Iranians’ inherited Aryan myth erases India and is inseparable from anti-Arab racism

Evidence

The Indian subcontinent and its peoples are conveniently and entirely expunged from the version of the Aryan myth circulated among Iranians. As blisteringly put by Hamid Dabashi, “Orientalists have instructed [Iranians] that they are ‘Aryan’ and as such of the same superior stock as Europeans; only by some unfortunate accident of geography do they find themselves somewhere between the Arab lands and India. The Orientalists’ tales—about Cyrus the Great, Darius the First and Xerxes the Conqueror—continue to haunt them, generation after generation. The racism of Iranians runs viciously deep; they have a horror of being taken for Arab (though they would be delighted to be taken for Italian).” — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 1461

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the ‘Aryan’ essentialism that Maghbouleh’s second-generation subjects inherit and reverse toward ‘brown’ — the empirical case at the center of the reader’s irony-to-residence question. — connects to: The first generation inherited Aryan whiteness from Iranian state socialization — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 379; Iranian internalized racism positions Iranians as Aryan and superior to Arabs, expunging India — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 680; The Iranian Aryan myth survives despite scientific refutation and political regime change — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 178 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Dabashi’s claim that Iranians ‘would be delighted to be taken for Italian’ begs the question of how the lighter-spectra ‘brown-adjacent’ or ‘hinge’ identities get mobilized collectively versus only by individuals.

Broader Connections

• Iranian internalized racism positions Iranians as Aryan and superior to Arabs, expunging India #corroborates (0.95) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 680
• The Indo-European language tree gave Iran a scientific excuse to disavow Arab kinship #expands (0.85) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 200
• The Iranian Aryan myth survives despite scientific refutation and political regime change #expands (0.75) — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 178