The Overt and Hidden Foundations of Racism in Ahmad Kasravi’s Thought and Their Function in Pahlavi Cultural Engineering

Author: Mohim Baloch-Sarkhosh

In the official historiography of Iran, Ahmad Kasravi has long been portrayed with labels such as “enlightener,” “anti-superstition,” “reformer,” and “the disturbed conscience of his era.” The aspect most frequently celebrated by his admirers is his uncompromising struggle against clerical hypocrisy and tradition-bound backwardness. This dominant image, however, has for decades obscured a deeper and more dangerous dimension of his intellectual project: a dimension in which Kasravi promoted an identity-engineering scheme achievable only through the erasure, polishing, and chiseling away of the “internal Others of Iran.”

Kasravi insisted that the Iran of the future must have a single language, and that language had to be Persian, imagined by him as the “reflection of Iranian purity and reason” (Kasravi, 1943). He repeatedly labelled Arabic, Turkic, and Kurdish as “corrupt and foreign languages,” not as linguistic observations but as value judgments against the peoples for whom those languages were mother tongues. Here emerges the first profound fissure in his heroic persona: his claims to freedom stood in stark contradiction with a project that permitted liberty only within the bounds of “being Persian.”

Such a worldview gained political expression in a pivotal historical moment when the Pahlavi state sought to extract the concept of “Iran” from its deep historical diversity and re-forge it as a purified Aryan entity. Abrahamian argues that Pahlavi policies rested on “culturally homogenizing strategies of a racial and centralist nature” (Abrahamian, 2008). In this context, Kasravi was no bystander but an influential ideologue who turned language into an instrument of elimination. The Pahlavis seized his ideas from journals and intellectual circles and institutionalized them in schools, courts, and administrative directives.

The suppression of mother tongues for millions of children, the criminalization of basic linguistic rights in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Arabestan (al-Ahwaz), Balochistan, Turkestan, Gilan, and Mazandaran, and the systemic humiliation of indigenous vocabularies became the concrete realization of what Kasravi called “reforms.” Shaffer demonstrates that the Persian Language Academy and its official campaign to purge Arabic words emerged precisely within this racializing discourse (Shaffer, 2002).

Another face of Kasravi’s project appears in his historiography. In Azari or the Ancient Language of Azerbaijan, he attempted to distort the linguistic past of the Azerbaijani people and portray millennia of Turkic presence as a “foreign imposition” (Kasravi, 1946). This revisionism rapidly became a theoretical pillar of the Pahlavi securitization of Azerbaijan, a region that had long demanded equality. Zia-Ebrahimi calls this discourse a case of “Iranian race-making masked as science” (Zia-Ebrahimi, 2016).

Kasravi frequently depicted Arabs as the cause of civilizational decline and Kurds as embodiments of backwardness (Kasravi, 1944). These stereotypes were not merely theoretical; they paved the way for the state’s security-oriented and derogatory attitudes toward millions of non-Persian citizens. Halliday accurately explains that Pahlavi ideology “defined being Persian as synonymous with being Iranian” (Halliday, 1979). Culturally speaking, this logic formed a direct continuation of Kasravi’s pen.

Said’s Orientalism offers a crucial insight: domination does not always begin with armies; sometimes it begins with the pen and is then carried forward by force (Said, 1979). The case of Iran fits that model. Kasravi armed the Pahlavi state with a linguistic weapon later enforced through legal coercion and security violence in colonized and occupied regions such as Balochistan and other non-Persian homelands.

Evaluating Kasravi solely as an enemy of clerical superstition and champion of reason produces an incomplete picture. His contribution to strengthening a form of “cultural totalitarianism” deprived millions of their natural right to a mother tongue: the right to define themselves and narrate their own past.

Critiquing Kasravi neither negates his contributions nor ignores his historical role in resisting clerical despotism. It responds to a greater necessity: removing the overt and subtle layers of racism embedded in the concepts of “Iranian identity” and “nationhood.” As long as Iranian historiography rests on silencing and demeaning its internal Others, no genuine national dialogue can emerge. Iran’s linguistic and cultural diversity is not a crisis, but the living foundation of its geography. A just future requires a conscious rupture from Aryan-centrism and monolingualism that have distorted the human landscape of Iran.

Re-examining Kasravi’s legacy opens a new door toward dialogue where Turk, Kurd, Arab, Baloch, and Persian stand side by side, each with their language and collective memory intact, not under the shadow of another. A society where the right to self-naming and self-narration is not monopolized, and no nation is forced to sever its roots to prove it belongs. Only within such a horizon can criticism of Kasravi transform from reproducing cycles of erasure into a force for liberation and equality.

If such rethinking does not occur, the multinational geography of Iran will remain vulnerable to the erosion of trust and justice, a corrosion that could eventually hollow out any unity built upon denial. As long as the center believes only “one narrative” deserves life, divisions will not heal but deepen. The glass is already overflowing; the patience of nations has reached a breaking point, and a fire beneath the ashes waits with no distinction for wet or dry.

This moment is a historic opportunity. It is the last warning the centralist policymakers and proponents of the Iranshahr ideology must hear: recognize for others the very rights you claim for yourselves; the future of this land depends on such equality. Iran might be preserved not by denying its non-Persian nations but by recognizing and respecting them. The destiny of this country becomes clear only when “Iran” ceases to be the name of a single ethnic group and language and becomes the shared home of all its nations. Otherwise Iran will turn into Iranistan. Study Yugoslavia and the Balkans as a historical lesson. Continuing the mistakes of the Serbs and Milošević carries grave consequences for Iran and its one-dimensional identity.

⸻

References
Abrahamian, E. (2008). A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, F. (1979). Dictatorship and Capitalist Development in Iran. Amir Kabir.
Kasravi, A. (1943). Zabān-e Pāk. Payman.
Kasravi, A. (1944). Mā va ham-sāyegān. Parcham.
Kasravi, A. (1946). Āzari yā Zabān-e Bāstān-e Āzarbāijān. Matba’a-ye Shoravi.
Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Shaffer, B. (2002). Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity. MIT Press.
Zia-Ebrahimi, R. (2016). The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism. Columbia University Press.