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Following a theoretical framework that relies on the concept of the construction of collective identities through heroes, this paper demonstrates that the concept of javanmardi is a focal point in creating a hegemonic modern Iranian identity. In the official discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the national hero Tayyeb Hajj Rezaʾi (1912–1963) is presented as the first martyr who sacrificed his life for Ayatollah Khomeini and additionally as a javanmard-e bozorg (a grand javanmard). Thus, his example is used to mediate the ideal virtues of javanmardi to the public. Accordingly, this paper is dedicated to a study of the motives present behind the public depiction of the hero Tayyeb Hajj Rezaʾi.
2021 •
The heroic figure is a human fiction of the wholly singular. In the hero, discourses about ideals and exemplariness, extra-ordinariness and exceptionalness, agonality, transgressivity, or good and evil become condensed into a single individual. Thus, the hero is the opposite of the masses. As it is argued in this article, the answer to the question of what distinguishes a hero lies in the supererogatory moment, the reference to the hero's quality of more than can be expected: the heroic figure does more than he or she has to, more than duty requires of an ordinary person, and this is the reason they are heroized. However, this also points to a dialectic moment of the heroic in which the opposition between the hero and the many seems to be suspended. Following Niklas Luhmann, the hero represents the paradox of conformity through deviance, because through the example of their abnormality they produce in others a desire to imitate them. In the end, there is a collective appeal of the heroic that affects even the conceptual complement of the hero: the crowd which is characterized by the disappearance of the individual within it. Inspired by Luhmann's sociological reflections on the heroic as well as Elias Canetti's anthropological perspectives on the phenomena of the crowd, this article traces the rhetoric of the hero along its path from the singular to the plural. Against the backdrop of the analysis of the heroic in revolutionary Iran, a generalizable typology is proposed that distinguishes between the hero, the collective of heroes, the heroic collective, and collective heroism. This order reflects a progression that is analogous to the conjunction of the one and the many, moving qualitatively from the distinct figure of the hero to the indistinguishable masses.
This paper will analyse the relationship between Identity and the evolution of the manner through which Iranians view themselves, which is mostly rooted in the manner through which myths transcended into ideologies, looking at the evolution of Religion and Nationalism in Iran, in order to understand the historical changes that happened from the end of the Qajar Dynasty till the establishment of the Vilayet-a-Fariq. This will be done by first analysing what a Myth, an Ideology, and Identity are. Afterwards, this paper will analyse the pre-modern Qajar Iran and then it will look at how nationalism and political Islam shaped the character of Iranian Identity. This will be analysed under the assumption that all identities are inherently a product of society.
The Review of Politics
Symbolic and Utilitarian Political Value of a Tradition: Martyrdom in the Iranian Political Culture1997 •
“Ricoeur on collective identities”, November 15-17, 2021, Institute für Medien und Kultur , University of Trier
The role of narrative of Shahnameh in Constructing Iranian's Collective Identity2021 •
Shahnameh is one of the greatest books of Iranian culture. Although this work is a collection of mixed contents in which historical and mythical motifs are gathered together, it has been considered as a historical source through the past centuries. Actually, Ferdowsi has narrated ancient kingships and their concepts of legitimacy through stories that have imaginative configurations. This book has constituted different aspects of Iranian culture through centuries, such as art, politics, and social influences as well as effects on individual minds. In this paper, by using Ricoeurˊs theory of narrative identity, we aim to indicate how this imaginative history has constituted a collective identity in this culture. Paul Ricoeur characterizes identity concerning the narrative to show that self-knowledge is a dynamic process. In this theory, by encountering the world of the text, our world can be reformed and refigured, hence we may recognize ourselves differently. This narrative identity, as a poetic and indirect way to self-understanding, can be individual or collective. In other words, one of the main goals of his theory is that how symbolic language, especially narrative, constitutes an aspect of human self-understanding and affects his actions. As such, what we emphasize in this paper is this relation and its corollary for an understanding of the self as the social groups like historical nations. Here, we focus on Shahnameh as a book of politics and try to interpret one of its basic political terms "Dâd" (justice). This is one of the most pivotal terms which configure the emplotment of the text. In general, it has been attributed to the shah, the king. However, in this narrative, we can see that how "dâd" encompasses all over the kingdom institution and related the shah, the divine, people, and nature together as a coherent whole in which each element has been influenced by another according to the just. By elaborating the narrative, we can see that how this term transforms into characters, motifs, themes, and stories from which we achieve an image that has constructed the main part of Iranian collective identity in history. In this paper, by analyzing the stories, we want to show that how Ferdowsi's fictive articulation of "dâd" has formed a collective conception that through centuries figured the relation of people and systems of power.
