Sohrab Ahmari: Burying Uncle Napoleon
[Sohrab Ahmari, a member of the American Islamic Congress’s New England Council, is a law student at Northeastern University. His commentary on Iran and democratic reform in the Middle East has previously appeared in the Boston Globe and PBS | Frontline’s Tehran Bureau.]
For days, Iranian media have been celebrating the triumphant homecoming of “kidnapped” nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri. Now we learn that his story is to be adapted into an action movie, Islamic Republic–style.
Right. This is a preposterous narrative, but one perfectly designed to exploit Iranians’ national neurosis: the “Uncle Napoleon complex”—the all-too-common tendency among Persians to ascribe supernatural powers to evil Westerners whose conspiracies lurk behind every political development. The specific diagnosis has its origins in Iraj Pezeshkzad’s comic novel My Uncle Napoleon. Published six years prior to the Islamic Revolution and banned by the mullahs, the novel cleverly satirizes the conspiratorial Persian mind. Its title character is the senile patriarch of a petty aristocratic family who imagines himself a national hero and the target of a dastardly British revenge plot for his patriotic activities.
Generations of Persian readers have gotten laughs out of Dear Uncle Napoleon’s attempts to smoke out the British conspiracies at work in the banal goings-on of his declining clan. But the Uncle Napoleon complex is no laughing matter. It is an insidious—and dangerous—part of Iranian political life....
Read entire article at Commentary
For days, Iranian media have been celebrating the triumphant homecoming of “kidnapped” nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri. Now we learn that his story is to be adapted into an action movie, Islamic Republic–style.
Right. This is a preposterous narrative, but one perfectly designed to exploit Iranians’ national neurosis: the “Uncle Napoleon complex”—the all-too-common tendency among Persians to ascribe supernatural powers to evil Westerners whose conspiracies lurk behind every political development. The specific diagnosis has its origins in Iraj Pezeshkzad’s comic novel My Uncle Napoleon. Published six years prior to the Islamic Revolution and banned by the mullahs, the novel cleverly satirizes the conspiratorial Persian mind. Its title character is the senile patriarch of a petty aristocratic family who imagines himself a national hero and the target of a dastardly British revenge plot for his patriotic activities.
Generations of Persian readers have gotten laughs out of Dear Uncle Napoleon’s attempts to smoke out the British conspiracies at work in the banal goings-on of his declining clan. But the Uncle Napoleon complex is no laughing matter. It is an insidious—and dangerous—part of Iranian political life....