Can non-Persians speak? The sovereign’s narration of “Iranian identity”

Abstract

Since the late 19th century, despite multi-cultural and multilingual composition of Iranian population, Persian nationalism has functioned as the ideology of the state. Persian intelligentsia have formulated a set of historical and cultural referents that enabled them to present the Persian language and identity as primordial and allinclusive of all Iranians. By the advent of the modern nation-state, during Pahlavi dynasty, the non-Persian identities were brutally repressed in favor of the "One Country, One Nation, and One Language" policy. Through the adoption of such a policy and with the help of Persian intellectual and literati classes, the state was able to impose Persian identity as the singular "Iranian identity" and systematically marginalize and criminalize the non-Persian identities, treating them as "manufactured ethnic identities." Being declared as "manufactured," non-Persian identities are consequently perceived as constant threats to the territorial integrity and ideological monologue of the sovereign. This paper, therefore, aims to critically reassess "Iranian identity" and its production of "internal colonized Other." It argues that through such an "internal othering" that Persian nationalism, backed by the combined force of a military and "privileged epistemology" has generated and sustained "the process of internal colonization."

Examining family language policy through realist social theory

“…Historically, since the late nineteenth century, speakers of minority languages in Iran have lived in a state where Persian nationalism has functioned as the dominant ideology (Soleimani & Muhammadpour 2019). The ideology was constitutionalized in the 1905 Constitutional Revolution, making Persian the only official language of the country (Mirvahedi 2019), which was later taken to repress non-Persian languages and identities in favor of a ‘one country, one nation, one language’ policy during the Pahlavi dynasty (Soleimani & Muhammadpour 2019). Although minority languages, labeled regional and tribal languages , were included in the Constitution after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to allow them to appear in the education system and media, Persian has continued to be the sole official and institutional language in the country.…”

“…Historically, since the late nineteenth century, speakers of minority languages in Iran have lived in a state where Persian nationalism has functioned as the dominant ideology (Soleimani & Muhammadpour 2019). The ideology was constitutionalized in the 1905 Constitutional Revolution, making Persian the only official language of the country (Mirvahedi 2019), which was later taken to repress non-Persian languages and identities in favor of a 'one country, one nation, one language' policy during the Pahlavi dynasty (Soleimani & Muhammadpour 2019).…”

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“…to conflate Muslims and people from the Middle East is a common practice that fails to account for the great religious and ethnic diversity in the region as well as the various competing realms of race within the Middle East (Lukasik, 2020;Soleimani & Mohammadpour, 2019;Khoshneviss, 2018Khoshneviss, , 2019. 2.…”

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“…In non-capitalist societies that directly or indirectly experienced the pressure of capitalist England, nationalism, rather than capitalism, forged the nation as the political-ideological unification of still concrete individuals; a process for which the violent construction of a 'national' identity from a particular ethnicity or language was the most possible, and hence most common, route (cf. Dirlik 2002: 436;Soleimani & Mohammadpour 2019). Within societies experiencing this circumstance, e.g.…”