Abstract

This article interrogates the deliberate linguistic demotion of Iran’s sovereign titulature from ‘imperial’ to ‘royal’ in post-1979 Euro-American discourse and its reproduction among segments of the Iranian intelligentsia. It contends that this terminological revision is neither benign nor incidental, but rather constitutes an epistemic manoeuvre intended to decivilise Iran by severing it from its pre-Islamic imperial continuum. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial thinkers such as Spivak, Fanon, Bhabha, and Quijano, the article identifies the deployment of ‘royal’ as a form of symbolic containment, imposed to render Iran intelligible within the Eurocentric imaginary. In the discursive field of postcolonial geopolitics, ‘royal’ becomes not an honourific but a euphemism, a rhetorical straightjacket designed to reduce an ancient civilisation to a manageable, monarchic appendage of the ‘Non-Aligned World’, or what is derogatorily labelled the ‘Global South’ [1].

 

It situates this lexical downgrade within a broader arsenal of orientalist sabotage, highlighting how Euro-American media, diplomatic protocol, and even ‘liberal’ historiography collude in stripping Iran of its imperium while preserving such recognition for European and East Asian powers. It exposes the complicity of internalised coloniality among diaspora scholars and post-revolutionary reformists who have uncritically adopted this nomenclature as part of their broader deracination. The symbolic death of His Imperial Majesty and the ascendance of a neutered Shah is not a by-product of ignorance, but a calculated act of narrative warfare. This article calls for the restoration of Iran’s rightful imperial grammar as an act of resistance against cultural infantilisation and as an affirmation of its civilisational sovereignty.

 

 

Introduction

There are no innocent words in colonial modernity. When the language of empire is stripped from the colonised and reallocated to the coloniser, it is not semantics, it is strategy. The post-1979 linguistic reduction of Iran’s sovereign titulature from imperial to royal, and of His Imperial Majesty to the neutered fiction of His Royal Highness, is not merely an act of Western bureaucratic tidiness. It is, as this article argues, a calculated operation of epistemic sabotage, designed to detach Iran from its civilisational depth, to dislocate its monarchy from millennia of continuity, and to insert it into a Eurocentric typology of infantilised monarchies.

 

This discursive downgrade reflects a broader structural compulsion within the Euro-American imaginary: to subordinate non-Western polities to nomenclatures that render them intelligible, but never equal. The shift from imperial to royal is not imposed out of ignorance of Persian political history, but because acknowledging imperium in a non-European context threatens the West’s monopolisation of that term’s symbolic capital. The denial of Iran’s imperial status is not an error in diplomatic protocol, it is the fulfilment of a psychological imperative. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, ‘the domination of a people’s language is part of the process of dominating them mentally’ (Ngũgĩ, 1986, p. 16). In this context, the West’s refusal to use Iran’s historically correct titulature is not merely inaccurate, it is an act of mental occupation.

 

This linguistic demotion is deeply embedded in what Edward Said identified as the grammar of Orientalism, whereby the East is systemically constructed as ahistorical, derivative, or dangerous, and always positioned beneath the West (Said, 1978, pp. 1–28). Said’s work exposed how colonial knowledge systems did not merely reflect empire but constituted it, creating the discursive conditions for its legitimacy. Within that framework, Iran’s imperial sovereignty, whether under the Achaemenids or the Pahlavis, could never be acknowledged without destabilising the entire edifice of Western exceptionalism. To recognise Iran as imperial would be to admit that civilisation did not begin in Athens, that monarchy need not be constitutional to be legitimate, and that modernity need not be Western to be real.

 

Yet this erasure is not merely external. A more insidious danger lies in the internalisation of this semantic inferiority by segments of the Iranian diaspora, particularly among self-styled intellectuals, post-revolutionary reformists, and Euro-assimilated commentators. Many now echo the very terminology that was engineered to degrade them, deploying the term ‘royal’ as though it were neutral. Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of the colonised intellectual who ‘ventriloquises the master’s discourse’ is instructive here: ‘The subaltern cannot speak... not because she is mute, but because the very structure of language has already excluded her’ (Spivak, 1988, p. 295). The Iranian who uses royal instead of imperial does not merely misname, they participate in their own symbolic silencing.

 

The case of Iran is particularly revealing because it offers no convenient slot in the West’s typology of monarchic governance. It is not Arab, and thus immune to the patronising ascription of tribal sheikhdoms. Nor is it postcolonial in the African or South Asian mode, where royalty could be exoticised into obsolescence. It is an unbroken imperial civilisation that predates Europe itself. For that reason, it must be discursively dismantled, its emperors renamed, its sovereignty rewritten, and its grandeur reduced to a mimicry of European forms.

