Happy (Belated) Persian New Year

"Over the weekend," reports Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, "Iran hosted the presidents of Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan to celebrate Nowruz, the ancient Persian new year marking the first day of spring that is celebrated by some 300 million people around the world who together form an important cultural bloc" — Iran rediscovers value of Persian roots. The author suggests that "this represents a cultural evolution in contemporary post-revolutionary Iran dominated by the Islamist discourse," saying:

Over the past 31 years, in the complex interplay of Iran's dualistic, part Islamic, part pre-Islamic culture, the government has prioritized the Islamic and, yet, increasingly has discovered the trans-Iran potential of the pre-Islamic, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rediscovery of cultural roots connected to Persian culture and language in certain parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus, above all Tajikstan.

To some extent, the origin of this new "cultural offensive" by Iran should be traced to a former president, Mohammad Khatami, and his promotion of a "dialogue among civilizations", which inevitably implicated the Islamist political system in a discrete re-embrace of pre-Islamic civilization, although without ever losing the priority given to Islam.