Years ago, in 2003, when I was an MSc student at the LSE doing global history, I wrote a Persian article about issues of identity in modern Iran. There I argued that the increasing association of the identity marker of “Persian” with the nation-state identity of Iranian, influenced by a certain late Qajar/Early Pahlavi reading of ancient history, is one of the leading causes of the ethnic disenfranchisement and conflicts we witness today in Iran. This article was badly misunderstood (I was young and did not have the words) and misused (several websites cut it down to half its size, took the footnotes out, and published the parts they thought helps their cause). I decided that instead of trying to remove the article from all those website, I am going to put a PDF only version of it on my website, so people can read and judge it themselves. I still agree with a great part of it, but there are parts that I would completely redo and rewrite. I will do this in English if I were doing it now, but let it be as it is. So, here it is, for the posterity!