 

This article dismantles the colonial logic underpinning this linguistic substitution. Drawing upon the work of Spivak (1988), Fanon (1967), Quijano (2000), and Bhabha (1994), it locates the semantic shift within broader systems of coloniality, mimicry, and psychological warfare. In the battleground of memory, language is both a weapon and a wound. To reclaim the title imperial is not nostalgia, it is resistance. And in the context of Iran, it is truth.

 

 

The Weaponisation of Language: From Imperial to Royal

His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shāhanshāh Āryāmehr; Her Imperial Majesty Empress Farah Pahlavi;and His Imperial Highness Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi,following the Imperial Coronationon 26 October 1967 at Golestan Palace.Language, in the hands of empire, is not a medium, it is a weapon. The transformation of Iran’s sovereign titulature from imperial to royal is not a diplomatic misnomer but an act of deliberate semiotic warfare. In every reference to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as ‘His Royal Highness’ rather than His Imperial Majesty, the violence of Eurocentric language asserts itself not with bombs or embargoes, but with the stealth of protocol. This is how empires speak: by renaming what they cannot erase.

 

In the context of Iran, this linguistic reduction functions as a discursive strategy designed to shrink civilisational scale, sever dynastic continuity, and evacuate political legitimacy. The Pahlavi dynasty did not declare itself royal. It was imperial by design, an assertion grounded in the ancient tradition of Shahanshah (Shāhanshāh), the King of Kings, which itself extended a lineage that preceded the rise of Rome and long outlasted its fall. To call such a dynasty ‘royal’ is not simply to be incorrect; it is to participate in what Fanon diagnosed as the symbolic ‘depersonalisation’ of the colonised subject (Fanon, 1967, p. 17). When the Iranian monarchy is translated into the vocabulary of European-style royalty, it is stripped of its grandeur, reclassified into a hierarchy in which Iran becomes a regional prince, not a sovereign emperor.

 

The same discursive violence is evident in the regime-led substitution of ‘Farsi’ for ‘Persian’, a linguistic coup that mirrors the Western refusal to acknowledge Iran’s imperial titulature. Just as the Islamic Republic eschews the Persian language’s international nomenclature in favour of the domesticised ‘Farsi’, the West rebrands Shahanshah as merely ‘royal’. Both acts serve parallel functions: to provincialise, to diminish, and to re-script Iranian identity into a more manageable and ideologically compliant form. As argued elsewhere (Suren-Pahlav, 2007), this terminological sabotage is not semantically trivial; it is civilisationally catastrophic. The use of ‘Farsi’ erases millennia of cultural capital embedded in the term ‘Persian’, a name synonymous with high civilisation, literary grandeur, and diplomatic reach. It is no accident that both these erasures, of language and titulature, are advanced by regimes hostile to Iranian imperial memory: one clerical and anti-national, the other Eurocentric and epistemologically supremacist illusion. Their shared objective is the symbolic liquidation of Iran’s civilisational sovereignty.

 

This semiotic downgrade is consistent with what Quijano (2000) identifies as the coloniality of power, where epistemic frameworks are imposed to entrench structural dependency. Language, here, becomes not only descriptive but classificatory, it determines who may rule, who may remember, and who must be forgotten. Under this logic, the West does not simply withhold the title of ‘imperial’ from Iran; it confiscates it, hoarding the term for itself and a small number of culturally sanctioned others (e.g. British, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese dynasties). Iran’s exclusion is not coincidental, it is structural. It affirms a cartography of legitimacy in which only Western or West-approved entities are permitted the dignity of imperium.

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) warns that this kind of linguistic violence is foundational to colonial control. When imperial powers impose their language upon a people, they do not simply change their vocabulary, they recalibrate their entire cultural horizon. In Iran’s case, the use of royal over imperial serves to misplace its monarchy within a Eurocentric schema of constitutional ceremonialism, where kings and queens are quaint relics of national theatre rather than expressions of civilisational memory. The consequence is discursive containment: Iran is symbolically demoted and culturally provincialised.

