‘ASSUMING and not conceding’. That phrase underpinned the masterly court craft of Perry Mason, the popular detective-lawyer of Erle Stanley Gardner’s riveting creations. Let’s assume Benjamin Netanyahu’s dream of destroying Iran as an Amalek of the Torah or Donald Trump’s threat to bomb the country into extinction somehow got pre-empted and Iran never existed. Let’s assume and not get needlessly reasonable to question the absurd assumption.

Would it not be a distraction, given the loaded assumption, to ask if Firdausi would still have written the Shahnameh had Iran not existed? Equally counterfactually, where would Zoroastrianism be born? Through which country would Alexander reach the Beas river to culminate his adventures of conquest? Who would Changez Khan turn upon in lieu of Iran? Who would dispute the Shatt al-Arab waterway with Saddam Hussein, assuming Iraq managed to dodge Zionism’s poisoned dart? Without Iran where would the Safavids install the Shia beliefs as state religion? In which case who would Ayatollah Khomeini be plotting to overthrow and, without Iran, where?

An Indian journalist wrote a play not long ago with a similarly absurd theme and titled it The Muslim Vanishes. The thought was amusing and terrifying at once. Look up the pre-Islamic history of the subcontinent through Hindutva’s jaundiced eye (as is Netanyahu’s for Iran) and one would perhaps glean how in the absence of Mughal rule, currently being airbrushed from school curricula, Hindu chieftain Rana Pratap would struggle to locate........

© Dawn