Empire and the Erasure of Memory: Why Bombing Iran Is Bombing History

Empire does not begin with bombs. It begins with stories. Before missiles strike, a narrative is crafted that renders the target bombable. As postcolonial historian Ranajit Guha explains in A Conquest Foretold, imperial conquest must be imagined before it is executed—it is written as destiny, preordained and righteous.

Iran was not merely bombed on June 13, 2025. It was conceptually erased before a single missile launched. Its right to exist as a civilizational subject, to hold memory and produce knowledge, had already been dismissed in the dominant global narrative.

Writing Conquest in Advance

The Israeli assault was justified with the usual scripts—imminent nuclear threat, national security, surgical strikes. These are not explanations but performances. As in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, intelligence dismissing Iran’s weapons program was irrelevant. The story was already in place.

Guha reminds us that the British conquest of India was not decided at the 1757 Battle of Plassey. The battle itself was minor. But in imperial historiography, it was elevated into the cornerstone of colonial legitimacy, repeated in schoolbooks and parliamentary speeches until it became history itself.

“The sword is the charter,” wrote East India Company historian Robert Orme. This chilling declaration is imperial logic distilled: victory rewrites violence into law. The narrative reconfigures domination into moral necessity.

Bombing the Right to Remember

Empires do not only win wars—they shape memory. The colonial archive does not record only facts. It reshapes events as moral inevitabilities. Iran, like Iraq or Palestine, is framed as irrational, fanatical, and backward. In such a story, bombing is not tragedy—it is responsibility.

In the seminal work of Edward Said, Orientalism is exposed as not just misrepresentation but deliberate construction. The East was defined as barbaric, exotic, and unfit for self-rule. This narrative enabled war under the guise of order.

The legacy of Orientalism still informs policy and perception. When a place is consistently shown to be dangerous, irrational, and alien, military aggression becomes thinkable—even expected.

The Intellectual Legacy of Iran

Yet Iran is not merely a political entity. It has been a center of global knowledge. The Academy of Gundishapur in Khuzestan, founded in the 3rd century CE, predated Oxford and Cambridge. There, Sanskrit texts were translated into Middle Persian, Babylonian astronomy was refined, and clinical medicine was formalized.

Later, Persian scholars influenced Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, which became a model for European universities. Figures such as al-Farabi, al-Tusi, al-Razi, and al-Khwarizmi laid the groundwork for philosophy, algebra, optics, and the experimental method.

This intellectual flow extended far beyond the Middle East. Through trans-Saharan trade, Persian philosophy reached West Africa. At Sankoré University in Timbuktu, scholars studied Avicenna and al-Ghazali. Libraries across the desert preserved texts in Persian script.

Colonialism as Erasure

This history was not forgotten—it was erased. Under British rule, Persian was removed as the language of law and learning in India. Persian manuscripts were stripped of context and repackaged as museum curiosities. Scientific achievements were dismissed or ignored. See the British Museum’s Middle East collection for examples of how Persian artifacts are recontextualized.

And so, when bombs fell on Tabriz in June 2025, they struck not just a city, but a civilizational archive. Tabriz is the birthplace of Shams al-Din Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher, and a center of astronomy, philosophy, and mysticism. These traditions are not mere memories—they are live connections between past and future.

Yet, Iran remains framed by Western media as a menacing, nuclear-obsessed other. This is not ignorance. It is strategy. As Guha and Said show, it is a way of un-naming: of turning people into shadows, cities into targets, and knowledge into dust.

Memory Is Resistance

We have seen this strategy before. Iraq’s libraries were looted. Mosul’s university was leveled. Gaza’s archives and schools have been systematically destroyed. These are not collateral losses—they are imperial tactics. They erase the right to remember, to create, to imagine.

To focus on epistemology is not to disregard the dead. It is to insist their lives had meaning, intelligence, and creativity. The people of Iran are not footnotes—they are authors. They are keepers of wisdom and custodians of a world empire wishes to forget.

This war, like all imperial wars, is about sovereignty—but also about the ownership of knowledge. Who gets to define history? Who gets to remember?

Conclusion: Writing Our Own Stories

Until we reject the narratives that erase us and reclaim our own stories, we remain at the mercy of empires that deny our full humanity. Remembering is resistance. Telling the truth is a form of survival.

About the author: Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labor expert, and analyst of South Asian and pan-African politics.