Introduction

Since 1963, when the Pahlavi government introduced a policy requiring the exclusive use of state-designated textbooks at all school levels in both the public and private sectors, every student receiving Iran's compulsory education has studied the story of their national history. Though the history described in school textbooks was continuously revised, the underlying policy of using them to teach the official history has remained unchanged since the policy was implemented. For this reason, the textbooks have served as extensions of state media that disseminate the official ideologies.

Existing studies on Iranian textbooks, especially those focused on teaching history, have highlighted the relationship between history and nationalism. They have analyzed how and what sort of “national history” or “national collective memory” has been constructed and how this has changed or remained the same from the Pahlavi dynasty up to the existing Islamic Republic of Iran. Based on the idea that the nation is constructed and imagined, the formation of national identities was analyzed as the process of defining “us” while excluding “others.” The issues are who defines our attributes in order to construct the “nation” and what attributes have been given to the nation. The popular arguments revolve around the selection of historical events, the accuracy of historical facts, the validity of the explanations of events’ causes and consequences, the evaluation of past events and the role of historical figures, and the underlying ideology that shapes the storyline.

In contrast to existing studies, this chapter attempts to identify dominant repeated patterns of explaining the historical transition from the ancient to the present, rather than analyzing historical event selection and the way each one has been evaluated or depicted in the textbooks.