 

This strategy of terminological appropriation has precedent. As examined in the historical distortion of the term ‘Aryan’, Eurocentric scholarship has long demonstrated a tendency to misappropriate Iranian ethnocultural concepts to serve its own classificatory frameworks. The original Avestan term Airya and its cognates in Old Persian were civilisational, spiritual, and territorial markers, not racial ones. Yet, from the 18th century onwards, Orientalists and racial theorists redefined ‘Aryan’ to fit Western racial mythologies, removing it from its Zoroastrian and Iranian roots and projecting it onto fabricated Indic and Northern European lineages. The same pattern of semantic displacement now afflicts Iranian imperial sovereignty: Shahanshah (King of Kings = Emperor) becomes ‘royal’, just as Airya became ‘Indo-European’. In both cases, conceptual vocabularies indigenous to Iran are gutted of meaning and remoulded to accommodate European anxieties, agendas, and epistemic dominion (Suren-Pahlav, 2005).

 

Therefore, there is also an unmistakable racial dimension to this terminological sabotage. The application of ‘imperial’ is conspicuously racialised. It remains available to white-dominated polities, and cautiously extended to East Asian ones, but is withheld from those civilisations whose histories predate the West and whose presence challenges the racial order of international hierarchy. Said (1978) exposed this when he detailed how the West constructs the Orient not merely as its opposite, but as its subordinate, unable to speak for itself, and thus spoken over, renamed, and misrepresented. The renaming of the Shah from imperial to royal follows this very trajectory: it is not a translation, it is an overwriting.

 

Within this epistemic regime, the very word Shah becomes a site of erasure. Rendered into English with none of its semantic weight, Shah is deployed as a linguistic quarantine: exotic enough to mark difference, yet deliberately untranslatable so as to dislocate it from its actual status as Shahanshah. The deliberate refusal to translate Shah into its rightful equivalent, Emperor, or King of Kings, ensures that its dignity remains unintelligible to the Western ear. This mirrors what Spivak (1988, p. 294) describes as the subaltern’s linguistic imprisonment: ‘The subaltern’s speech, even if uttered, cannot be heard in the colonial metropole without distortion or deletion.’

 

The consequence is more than grammatical. When Iran’s imperial titulature is stripped, its historical sovereignty is rewritten, its dynastic continuity severed, and its symbolic capital looted. It is a form of cultural disarmament dressed in diplomatic protocol.

 

What is lost in this linguistic mutilation is not merely accuracy, it is authority. To call the Shah ‘royal’ is not to err; it is to rewrite Iran’s relationship to itself, to its past, and to the world. That this misnaming continues to be echoed by Iranian commentators and diaspora intellectuals is not only an indictment of internalised colonialism, it is proof of how effective linguistic occupation can be.

 

 

II. Eurocentric Anxiety and the Politics of Diminishment

The Western refusal to acknowledge Iran’s imperial titulature must be understood not as a lapse of knowledge but as a projection of insecurity. Europe’s historical anxiety towards older, non-Christian, and non-European civilisations, particularly those with unbroken dynastic traditions, has long expressed itself through symbolic diminishment. When the British monarch is titled ‘Her Imperial Majesty’, and the Japanese emperor is addressed with unqualified reverence, but the Iranian Shahanshah is rendered simply as ‘Shah’ or demoted to ‘His Royal Highness’, we are not witnessing a semantic accident; we are witnessing the pathology of Eurocentric inferiority masquerading as bureaucratic neutrality.

 

This anxiety has roots in the epistemological architecture of modernity itself. From the Enlightenment onward, Europe has required its Others to be either primitive or derivative. The notion that a non-European polity might possess a sovereign tradition older than its own, more continuous than its own, and more imperially grounded than its own, is incompatible with the Eurocentric worldview. As Quijano (2000) observes, the modern world system was built not only on economic exploitation, but on the racial and epistemic classification of peoples: a civilisational caste system disguised as universal progress. Within this system, Iran’s imperial pedigree becomes a threat, not because it contests Western power materially, but because it destabilises its narrative monopoly.

 

The West’s need to infantilise Iran intensified after the 1979 Anglo-American-Israeli engineered Islamic Revolution (Suren-Pahlav, 2000). This orchestrated revolution removed a secular, modernising, and historically anchored monarchy and replaced it with a totalitarian-theocratic regime that suited Western Orientalist tropes more comfortably: irrational, chaotic, destabilising. Yet even in its fall, the Pahlavi legacy haunted the Western imagination. The erasure of "imperial" from diplomatic protocol constituted a ritual cleansing, an overwrought attempt to purge the historical record and recast it in terms more flattering to Western self-mythology. In the prevailing political lexicon, it is preferable to portray Iran as a tyrant, aligning more comfortably with the current narrative model.

