iranian working class. According to the author, this is partly due to the existence of an influential non-Arab working-class minority in the region of Arabistan (Khuzestan). However, as the workers’ struggle develops, this class, because of its linguistic and cultural ties to the Arab nation, will eventually find its place within that nation.
The internal colonizer has not only eliminated the historical rule of the Arabs, altered the demographic composition in favor of non-Arab migrants, impoverished them in their own land despite its abundance of oil and other natural resources, and prevented education in their mother tongue; it has also, according to the author, plundered the waters of their rivers and transferred them to the central cities of Qom, Isfahan, and Yazd.
It has also dried up wetlands for the purpose of extracting oil and developing those cities. Government statistics, the author states, indicate that approximately 70 percent of Iran’s economic and industrial facilities are located in Tehran. Several years ago, an institution affiliated with the United Nations reportedly identified Ahvaz as the most polluted city in the world, a situation the author attributes to the Iranian government’s deliberate neglect in addressing a phenomenon destructive of human life.
To understand the degree of centralization of the Iranian regime, I will mention one simple but disturbing example. An Arab writer from the city of Mohammerah (Khorramshahr) waited six months for the censorship office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Tehran to grant a publication permit for his 150-page book of very short stories, even though there is an Islamic Guidance office in Mohammerah itself and a provincial Directorate-General of Islamic Guidance in Ahvaz, the provincial capital.
The Central Problem in the Struggle Against the Iranian Regime
The level of distrust between the non-Persian nationalities and the dominant nationality is such that these nationalities—particularly in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan—did not join the Persian-majority central regions during two historical events that might have led to the regime’s overthrow.
The first was the mass uprising of the Green Movement in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz in 2009; the second was the popular uprising that spread to more than one hundred Iranian cities in December 2017–January 2018.
The regime exploits this division in order to ensure its continued survival, because efforts thus far to coordinate between these two groups—despite the unprecedented historical pressures placed upon the regime—have failed to produce tangible results.
It appears that a possible alternative for dismantling the empire and eliminating internal colonialism would be the distribution of wealth and political power between the dominant nationality and the other oppressed national components through the establishment of a decentralized federal system. Such a system, the author argues, existed in a traditional form in Iran for centuries before the emergence of the modern “national question” in the early twentieth century.
At present, the efforts of non-Persian nationalities are taking place simultaneously with the struggles of various social groups—including workers, women, students, intellectuals, and others harmed by difficult economic conditions—against the Iranian regime.
Will these struggles converge in the establishment of a secular, democratic, and federal system in Iran?
That is the fundamental question.
Original Persian text: Yousef Azizi — “Iran: The Remnant of an Empire with a System of Internal Colonialism”