Iran And The Challenge Of Diversity

This interrogates the racist construction of Aria and Aryanism in an Iranian context, arguing that these concepts gave the Indo-European speaking Persian ethnic group an advantage over Iran's non-Persian nationalities and communities.

This interrogates the racist construction of Aria and Aryanism in an Iranian context, arguing that these concepts gave the Indo-European speaking Persian ethnic group an advantage over Iran's non-Persian nationalities and communities.

Recent Iranian history has been full of unexpected turns. Whether it was the 1979 revolution, which resulted in the establishment of the first ever Islamic Republic in the history of the Muslim world, the rise to power of the reformist movement in 1997, or the emergence of the Green Movement, an opposition movement that took shape spontaneously in the days immediately following the presidential elections in June 2009, the world has been taken unawares at every juncture. This book brings together essays that both speculate on the import of the developments of 2009 and shed light on the complexities and the ever-changing dynamics of post-revolutionary Iran.

While the Islamic Republic has employed various strategies to mitigate the worst excesses of inter-ethnic tension while still securing a Shi'a dominated "Persian hegemony," the systematic neglect of ethnic groups by both the Islamic Republic and its predecessor regime has resulted in the politicization of ethnic identity in Iran.

Iran is More than Persia: Ethnic Politics in Iran analyses Iranian politics from a unique perspective, one that focuses on the relations between the Persian-dominated Iranian state and the country’s ethnic minorities. The book explores the stability of the ruling regime in light of the challenges that multiethnicity brings. Persians comprise less than half of the population of Iran and more than 40 percent of Iranians lack fluency in the Persian language. An overwhelming majority of non-Persian groups inhabit most of Iran’s border regions; as such the book explores Iran’s foreign policy toward neighboring states that share co-ethnic populations. Iran’s ethnic minorities inhabit the state’s poorest provinces and the country’s growing environmental and water supply challenges hit the ethnic minority provinces harder than the Persian center, adding an ominous ethnic character to what are often presented as purely environmental or economic challenges. The book further examines the potential impact of ethnic based unrest in Khuzestan on Iran’s oil production, Iran’s main oil producing region. Drawing on a rich assortment of primary data and interviews, this book offers unparalled insights into ethnic politics in Iran. It will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates, researchers and professionals interested in the Middle East, international relations, and ethnic studies.

This book examines the sociolinguistics of some of Iran’s languages at home and in the diaspora. The first part of the book examines the politics of minority languages and the presence of hegemonic discourses which favour Persian (Farsi) in Iran, exploring issues such as language maintenance and shift, linguistic ideologies and practices among Azerbaijani and Kurdish-speaking communities. The authors then go on to examine Iranians’ linguistic ideologies, practices and (trans)national identity construction in the diaspora, investigating both the challenges of maintaining a home language and the strategies and linguistic repertoires employed when constructing a diasporic identity away from home. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages and communities, diaspora and migration studies, and language policy and planning.

Based on the premise that nationalism is a dominant factor in Iranian identity politics despite the significant changes brought about by the Islamic Revolution, this cross-disciplinary work investigates the languages of nationalism in contemporary Iran through the prism of the minority issue.

An examination of how Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) view their history and their roles in the Iran-Iraq War.