 

This is why the term ‘royal’ was selected, and not by accident. ‘Royal’ carries with it the linguistic residue of Eurocentric accommodation. It is the language of proxy kings, ceremonial governors, and European-aligned dynasties whose legitimacy is tolerated only insofar as it is subordinate. The kings of Jordan, Morocco, or Malaysia are called royal because they pose no narrative threat. They are positioned within the Euro-American matrix of ‘good monarchies’: malleable, politically decorative, yet never imperial. That designation is reserved for Britain, Austria, Japan, and, selectively, for Russia, particularly when mobilised against communism. Iran, despite its far older and more continuous sovereignty, is denied such recognition. The deeper anxiety, however, lies in the possibility of an imperial monarchy being restored in Iran. This is the vocabulary of gatekeeping.

 

The selective application of the term 'imperial' is further illuminated by the West's treatment of China. Precisely because of its ideological hostility towards Communist China, Western discourse consistently retains the title 'emperor' for China’s historical sovereigns. This semantic consistency does not reflect civilisational respect; rather, it functions as a deliberate invocation of China's imperial past to delegitimise its revolutionary present. In other words, it becomes politically expedient to remind the Chinese of their dynastic grandeur in order to frame communism as an aberration.

 

Iran, by contrast, though its nation remains firmly aligned with the West, is denied this civilisational birthright. The West, viewing the fundamentalist regime in Tehran, and political Islam more broadly, as both a useful political instrument and a potential source of regional instability, deploys it within a strategy of divide and rule. The Islamic regime in Iran is, after all, the illegitimate progeny of Western and Israeli interventionism. In this context, the erasure of Iran’s imperial memory becomes not merely convenient but necessary.

 

To recognise Iran's historical sovereignty would be to affirm a national consciousness too autonomous to be instrumentalised, one that places the Islamic regime in jeopardy and, ultimately, threatens Western interests. This discrepancy exposes the strategic architecture of Western titulature: Iran is not stripped of its imperial designation because it resists the West, but because it reflects it too closely, too ancient, too continuous, too imperially sovereign to be safely assimilated into the typology of subordinate monarchies.

 

As Said (1978) forcefully demonstrated, Orientalism is not merely a discourse of difference, it is a technology of control. By regulating how the East is described, the West regulates what it is allowed to be. The denial of Iran’s imperial status is part of this regulatory regime. Iran is permitted to be despotic, religious, rebellious, but never imperial, never legitimate on its own civilisational terms. Even when describing Cyrus the Great, Western textbooks often avoid the title altogether, or else elevate Alexander of Macedon, his destroyer, as ‘the Great’ while relegating Cyrus to the periphery. This is not historiography; this is narrative warfare.

 

Homi Bhabha’s (1994) concept of colonial mimicry further illuminates how this anxiety plays out not only in Western institutions, but among those colonised subjects who seek to be accepted by them. The Iranian academic or journalist who uses ‘royal’ instead of ‘imperial’ is not being cautious, they are performing mimicry. They reproduce colonial language in order to appear credible, rational, and non-threatening. They hope, as Fanon (1967) diagnosed, that by adopting the syntax of the coloniser, they may be treated as equals. Yet mimicry never results in equality, it only deepens dependence. As Bhabha puts it: mimicry is ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 86). By using ‘royal’, they become almost legitimate, but never sovereign.

 

In this context, Eurocentric anxiety becomes a disciplinary apparatus, one that punishes civilisational assertiveness and rewards self-effacement. The refusal to acknowledge Iran’s imperial grammar is not a historical disagreement, it is a mechanism of imperial boundary-setting. And every time that refusal is repeated, echoed, and unchallenged, it tightens the noose around Iran’s narrative agency.

 

The Pahlavi era’s self-styling as an imperial state was not anachronism, it was historical reclamation. It declared that Iran’s sovereignty did not begin with 20th-century nationalism but stretched back to Achaemenid grandeur. That declaration terrified a Euro-American order predicated on the myth of Western centrality. Thus, it had to be buried, not with facts, but with euphemisms. Royal became the linguistic tombstone of a silenced civilisation.

 

 

III. Royal by Compulsion – Iran and the Failure of Western Categories

The reduction of Iran’s imperial identity to ‘royal’ cannot be understood without interrogating the underlying taxonomical violence inherent in Eurocentric epistemologies. Western political theory and diplomatic terminologies have developed a closed lattice of categories, kingdom, empire, commonwealth, state, through which all non‑Western polities are interpreted. When those categories fail to accommodate a given civilisation on its own terms, the familiar impulse is not creative reanalyses but forced assimilation into existing frameworks. For Iran, this has meant the insistence on a Western derivative form, royal, because Western categories cannot structurally, linguistically, or psychologically accommodate an Iranian imperial subject.

