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Crafting a National Identity Amidst Contentious Politics in Contemporary Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Farideh Farhi
Farideh Farhi*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
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Extract

It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that the crafting and re-crafting of national identity through actions of authorities and/or political mobilization and struggle has been a national preoccupation in modern Iranian history. This is not to imply that Iranians and their political leaders, going through the global process of modernity, have been any more or less creative than others in the world in re-inventing their “national” selves. However, a case can be made that in the past century Iranians have been afforded, or have produced, more opportunities to re-create themselves in a bombastic and dualistic fashion, energetically vacillating between extremes of contentious Islamism and secularism, pre-Islamic and Islamic imagination, and avid anti-imperialism and absorption in global trends.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Iran Facing the New Century , March 2005 , pp. 7 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2005

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on “Iran Facing the New Century” held at Oxford, UK, 5–7 April 2004. I would like to thank Homa Katouzian and Hossein Shahidi for their generous help in revising the paper.

References

2 The use of the term “Iranians” is probably not justified here. The proper terminology is “Iranian leaders,” “Iranian opinion makers,” and so on as one could easily argue that the majority of Iranians have managed to combine various elements of their reported national or political identity in their everyday lives without much fanfare or posturing. Note, for instance, the routine appearance of the Quran on the haft sin arrangements for the Iranian New Year. There are usually deep differences between the largely unarticulated and generally porous identities embedded in daily social life and those rather rigid and bounded political identities that become evident through political contention.

3 Evidence of this disappointment can be detected in the precipitous drop in voter turnout (from low to mid 70 percents to low 50 percents) between the 1997 and 2001 presidential elections and 2000 parliamentary elections on the one hand and the 2003 municipal and 2004 parliamentary elections on the other.

4 Mehran Karami, “Varunegi-ye Siasi” (Political Inversion), Shargh, 22 January 2004, p.1.

5 For the text of Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Prize speech see http://www.payvand.com/news/03/dec/1065.html. My point is neither to question Ebadi's admirable statement of who she is, nor her aspiration, which I also share. I only intend to point to the irony that exists in her Nobel Prize speech: the highlighting of precisely the same contending elements of Iran's national identity, constituted as opposites by a century of highly charged ideological struggle, as a means to overcome the struggle.

6 Katouzian, Homa, “Legitimacy and Succession in Iranian History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23, 1&2 (2003): 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 Tilly, Charles, Stories, Identities, And Political Change. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, ch. 5Google Scholar.

9 Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, “The Evolving Polemic of Iranian Nationalism,” in Iran and the Surrounding World edited by Keddie, Nikki R. and Matthee, Rudi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002Google Scholar.

10 Ibid. and Cole, Juan R., “Marking Boundaries, Marking Time: The Iranian Past and the Construction of Self by Qajar Thinkers,” Iranian Studies 29 (1996): 36–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For a good discussion of the way war poetry was used to frame the defense of territory within the context of Shi'i values and methods of war see Kashi, Mohammad Javad Gholamreza, Jadouye goftar: zehniat-e farhangi va nezam-e ma'ani dar entekhabat-e dovom-e khordad (The Magic of Discourse: Cultural Consciousness and the System of Meanings in the 2 Khordad Election). (Tehran: Ayandeh Pouyan, 1379/2000, pp. 326–334.)Google Scholar As examples, Kashi points to the use symbols from Karbala, recreation of particular events in the war in the light of Ashura, and the use of sacred Sh'i titles for war operations.

12 This line of argumentation, or more properly justification, emphasizing continuity with pre-1979 positions as a means to legitimate Iranian post-1979 claims and policies, is not only limited to questions related to the Iranian territory. It is also a favored strategy, for instance, in justifying post-revolutionary strivings towards the development of nuclear energy.

13 Vali, Abbas, “The Kurds and Their Fragmented ‘Others’: Fragmented Identity and Fragmented Politics.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 21, 1&2 (2002): 82–94Google Scholar. Vali rightly points out that the Kurdish question in Iran is a question of denial of the Kurdish identity by the sovereign power and the Kurds' resistance to this denial. A similar argument can be made regarding others, although a case can perhaps be made that the Kurdish question has proven more muscular and urgent given the persistence of the question in the surrounding countries.

