The central thesis of this book challenges the anachronistic construction of Iranian identity, claiming that the nationalist historiography first undertaken by the European Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually influenced the modern Iranian nationalist intelligentsia and literati, leading to the adoption of a broad nationalist construction of identity to suit Iranian political and ideological circumstances. This book also argues that such a broad-brushed approach and the term “Iranian” could not have applied to the large multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural populations in the vast territory of Iran over so many distinct historical periods – as employed by academicians and eager nationalists.

Mostafa Vaziri is a lecturer at the University of Innsbruck – Austria, and the author of Buddhism in Iran: An Anthropological Approach to Traces and Influences (2012). Vaziri is also a physician who has worked as a volunteer doctor in Nepal, Afghanistan, and Africa.

Cover image and design by Chandra Khaki. The front cover is a map of Iran by Ibrahim Müteferrika produced in c. 1729 (with the permission of National Széchényi Library of Hungary, Budapest. The shell number of the map: Budapest, OSZK TR 7 656). The photographs are of a group of European Orientalists and Iranian literati.