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Contested Memories of Pre-Islamic Iran

Associate Professor of History, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois 61790-4420, USA

The conquest of Iran by Islam and the subordination of its history to an Islamicate version did not go uncontested. The intellectual movement of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries inspired by Azar Kayvan, who went into self-exile in Mughal India to escape the persecution of the Safavid regime at home, constructed a powerful Iran-centred universal history begin ning with the pre-Adamite, Mahabad. The Biblical-Qur'anic domination was subverted to encode what later Orientalists, Zoroastrians and Baha'is were inspired to perceive as a proto-scientific text. It incited Iranian national ists in the nineteenth century to reconfigure the pre-Islamic past as a 'golden age', coming to a 'tragic end' with the Muslim conquest.

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