which he saw as a great religion and the true Iranian religion. He hoped that it would one day replace Islam again and so tried to promote it with his Maktubàt. The ‘Sultans of Islam’ will be ‘kinder to your kin than to their own brother and father’. They ‘will deplore the fact that they did not know you until today and that throughout the history of Islam they have supported and admired Arabs, who are their enemies ... who destroyed their country’, rather than Zoroastrians who are ‘their brothers, who speak the same language [sic], their compatriots, the living memory of their glorious forefathers, and their guardian angels’. Akhundzadeh was under the spell of what seems to be Manekji’s archaistic charisma, a sort of magnetism stemming from the special knowledge of the glorious past that he was perceived to possess. Akhundzadeh put him on a pedestal because he saw him as an emissary of this Golden Age for which he and Jalal ed-Din Mirza longed, as if Manekji had just walked out of a time machine. In another letter, this admiration of Manekji becomes more evident: ‘my wish is that . . .Iranians knew that we are the children of the Parsis, that our home is Iran, that zeal, honour, idealism and our celestial aspirations demand that we favour our kin. . . rather than alien bloodthirsty bandits’ (Akhundzadeh to Manekji, 29 July 1871, in Mohammadzadeh and Arasli 1963:249, emphasis added). It is very revealing that Akhundzadeh called Iranians the ‘children’ of the Parsis. He accorded Parsis a genealogical ascendancy that can only be explained by the fact that he considered them as a kind of pure Iranians uncontaminated by Arabs and Islam, who should be ‘followed’ by the contemporary debased Muslim lot. He then added that ‘my appearance is that of a Turk, but I am of the Parsis’ race’. In the 1920s, the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre was named after Akhundzade. Iranian nationalism Akhundzade identified himself as belonging to the nation of Iran (mellat-e Irān) and to the Iranian homeland (vaṭan). He corresponded with Jālāl-al-Din Mirzā (a minor Qajar prince, son of Bahman Mirza Qajar,1826–70) and admired this latter's epic Nāmeh-ye Khosrovān ('Book of Sovereigns'), which was an attempt to offer the modern reader biography of Iran's ancient kings, real and mythical, without recourse to any Arabic loanword. The Nāmeh presented the pre-Islamic past