 

This categorical constraint is not accidental. It is a function of how Western modernity constructs its legibility map, a grid that determines what kinds of political organisation are knowable and acceptable within its own intellectual economy. To borrow from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, colonial languages domesticate the world by inscribing it within a schema that prioritises Western referents (Ngũgĩ, 1986). Similarly, the Western taxonomy of sovereign forms pre‑sets which entities can legitimately claim imperial status. Britain, France, and Spain fit because they are genealogically bound to Westphalian Europe; Japan fits because its post‑Meiji constitutionalism was assimilated into Western diplomatic structures. Iran, in contrast, stands as an uncomfortable outlier: older than the European state system, institutionally continuous, and historically expansive in its own right.

 

When European languages encounter a phenomenon they cannot categorise, the default strategy is not intellectual humility but containment. Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry is instructive here: the colonised subject is encouraged to imitate the coloniser’s categories in order to be seen as legitimate, yet this imitation is never enough to confer equal status (Bhabha, 1994). In the case of Iran, the internalised use of royal by Iranian scholars and commentators is precisely this mimicry, an effort to situate Iran within the recognisable lattice of Western monarchy. But mimicry, by definition, produces an almost‑but‑not‑quite: Iran is framed as ‘a monarchy like ours’, rather than as an independent imperial civilisation in its own right.

 

This failure of Western categories is not merely bureaucratic; it is epistemological. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism demonstrates how the West’s classificatory apparatus does not merely misunderstand the East, it produces it according to pre‑existing conceptual frameworks (Said, 1978). Iran is thus constructed as if it must fit into the genus royal monarchy because that is the only genus recognised as non‑threatening in Western political thought. To label Iran imperial would be to acknowledge a sovereign trajectory that predates, and stands apart from, the Westphalian order. It would call into question the West’s self‑image as the progenitor of political modernity.

 

The inadequacy of Western categories becomes especially conspicuous when one considers the alternatives that Western languages do comfortably accommodate. Titles such as Emir or Sheikh are readily applied to Arab polities precisely because they fit into the West’s orientalist typology of tribal or sectarian governance. Such terms, however, cannot logically or culturally apply to Iran without collapsing into self‑evident error; Iran is not an Arab polity, and its political forms are not derivatives of Arabian tribalism. By contrast, the category royal does not carry specific civilisational content, which makes it a convenient catch‑all for anything Anglo‑European in spirit, even when it misrepresents the subject it claims to describe.

 

An analogy is instructive: it would be as if Western political science, encountering the Byzantine Empire, insisted on calling its emperors ‘kings’ because “king” is a recognisable, domesticated category within European thought. The actual title basileus would be mistranslated into an inferior form, not because of factual necessity, but because of conceptual convenience. By sanitising the terminology, the historian or diplomat effectively diminishes the subject’s political distinctiveness.

 

This conceptual containment extends beyond titles to the very question of historical legitimacy. When language is stripped of its accuracy, the political imaginary through which actors understand themselves is also reshaped. For many Iranians in the post‑1979 diaspora, the repeated use of royal has over generations come to feel normal, even correct. This is a striking example of what Fanon described as the internalisation of colonial categories: the colonised subject begins to see their own political forms through the lens of the coloniser’s taxonomy, thereby consenting to an epistemic diminution (Fanon, 1967).

 

Thus the failure of Western categories is not an abstract theoretical lapse; it is a form of discursive violence that reinforces geopolitical hierarchies. Iran’s imperial identity is not conceptually illegitimate, it is simply unmanageable within the dominant Western schema. The strategy, then, is to compel Iran into a recognisable Western category (royal), thereby neutralising its civilisational claim and flattening its historical agency. This is epistemic tyranny, not misclassification.

 

If the West cannot generate categories capable of accommodating the Persian imperial legacy, the onus falls upon scholars, activists, and public intellectuals to insist on terminological precision, not as anachronism but as political necessity. The refusal to settle for royal, to insist instead on imperial, Shahanshah, or King of Kings, is an act of decolonial exigency. It resists the compulsion to assimilate non‑Western political forms into an epistemic order that was never designed to recognise them.

