شهامت داران در ورود به مبحث پوریم

محمدرضا

جمعه 19 شهریور ماه سال 1389 ساعت 8:35 PM

در مصاحبه زیر اصغر زاده به سنت شکنی آقای پورپیرار در در تحقیقات تاریخی منطقه اشاره نموده و در کتابشان چندین با به این موضوعات اشاره نموده.

قسمتی از این مصاحبه به انگلیسی:


Lisa: Naser Pourpirar is also labeled as Anti-Iran. I noticed you reference him quite a bit in your book. What is his story?

Alireza: Naser Poorpirar (or Pourpirar) is a very intelligent historian, and a very complex character. I respect him for his originality and his independent research, but I don’t agree with his methodology and with some of his conclusions.

Lisa: How do you mean? Can you expand on it a bit more?

Alireza: You see, in my book I explore some aspects of an emergent anti-colonial and critical historiography in the region. In Africa, for example, we have T.O. Ranger who initiates over 40 years ago the importance of writing African history from an African standpoint, based on African epidemiologies and methodologies. And in India, we have the Subaltern Studies Collective, a group of researchers and scholars who come together in early 1980s and begin writing a history of India and South Asia from the standpoint of the subaltern, the marginalized and excluded. This kind of historiography is not a top-down method of history writing; it is a bottom-up historiography. And this is a major departure from all sorts of elitist, ‘nationalist,’ Orientalist and colonialist historiography. Well, in Iran this historiography starts effectively with Naser Poorpirar. For the first time in Iran’s modern history, a local historian decides to take on the challenging task of re-examining a history written by foreign missionaries, travelers, priests, ambassadors, anthropologists, philologists, and historians. And this local historian is Naser Poorpirar. No one else has done this before him. In Iran he is the first to produce a local historiography by exposing misconceptions and misrepresentations inherent in the Orientalist historiography of Iran. He has done a great job in this field and he will be remembered because of this.

Lisa: What about the problematic area of his work that you mentioned?

Alireza: You might have noticed that my book starts with a mild criticism of Edward Said’s Orientalism. I critic Said for failing to properly discuss “Aryanism.” The reason for this is, in an Iranian context we are dealing with Aryanism more than anything else. As a matter of fact, in my book I show the evolution of this concept of “Aryan race” from its inception up to the emergence of fascism and Nazism in Europe. I show clearly in the book how Adolph Hitler’s definition of this term does not differ that much from its current definition in dominant Iranian literature. In an Iranian context then, we need an interrogation of this concept of ‘Aryanism’ more than any other term. Poorpirar does not do an effective job in this area. Aryanism, moreover, was a discourse constructed to reject Judaism, Semitic races and biblical religions. It was an anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish project from the very beginning. How can such a project be manufactured by the Jews? And herein lies a major contradiction in Poorpirar’s methodology.

Lisa: Is he saying Aryanism is constructed by the Jews?

Alireza: He does not discuss Aryanism per se. He tends to indicate that the current animosity among different ethnic groups in Iran and in the region is a result of historical Jewish conspiracy. Now the way I see it, there are several things wrong with this picture. To begin with, various non-Persian ethnic groups in Iran have no animosity against the dominant Persian group. All they want is to be treated equally as equal citizens of their country. It is only the elites of Persian group and their culture that constantly humiliate other groups as subhuman, lacking in culture, lacking in civilization, lacking in linguistic abilities, and so on. For instance, the Persian culture identifies Turks as donkeys (Tork-e khar); it identifies Arabs as dogs (Taazi), and so on and so forth. It bans the languages of non-Persian groups and seeks to supplant them by its own Farsi language. Obviously, here we are dealing with a racist and colonial condition in which one group dominates others. There is a huge power configuration and power imbalance at work here that Poorpirar’s conspiracy theory does not and cannot address.

Instead of focussing our attention on Persian racism and its elimination through our democratic anti-racist struggles, he wants to divert our attention to some historical wild goose chase regarding Purim, this and that.  Now I have nothing against doing historical research; but I am against linking in a deterministic way the events of 2500 years ago to contemporary situations. Contemporary conditions require contemporary solutions. It is not a Jewish conspiracy that today the language of the Kurd, the Turk, the Arab, the Baluch, the Lor and the Turkmen is banned in Iran. It is a result of an 80-year-old racism. Of course, we should go back to history and try to see what has happened that we have ended up this way; we should try to analyze, if we can, the historical roots and causes of our contemporary problems. But this is different than getting ourselves stuck in the swamps of history. An engagement with history is useful insofar as it provides insights for our contemporary issues. Historicism, antiquarianism, and a superficial fascination with ancient history will not solve our contemporary problems.

The other loophole in Poorpirar’s conspiracy theory is the phenomenon of colonialism. For the most part, Aryanism and bio-genetic racism were discursive constructs to justify the colonization of other lands by white Europeans. The idea was that the white Nordic race was a superior race genetically, mentally, and culturally while other races were inferior and could not create higher civilizations, could not properly run their own affairs, could not manage their own resources. It was thus seen as a mission of the white Aryan race to colonize these supposedly inferior races and run their affairs for them. You cannot single out Iran, as Poorpirar does, and say that in the case of Iran it was a Jewish conspiracy to infiltrate Aryanism into the country, but in the case of India, for example, it was the work of British colonialism. This historical conspiracy theory does not hold much water.

Furthermore, if the current racism in Iran was a result of Jewish conspiracy, then the presumably anti-Zionist Islamic regime in Iran should have done away with this racism immediately after dethroning the shah and seizing the political power in 1979. But why didn’t they? Why doesn’t the current Islamic regime lift the ban on Non-Persian languages? Why does it not allow these languages to become languages of instruction, of schooling, of reading and writing for their speakers? Is this too a Jewish conspiracy? Is the current Islamic regime in Iran controlled by the Jews as well? The historical conspiracy theory is a ridiculous argument promoted particularly by the government of president Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist supporters. Thinkers like Pourpirar, in order to survive and to write, capitalize on these foolish sentiments so that they may get some kind of immunity from Iran’s sensor and torture organizations.


AN INTERVIEW WITH ALIREZA ASGHARZADEH
INTERVIEWER: Lisa  A. Hamdoon, University of Toronto

http://durna.eu/asgarzade_lisa.htm

پاسخ:
آقای محمد رضا. لابد حالا اعتراض خواهید شنید که چرا از متن انگلیسی استفاده می کنید. هیچ حرف مهمی از زبان اصغر زاده در این مصاحبه نخواندم و مثلا چیزی در باب اثرات پوریم در توقف رشد تمدن نگفته، با زیر بنای بنیان اندیشی بیگانه است و مثلا کلامی درباره مستندهای با خون دل ساخته شده بر زبان نرانده و تا توانسته از مبانی گریخته است. مختصر بگویم صاحب نظرگاه زیر در باب تاریخ و تمدن، برای آسیاب های مخصوصی میرابی می کند و بس:

«جنبش سکولاریسم در ایران کنونی یکی از مهمترین حوزه های مقاومت علیه بنیادگرائی سیستم حاکم است».

زیرا نه در ایران جنبش سکولاری در جریان است و نه جمهوری اسلامی قدمی در مسیر بنیان گرایی اسلامی برمی دارد!