The term nostalgia dates from the end of the seventeenth century when Johann Hofer, a nineteen-year-old Swiss physician, devised it for his doctoral thesis on the causes for the melancholic state of Swiss serving as hired soldiers in the armies of other European powers or working or studying away from their native area. Nostos in Greek means home, the homeland, while agie means longing, yearning for. As its usage became more popular from the second half of the nineteenth century in west-European languages, it gradually entered Russian, Persian, and Arabic, among other languages, even when they already had words expressing homesickness, in other words spatial nostalgia, and temporal nostalgia, a nostalgia for the past.

Public opinion in Iran was not naïve about criminality. Robbery, mugging, the occasional random murder, and murder resulting from conflicts between people who knew each other were considered a danger and unfortunate fact of everyday life resulting from socio-economic conditions or weaknesses and faults in human character. However, from the early 1960s, the mass media in the West and Iran brought to readers and viewers reports about rapidly rising rates of murder and current crime horrors in the West, such as the Moors Murders carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who in and around Manchester sexually assaulted and killed five boys and girls, aged between ten and seventeen; Dean Corll, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least twenty-eight teenaged boys; and Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper who randomly shot forty-two people, killing eleven, from the twenty-eight-storey observation deck of Austin University’s Main Building. In the West, social commentators, journalists, politicians, and public opinion increasingly spoke of ‘crime waves’.

Hassan Moghaddam in his play Jafar Khan Has Returned from the West (1921) satirically described two social phenomena: arrogant Occidentosis and nostalgic resistance to change. While it can be considered the first popularly acclaimed work describing the condition of Occidentosis-ridden individuals, it simultaneously describes an equally new phenomenon, a generation gap that began to emerge in the late Qajar period given growing contact with the West.

Crime rates and how crimes are presented to the public, specifically in the mass media, spread, and deepen individual and societal fear of crime. This fear of crime is a set of feelings which are orientated towards the problem of crime for society.

Before we step onto the path into the world of Pahlavi-era nostalgia, some context regarding the Pahlavi power structure, the trajectory leading to the establishment of the Rastakhiz Party, its ideological principles, and its position within that structure is needed, since its narratives and discourses constitute a pillar of this study.

In 2004, the film Mother’s Guest (Mehman-e Maman), produced by Dariush Mehrjui and based on a short story by Houshang Kermani, hit Iran’s cinemas. It was warmly welcomed by the public and critics, became one of the most popular films of 2004 and 2005, and was chosen the best film at the 22nd Fajr Film Festival.

‘Does the family [in the West] face complete collapse?’, asked Ferdowsi in 1970. Although the question was somewhat sensationally posed, in the West, from the mid-1960s, social commentators, politicians, the mass media, and trends in public opinion increasingly pointed to perceived signs of rapid family decline emerging at the top of the family structure – rising rates of divorce and deteriorating parenting as fathers and mothers became more concerned with conspicuous consumption and sexual hedonism than with child-rearing. These factors, it was argued, played a key role in the rise of youth antisocial behaviour, violent crime, sexual licentiousness, and drug addiction. These issues were increasingly discussed in Iranian popular and political spheres as Iranians again regarded tendencies in the West as bellwethers for Iran.

The emergence of Hippieism in the USA and then in Western Europe can be traced back to the end of the 1940s when Jack Kerouac introduced the term ‘Beat Generation’ to describe his social circle consisting of norm-breaking and anti-conformist youth in New York City. ‘Beat’, meaning beat down, was subculture slang from the world of those groups who saw themselves in that condition – petty thieves, hustlers, drug addicts, and other ‘down and outs’. However, for Kerouac and others within his circle, such as Allen Ginsberg, another well-known anti-conformist writer who opposed imperialism and traditional forms of sexual morality, ‘beat’ had a spiritual dimension which rejected the materialist and conformist trajectory that US society had taken after World War II. Behind this dimension were nostalgic visions of life in the USA to which society should return. The term faced distortions as it entered the public arena. In Kerouac’s response to these distortions, we get a sense of the meaning behind ‘beat culture’.

In 2019, a film about the life of Gholamreza Takhti (1930–1968), the champion wrestler from south Tehran, hit cinema screens across Iran. The popularity it enjoyed, the discussions about the past and present it triggered, and the forms of nostalgia it provoked underlined Takhti’s unique position in popular and intellectual conceptions of javānmardi and authenticity. His status as a national hero emerged from below during the Pahlavi period: ‘He enjoyed great popularity and respect in Iran amongst many sections of society – university students, merchants, large and small, the regular people and illiterate and semi-literate people’, stressed Sadegh Zibakalam, a public intellectual and professor of history at Tehran University, in a wide-ranging discussion published in the newspaper Shargh between him and its editor on the nostalgic imagery surrounding Takhti at the time of the film’s release.

In early 1978, Towards the Great Civilization, the last pre-revolutionary book written by Mohammad Reza Shah, was published amid great fanfare. To be sure, from the early 1970s, he increasingly spoke of this ‘great civilization’ and its elements, a significant number of which are found in his first work, Mission for My Country (1961), in his trial balloon aimed at the ideologization of the monarchy, Pahlavism (1966–1967) penned by Manuchehr Honarmand, and in the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party of Shah and People founded in 1975. Expressing great optimism about Iran’s future, the shah portrayed this Great Civilization as an Iranian modernity superior to that offered by the liberal and capitalist West and the communist East.

In late 1973, around 7:30 p.m., ten-year-old Nasrin, one of four children in a family living in central Tehran, finished her homework and went to the corner grocer to buy milk. After thirty minutes, she had not yet returned. Alarm bells ringing, the family went to find her. No trace of her was found. Into the next day, they continued the search until the evening when she showed up at the house in ripped clothes. Crying and shaking, she told her parents what happened. They took her to the police station.

In 1925, the Pahlavi era started amidst strong sentiments of temporally distant nostalgia among the literate class, intellectuals, and political figures for the civilizational grandeur and military puissance of pre-Islamic Iranian empires, Iran’s Golden Ages. These sentiments had emerged in the closing decades of Qajar rule given the deep discontent and uneasiness resulting from the stark contrast between these ages and the weak, wretched state into which Iran had fallen. Exemplifying this nostalgia in early official ideology were the dynastic name, Pahlavi, the name of the Persian language during the Sasanian period, the Pahlavi crown, modelled on that of Sasanian shahs, and systematic celebration of Ferdowsi’s Shahname. This distant nostalgia constituted a mobilizing force and historical justification for Pahlavi absolutism, which claimed it would return to Iran that grandeur and puissance through programmes of change from above.