Reza Zia-Ebrahimi discusses the origins of racial forms of Iranian nationalism by revisiting the work of Fath’ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two Qajar-era intellectuals. In their efforts to make sense of Iran's shortcomings in the nineteenth century, these thinkers advanced an ideology Zia-Ebrahimi terms as "dislocative nationalism," in which pre-Islamic Iran is cast as a golden age, Islam is reinterpreted as an alien religion, and Arabs are represented as implacable others. Dislodging Iran from its empirical reality and tying it to Europe and the Aryan race, this ideology remains the most politically potent form of identity in Iran. Zia-Ebrahimi highlights Akhundzadeh and Kermani's nationalist reading of Iranian history that has been drilled into the minds of Iranians since its adoption by the Pahlavi state in the early twentieth century. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in History at King’s College London.…