Empire, knowledge and erasure: Bombing Iran is bombing memory

Mail & Guardian

6 hours ago

Iran has a long and magnificent intellectual history.
Empire does not begin with bombs. It begins with stories. Before missiles strike, a narrative must be written to make the target bombable. Colonial narrative, as postcolonial historian Ranajit Guha shows in
A Conquest Foretold
, transforms conquest into destiny. It prepares the public to accept war as not only inevitable but righteous.
It is not simply that Iran was bombed on 13 June 2025. It is that the idea of Iran and its right to hold memory, to produce knowledge, to exist as a civilisational subject was already rendered illegible.
The Israeli assault on Iran was defended in familiar terms — an imminent nuclear threat, national security, surgical precision. But these are not explanations. They are scripts. Like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the attack on Iran was rationalised through an architecture of claims that do not require evidence, only repetition. Intelligence reports denying Iran's weapons programme were irrelevant. The narrative had already been written.
Guha's insight is clear — Empire writes the future in advance. The British conquest of India was not sealed at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. That battle was a minor military affair. And yet, in British imperial historiography, Plassey was elevated to a grand foundational moment, the start of British rule in India, the point at which the East India Company became a territorial power.
As Guha points out, it was this narrative that was repeated in schoolbooks, official dispatches and parliamentary speeches. It provided the ideological foundation for expanding British rule. While the real event was modest and sordid, the story told about it became grand and civilisational.
Guha painstakingly shows that conquest must be justified, not just enacted. He draws from the writings of figures like Robert Orme, an official historian of the East India Company, who openly declared that 'the sword is the charter'. This chilling phrase captures the heart of imperial logic — that might creates right. Violence, if victorious, rewrites itself as law. The act of domination becomes the foundation of legitimacy.
What Guha reveals is that empires do not just win battles, they write the laws and the history books. They tell the story in such a way that the destruction appears noble, even necessary. The conquered are not only defeated on the ground; they are also written out of history.
This symbolic process, Guha argues, is what transforms the 'instant of aggression' into the logic of rule. The colonial archive did not record India's conquest merely as fact. It reworked it as a historical necessity, a fulfilment of a moral and civilisational order. This allowed future wars, occupations and annexations to be narrated not as violence, but as destiny. Guha calls this 'a conquest foretold', a fate legitimised before it is ever enforced.
This continues today. The West does not simply bomb places. It un-names them. In the mainstream media, Iran is rarely presented as a site of knowledge, history or intellectual contribution. It is a shadow space: nuclear, irrational, volatile, fanatical, alien, frightening. Colonial narratives render people fungible, bombable and, ultimately, forgettable. They reduce cities to targets, its people to collateral and magnificent civilisational archives to dust.
Literary theorist Edward Said showed clearly that the Orient was never just misunderstood. It was constructed. It was imagined as timeless, barbaric, hyper-religious and fundamentally unfit for self-rule. This epistemic violence enabled actual violence. When the drones strike, they do so on the back of a long intellectual history that emptied the East of sovereignty.
Said's Orientalism is a study of how European and American thinkers created a fictional image of the East, a world of despots, harems, fanaticism and mystery. This fantasy was not harmless. It underpinned policy, war and occupation. Said wanted readers to understand that power works not only through tanks and armies, but also through language, maps and books.
How we speak about a place, whether on TV or in schools, shapes what we believe can or should happen to it. When the East is painted as irrational and dangerous, bombing it becomes not a horror, but a duty.
Orientalism, Said shows, is not an error of perception. It is a system of power. Through universities, literature, policy and media, the West defined the East as the inverse of itself: irrational, feminine, despotic. This representation justified intervention. If the East could not govern itself, then governance must be imposed from without. Once internalised, this logic rendered bombing not only possible but legible as order, as responsibility, as peacekeeping. Violence becomes virtue.
Iran has a long and magnificent intellectual history. The Academy of Gundishapur in Khuzestan, Iran, was one of the oldest universities in the world. Founded in the third century CE, it was a centre for multilingual scholarship where Sanskrit medical texts were translated into Middle Persian, Greek logic was systematised and Babylonian astronomy refined. It was here that clinical observation became a method of medical teaching, surgery was formalised and knowledge travelled across linguistic and cultural lines, centuries before Oxford opened its gates in 1096 or Cambridge in 1209.
The very model of the Western university, its division into faculties, the logic of disputation, the canon of philosophy and science, was shaped by Iranian and Islamic precedents. The Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Abbasid Baghdad, deeply influenced by Persian scholarship, became the template for later European institutions.
When Arabic and Persian texts were translated into Latin in Andalusia and Sicily, they were not curiosities, they were the architecture of another world being absorbed. There would be no scholastic tradition without al-Farabi and al-Tusi, no experimental method without al-Razi and no algebra without al-Khwarizmi.
These networks extended even further south. Persian texts and Islamic jurisprudence travelled along trans-Saharan trade routes into West Africa. At Sankoré University in Timbuktu, scholars studied Avicenna and al-Ghazali alongside local astronomers and jurists. Libraries in desert towns preserved manuscripts copied in Persian script. These were not isolated developments. They formed part of an intellectual system that preceded and shaped the European Enlightenment.
From Baghdad's Bayt al-Hikma to the libraries of Timbuktu, Persian and Arabic texts travelled along trade routes, translated, adapted and taught across generations. The commentaries of al-Farabi, al-Tusi and Avicenna informed the very structure of the Western university. Algebra, optics and medicine — none of these can be understood without Iran.
This history was not just ignored by European colonialism. It was actively erased. During colonial rule in India, the British administration removed Persian as a court and scholarly language, replacing it with English and thereby severing centuries of transregional intellectual continuity between South Asia, Central Asia and the Iranian plateau. Persian manuscripts were stripped of context and displayed as exotic artefacts in museums. Its philosophy was recast as mysticism. Its scientific legacy was reduced to footnotes or omitted altogether.
Tabriz, struck in the June 2025 attack, is not just a military site. It is the city of Shams al-Din Tabrizi, Rumi's teacher and a centre of Persian mysticism and learning. It is a node in a centuries-old network of philosophy, theology, mathematics, astronomy and poetry that spanned from Khurasan to Mali. These were not isolated traditions. They were the foundations of a civilisational archive beyond the borders and imagination of Europe.
And yet, in the dominant Western imagination, Iran is nothing but a sinister, irrational enemy of the West.
This is not ignorance. It is design. It is an instance of what Guha and Said both expose: the strategic construction of the South as a site of absence. A place whose people are forgettable, whose knowledge is disposable, whose destruction is thinkable.
We have seen this before. Iraq's libraries were looted. Mosul's university was razed. Gaza's schools, universities and archives were bombed into nothingness. In each case, what is attacked is not just infrastructure but the right to remember, to dream, to transmit. Epistemic erasure is not collateral damage. It is the method of neocolonial domination.
To centre the epistemic is not to look away from the dead. It is to insist that their lives were lived in full. It is to understand that the people of Iran are not footnotes to someone else's future. That they are authors, carriers of meaning and custodians of a world that Empire has tried again and again to silence.
This war, like all imperial wars, is not just about sovereignty. It is about the terms of knowledge. Who gets to define history. Who gets to remember.
Until we refuse the stories that make us invisible and tell our own stories, we will never escape the imperial forces that deny our full and equal humanity.
Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist
.