During the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), which claimed more than one million lives, concepts and metaphors from classical Persian mysticism were used to mobilize young people to go to the frontlines and to offer their lives. Concepts from medieval love mysticism were used to idealize martyrdom to such a degree that martyrdom became an essential part of Iranian identity. This article analyses how medieval martyrs of love became the role models for Iranian soldiers, who interpreted the war against Saddam Husain's army as a redemptive mystic path leading to union with the Beloved. Religious literature was interpreted in a political context to convince Iranians to offer their lives. For example, the metaphor of the moth and the candle was popular in medieval mysticism, to represent the annihilation of the mystic's ego and his union with the Truth, and during the war, Iranian soldiers referred to themselves as moths, about to offer their lives, not necessarily for victory or patriotism, but in the hope of union with the Beloved.
Talebi’s essay emerges at the intersection of the state’s appropriation of martyrdom and the subject’s ethos and act of self-sacrifice, which exceed and transform that appropriation. Through a close reading of two letters sent from the front during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), it contemplates the complex desire of its authors to be simultaneously engaged political subjects and martyrs. The analysis attempts to illuminate the dynamic relationship within the official discourse and that which is reproduced through subjects’ interpretations and practices of shahādat. These interpretations are closely tied to the political and existential context of the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, which despite the harsh political suppression allows for an appropriation of the official views of martyrdom and their evasion, elaboration, or extension. It reveals how a pious citizen utilizes the voice of a martyr to subtly criticize the very state that endorses his views. It also exposes the complex relationships between citizens and state in the Islamic Republic as manifested in the key metaphor of martyrdom. The appearance of the same passage in another letter by another combatant unravels a disjuncture that provides insight into the subjectivity of those who fought and the shared and contested meanings of martyrdom in Iran after the revolution. The essay attempts to offer an interpretation of martyrdom that recognizes the dynamism and complexity of the subjects of the shahid and shahādat instead of reducing them to pathological figures.
2015 •
This article explores how provincial Iranian laymen and officials who support the regime (here, Basijis) mobilize the bodies and blood of martyrs to sacralize the national landscape in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a powerful cohort of religious scholars and everyday citizens has emphasized the need to (re)generate the authentically Islamic interior of the nation while resisting an immoral, “Westernstruck” exterior. A significant part of this sacred defense against Western cultural invasion has been the exhumation of bodies of Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) martyrs from the battlefront for reburial and commemoration at sites across the national landscape. This article, based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the Fars Province of Iran, investigates these ongoing practices of reburying and memorializing martyrs. I argue that the exhumations and reburials of martyrs are strategic religious practices that organize the bodies of Iranian subjects around key reference points, specifically the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala, the 1979 Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War. In addition, I show how acts of commemorating martyrs emphasize the sacrificial blood of male citizens, a bodily substance that draws further symbolic efficacy from its associations with the life-giving blood of kinship. This is the first ethnographic account of how martyrs are interred and commemorated in provincial Iran.
Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies
Power from Revolution: The Configuration and Evolution of Iran's Political Identity Reflected in the Supreme Leaders' Hajj MessagesThis research sheds light on what has constituted and defined Iran's postrevolutionary political identity and provides insights into its development with important socio-political implications. In order to understand the configuration and the evolution of post-revolutionary identity in Iran, we examined Hajj Messages issued by Iran's Supreme Leader through a content analysis within the framework of a threefold typological model of identity advanced by the authors: empiricistic, rationalistic, and idealistic. The passages selected from the Supreme Leader's Hajj Messages are classified into the above-mentioned three categories based on the model. Results indicate that in the post-revolutionary Iran, a rationalism that inherits the doctrines of anti-despotism, anti-colonialism, and return to Islam prevails. It is also observed that the post-revolutionary identity of Iran has both empiricist and idealist factors, in the narrations of which the rituals of Hajj and the history of prophets are underscored respectively. This research also concerns ebbs and flows in the process of identity development in postrevolutionary Iran. Whilst the rationalist factor keeps stable and is gradually strengthening its preponderance, idealism is ebbing away and empiricism is flowing in.
2019 •
During the Islamic Revolution (1978/79) and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) the cult of the martyr in Iran has had a lasting impact on the dynamics of revolution and war. As a powerful mode of boundary construction, the figure of the martyr represented a culturally idealised catalogue of norms and thus contributed crucial elements to the establishment and maintenance of the Islamic Republic’s political system. In this article martyrdom is conceptualised as a radicalisation of these modes of boundary construction, and thus as an extreme form of heroism, since the underlying discourses not only determine the sacred centre of the martyr’s society, but rather define opposing entities and ‘wrong behaviour’ in polar terms. Furthermore, I argue that martyrdom is to be determined as a dominant discourse influencing hegemonic masculinity in Iran in the late 70s and 80s. Accordingly, the cult of the martyr is to be understood to affect all aspects of gender relations in warring Iran. In his paper I shall show how the Islamist discourse on martyrdom has been forged and fostered through references to the Karbala narrative of early Islam and its modern reinterpretation as a heroic narrative which distinctively calls for the self-sacrifice of the true believer when facing tyranny and injustice. In effect, via the exaltation of martyrdom as a radicalised mode of boundary construction, everyone’s contribution to the war became a personal obligation.
International Journal of Middle East Studies
Negar Mottahedeh, Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007).2010 •
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