The Time of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Iran

Abstract This article examines the formation of a solar Islam—a modern Iranian national identity that took shape in the mid-nineteenth century, drawing on a new Indo-Persian cyclical notion of time (dawr). Solar Islam welded together Persian and Shi'i Islamic values that became manifest in a series of calendrical reforms. These reforms led to the formation of the solar Hijri-Shamsi calendar, the national calendar of Iran, and stemmed from shared nineteenth-century anti-(Sunni) Arab sentiments of the Shi'i and Zoroastrian populations in Iran and India who believed that Sunni Arabs were responsible for the falsification of the Quran and the destruction of Persian religious and scientific knowledge. The textual philanthropic activities of the Parsis in mid-nineteenth-century Iran and the spread of the Azari/“dasatiri” texts provided state officials and Shi'i scholars with important cultural resources for their nationalist project, including an Iran-centered historiography based on pre-Adamite Persian kings; a cyclical notion of time; and the “lost” verses of the Quran. Iranian state officials/nationalists appropriated these cultural resources, announced a break with the immediate past, generated an alternative time to the negative regressive view of time trumpeted by Orientalists, and heralded a progressive scientific era. These nationalist time-reckoning reforms began with the reintroduced Jalali calendar and culminated in the Hijri-Shamsi calendar.