ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals the 'ambivalent imaginary' of the decades before the 1979 revolution represented in Iraj Pezeshkzad's novel Mashallah Khan dar bargah-e Harun al-Rashid. Then, it exposes how novel uncovers the ambiguities, anxieties, and denials underpinning projections of Iranian identity at the individual and the national level. The novel's focus on how history can be used as a platform for improving one's self-image draws attention to other approaches to history in the Iranian cultural sphere and mirrors efforts under way in Iran of the 1960s and 1970s to project an image of the nation endowed with '3,000 years of Persian civilization'. Iran's pre-Islamic heritage was imagined as a point of origin that also held the promise of a future capable of rivaling European civilization. On the surface the novel offers a comic representation of Iranian preoccupations with rewriting history and the almost compulsive need to frame reality in terms of manipulated and ameliorated history.