 

 

IV. Iranian Complicity and the Psychology of Self-Effacement

Iran today is a state without a guardian, an orphaned civilisation ruled by clerics who define themselves in opposition to the very legacy from which they emerged. The Islamic Republic is not merely anti-monarchist; it is anti-civilisational. It has no interest in defending the country’s imperial memory because its ideological legitimacy depends on erasing it. The regime does not fail to protect Iran’s imperial identity, it actively participates in its obliteration. This is not complicity. It is open collaboration.

 

Yet the more insidious threat does not originate in Qom or Tehran, but in Paris, London, Toronto, and Washington. It is among the diaspora, those who claim to speak for Iran while echoing the very narratives that erase its imperial dignity, where complicity festers. These are not naïve victims of Eurocentric hegemony; they are often its willing echo chambers. Intellectuals, journalists, and activists, many operating within Anglo-American media and academic circuits, have adopted the colonial lexicon of ‘royal’ without hesitation, qualification, or resistance. They do not challenge the semantic sabotage; they reproduce it.

 

Frantz Fanon described this phenomenon with terrifying precision. ‘The colonised intellectual,’ he wrote, ‘who has absorbed the coloniser’s thought system, ends up repeating their prejudices with academic fluency’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 223). In the context of the Iranian diaspora, this takes the form of mimicry disguised as modernity. To use ‘royal’ instead of ‘imperial’ is not an act of scholarly restraint, it is a confession of civilisational self-doubt. It is the adoption of a language not because it is correct, but because it is palatable to Western ears.

 

Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern’s imposed silence is equally relevant. The Iranian diaspora is not voiceless; it has been allowed to speak, on condition that it speaks in the coloniser’s terms (Spivak, 1988, p. 295). Those who use ‘royal’ believe they are making Iran comprehensible to the West. In truth, they are making it acceptable. And in doing so, they abandon their historical responsibility. They are not translating Persian sovereignty, they are neutralising it.

 

This semiotic demotion extends to the present, most visibly in the systematic erasure of the titulature of His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. In Western media, foreign ministries, and much of the anglophone press, he is routinely referred to as ‘Reza Pahlavi’, or occasionally ‘Prince Reza Pahlavi’, but almost never with his full imperial title. More egregiously, his father, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, is retroactively referred to not as ‘His Imperial Majesty the Shahanshah’ or ‘the Emperor of Iran’, but simply ‘the Shah’, often qualified by the refrain ‘the last Shah of Iran’. This is not an incidental habit of speech. It is a calculated rhetorical act, a definitive assertion that the Iranian imperial monarchy belongs to the past, must remain in the past, and has no conceivable future. By discursively entombing the title and lineage, ‘son of the last Shah’, Western media and diplomats deny not only historical continuity but political possibility. This is the language of symbolic foreclosure: a way to say that Iran’s monarchy is not only over, but unrecoverable.

 

A striking precedent lies in the fate of the term ‘Aryan’. Once a Zoroastrian, civilisational, and ethical designation, the word was violently expropriated by European philologists and turned into a racial myth to serve Eurocentric fantasies. More disturbing still, many Iranians, particularly those educated under influence of post-1979 exile, have uncritically adopted the Eurocentric version, divorcing the term from its indigenous cosmology. In doing so, they unknowingly legitimise their own cultural dispossession. The same pattern recurs in the acceptance of ‘royal’ over ‘imperial’. This is not merely compliance; it is cognitive surrender (Suren-Pahlav, 2005). By repeating the coloniser’s language, they rehearse the very epistemic submission that Fanon identified as the psychological legacy of colonisation (Fanon, 1967, pp. 18–20).

 

This self-effacement is not simply linguistic, it is psychological. After nearly half a century of state-sponsored humiliation, cultural censorship, and exile, a large portion of the Iranian diaspora has internalised the myth that to be imperial is to be reactionary, elitist, or illegitimate. This myth was manufactured by the Islamic Republic, repackaged by leftist Iranian émigrés, and imported into Western institutions eager to confirm their Orientalist assumptions. In this ideological trifecta, Iran’s imperial past is erased from within and caricatured from without.

 

The pathologised relationship many Iranians now have with their own history mirrors what Fanon termed ‘the neurosis of colonial inferiority’, a condition where the colonised subject views their culture through the lens of imposed shame (Fanon, 1967, pp. 18–20). It is why even those in exile hesitate to say ‘Shahanshah’ aloud. It is why they speak of the monarchy as if it were an embarrassment rather than an institution of constitutional potential.