14 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989Google Scholar.

15 For instance, in October 2001, all six Kurdish members of Iran's Parliament resigned in protest at what they described in a letter to the interior minister as “denial of their legitimate rights” and the central government's failure to address the “political, economic and cultural rights that they have brought out.” Quoted by Afshin Molavi, http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/articles/eav041503.shtml. For a different take insisting on the increasing importance of the “national question,” see Brenda Shaffer Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity. Shaffer challenges the widely held view in contemporary Iranian scholarship that a broad Iranian identity supersedes ethnic identities.

16 Vali, op. cit.

17 Shirazi, Asghar, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic, translated by O'Hare, John (London: I.B. Taurus Publishers, 1997)Google Scholar.

18 I say “at least temporarily” because there is no guarantee that the linkage between the resolution of ethnic issue and the political process will occur naturally. Clearly governmental policies do matter and gradual movement towards a more democratic state is key. Without it ethnic nationalism and even separatism is always a possibility. So far, evidence from the electoral behavior of minorities suggests a desire to operate within the political system. For instance since 1997 and until the 2000 parliamentary elections the rate of participation in electoral politics, as well as the percentage of votes cast in favor of reformist candidates has been among the highest in the four predominantly Kurdish provinces, as well as in other ethnic minority provinces. However, during the parliamentary elections of February 2004, the rate of disqualifications of candidates by the Guardian Council was also the highest in these Kurdish provinces, as well as in other provinces dominated by ethnic minorities, with the exception of Lorestan. These important figures by themselves do not provide a full picture of the relations between ethnic populations and the central state in Iran. But they do suggest that the minority populations have vested much in the political process. How they will respond to the political process in the future will depend much on the actions of the now unified conservative power structure over the next few years. The government may try to throw money at the problem, in time honored authoritarian fashion. But Iran's social problems run deeper that the central state's cooptation abilities. The options facing the central government are either political or coercive, the latter clearly risking separatist reactions. For Iran's Ministry of Interior data on electoral participation in Iran's various elections see www.moi.gov.ir.

19 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. New York: Palgrave, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid, p. 135.

21 Note the appalled reaction when Iran announced that is seeking observer status in the Arab League.

22 The focus on public conversations as distinct from the intricacies of factional politics is intentional here since it is in the latter arena that one can find hope and a latent vision missing in the impasse of factional politics.

23 Abbas Abdi, “Enqelab ‘aleyhe tahqir (Revolution against Humiliation), Asr-e ‘Azadegan, 2 February 2000.

24 For a clear and longing aspiration for the Chinese model see the editorial in Kayhan (23 January 2004) by Mohammad Imani. For a discussion of why the autocratic Chinese model will not work for the Islamic Republic see the op-ed piece by Ibrahim Yazdi in Shargh (7 February 2004).

25 This point about the existence of legalized institutions creating oppositional movements to bring about institutional change is well made by Charles Tilly, op. cit., in comparing racially discriminatory regimes in South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. He argues that Brazil, while sustaining as much social and economic inequality by race as the United States, avoided legalizing legal distinctions to anything like the degree of South Africa and the United States. “In the short and medium runs, the difference surely worked to the advantage of Brazil's black populations. But over the long run stringent racial categories provided bases for political mobilization and legal claims for redress in South Africa and the United States, while in Brazil the very absence of legalized racial categories, statistics, and agencies inhibited black collective action” (p. 68).

26 Quoted in Avi Shlaim, “A Betrayal of History.” The Guardian, 22 February 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,654054,00.html.

27 On this point see Chubin, Shahram and Litvak, Robert S., “Debating Iran's Nuclear Aspirations.” The Washington Quarterly 26, 4 (Autumn 2003): 99–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 For a discussion of the internal debates that led the agreement with the three European powers see Farideh Farhi, “To Sign or Not to Sign? Iran's Evolving Debate on Nuclear Options,” in Iran's Bomb edited by Geoffrey Kemp (The Nixon Center, March 2004). http://www.nixoncenter.org/publications/monographs/IransBomb.pdf.