 

This is not to suggest that the entire diaspora is afflicted. There are exceptions, monarchist intellectuals, civilisational patriots, and historians of integrity. But they remain marginalised within Western academia and media, often caricatured as nostalgic or apolitical. The mainstream voice, especially among self-styled secular republicans, has chosen accommodation over resistance. They omit because they believe that is what will be published. They say ‘Shah’ instead of ‘King of Kings’ because they have been conditioned to fear Iran’s grandeur past.

 

The tragedy is that this complicity not only enables Eurocentric revisionism, it validates it. If Iranians themselves will not defend the imperial grammar of their civilisation, why should anyone else? The West does not need to erase Iran; it can rely on Iranians to do it themselves.

 

To reclaim Iran’s imperial vocabulary is not to fetishise the past, it is to restore the epistemic coordinates of sovereignty. It is to break the cycle of mimicry and return to a language that speaks from within the civilisation, not about it from without. The use of ‘imperial’ is not pedantry. It is political warfare.

 

 

V. Restoring the Grammar of Sovereignty

To reclaim Iran’s imperial titulature is to do more than correct a diplomatic inaccuracy, it is to break the epistemic siege under which Iranian identity has been held since the twin occupations of 1979: one Islamic, the other Eurocentric. Both are hostile to civilisational continuity. Both rely on linguistic sabotage. And both have sought to dislocate Iran from its rightful position in the global grammar of sovereignty. To use imperial is to reject both forms of colonisation.

 

The title Shahanshah, King of Kings, is not ornamental. It is civilisational syntax. It binds Iran to a political, historical and cultural lineage older than any monarchic form in the world has produced. It is the culmination of a millennia-long statecraft that predates the oldest European political systems by millennia. To translate Shahanshah into ‘royal’, or to the point of complete omission, is not only a semantic failure, it is an act of historical and cultural vandalism committed to appease Eurocentric anxieties and their enduring inferiority complex. It obliterates the conceptual vocabulary through which Iran, and the world, understood its civilisational authority, from antiquity until the rise of the totalitarian theocratic regime in 1979.

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) argued that the colonial state’s greatest victory was not its military conquests but its ability to ‘make the colonised speak the coloniser’s language in praising the coloniser’. In Iran’s case, that praise takes the form of mimicry: adopting the language of royalty, the tone of post-constitutional modesty, and the aesthetics of Western monarchy, even when they disfigure our own civilisational form. This is not deference. It is disfigurement.

 

The history of the term Aryan further illustrates how civilisational vocabulary, when filtered through Eurocentric epistemology, becomes unrecognisable. What began as a culturally embedded Zoroastrian and Iranian term, denoting ethical order and sacred belonging, was forcibly abstracted and misappropriated to scaffold pseudo-scientific racial ideologies in Europe. Iran’s ancient self-understanding was thus linguistically severed from itself and grafted onto alien racial fantasies that erased its roots. The same erasure now befalls Shahanshah. These are not parallel accidents; they are iterative assaults. Each act of renaming, Airya to Aryan, imperial to royal, functions to rupture civilisational continuity and replace it with Western frames of intelligibility (Suren-Pahlav, 2005).

 

Thus to restore the grammar of sovereignty is to reinstate the terms that define a nation on its own civilisational logic. It is to insist that Iran was never ‘royal’ in the British sense, never ‘tribal’ in the Arabian sense, and never ‘republican’ in the post-colonial African or Latin American sense. It was and remains imperial. The monarchy, when it functioned, was not a court of nobles or a playground of elites. It was a civilisational institution, one that tethered the contemporary state to an ancient memory of governance, autonomy, and cosmopolitanism.

 

As Said (1978) demonstrated, the West’s refusal to accept Eastern sovereignty on its own terms is not a matter of misunderstanding, it is part of Orientalism’s structural logic. The Orient must be spoken about, categorised, and explained, but never authorised. To insist on ‘imperial’ is to disrupt this order. It is to speak in a register that asserts parity, not petition. It is to say: we were not invented by you, we will not be defined by you, and we will no longer misname ourselves for your comfort.

 

This restoration must begin with language because language conditions perception. If an Iranian monarch is called royal, he becomes one. If an empire is called a kingdom, it is treated as one. This is what Walter Mignolo (2000) called epistemic disobedience, the refusal to speak within the grammar of the coloniser’s categories. Such disobedience is not merely rhetorical; it is civilisational survival.

 

Yet restoration is not nostalgia. It is not a yearning for monarchy as regime but for imperium as historical consciousness. One can advocate for democracy and still reject the colonial lexicon that denies the grandeur of one’s past. One can call for constitutional monarchy, parliamentary governance, and civil liberty while still referring to the state with the dignity of its history. There is no contradiction between being modern and being sovereign, unless one accepts the lie that modernity can only be Western.

 

The future of Iran depends on the language with which we imagine it. If we call it a kingdom, we prepare it for ceremonial defeat. If we speak of it as an empire, a civilisation-state, we prepare it to reassert itself not in mimicry but in memory. And memory, unlike mimicry, cannot be colonised. It can only be forgotten. This is the final frontier. And the first step to reclaim it is to speak correctly.

 

 

Conclusion

To call the Iranian monarchy ‘royal’ is not an innocent misstep. It is a declaration, one that speaks the West’s language of hierarchy and simultaneously accepts Iran’s subordination within it. This terminological betrayal, often performed by Iranians themselves, is the clearest expression of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) called the colonisation of the mind. The term ‘royal’ is not simply inadequate; it is structurally complicit in a wider regime of epistemic degradation, one that strips a millennia-old civilisation of its imperial grammar and reduces it to a caricature made legible to the West.

 

Post-1979 Iran is the perfect victim for this symbolic violence: decapitated from its past by a theocratic regime that actively disavows imperial memory, and narratively abandoned by a diaspora that, in its desire for acceptability and publication, has internalised the terms of its own erasure. The result is a void, into which Eurocentric institutions have stepped, wielding their own categories to rename and reorder what they cannot comprehend. That this has been allowed, even encouraged, is not merely a failure of historical literacy. It is a collective act of civilisational self-harm.

 

Edward Said (1978) warned us that representation is never neutral. When the West speaks for the East, it does so with the full force of empire, intellectually, linguistically, and symbolically. Iran, rendered as a ‘royal’ state, is stripped of its narrative agency. It becomes an object of study, not a subject of history. It becomes a monarchy among others, not an empire among equals.

 

What is required now is not academic correction but epistemic rupture. The term imperial must be restored not simply as a matter of historical accuracy but as a political weapon. It is a tool of narrative restoration, a mechanism through which Iran can once again assert its civilisational authorship. It is the linguistic frontline of a broader war, one that spans archives, media, scholarship, and diplomacy. The same imperative applies to the language through which that civilisation speaks. Just as we must reject ‘royal’ in place of ‘imperial’, we must repudiate the regime’s substitution of ‘Farsi’ for ‘Persian’. Both are linguistic amputations, severing Iran from its cultural inheritance to appease competing ideologies: one theocratic, the other Eurocentric. The term ‘Persian’ carries the historical and international gravitas of a civilisation; ‘Farsi’ is its bureaucratic ghost. To accept such misnomers is to concede the vocabulary of selfhood to those invested in Iran’s diminution.

 

To say His Imperial Majesty is not to glorify monarchy. It is to reject the symbolic castration imposed by those who cannot tolerate the grandeur of a non-Western civilisation. It is to demand that Iran be recognised on its own terms, in its own voice, with the full force of its historical magnitude.

 

There can be no democratic sovereignty without narrative sovereignty. And there can be no narrative sovereignty without the courage to speak in a language that unsettles empire. Imperial is that language. It is not a nostalgia. It is a return. And it begins with a single refusal: we will not call our emperors royal. Terminological precision is not pedantry; it is sovereignty in phonetic form.

 

To acquiesce to such misnomers is to relinquish control over the language of identity to those invested in Iran’s diminution. One must recall that the inherent potential of any organism remains latent when circumscribed by environments inimical to its function. Persuade an eagle that it is a chicken, and it may cease to remember the sky. Let us not allow Iran’s adversaries to domesticate lions into docility.

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – The term "Global South" is a euphemism of the same species as "Third World"—a designation imposed by the wealthy to name the exploited without acknowledging the exploitation. Coined by Carl Oglesby in 1969 during the Vietnam War, it entered polite discourse through the Brandt Commission's 1980 report North–South: A Programme for Survival, a document whose title alone reveals its assumptions: that the division is geographic rather than historical, that the relationship is one of development rather than extraction, that the programme required is survival rather than justice. From the 1990s onward, the term was adopted by the same academic and policy institutions that had previously used "Third World," serving the same function: to describe the consequences of imperialism without naming imperialism itself. It is derogatory. It is offensive. It is not neutral. It is not analytical. It is a mechanism of avoidance. The accurate designation is the Non-Aligned World—a term that asserts sovereignty, agency, and the refusal of imposed categories. To use "Global South" without irony is to participate in the euphemism this article indicts.

 

 

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