Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Ehsan Kashfi
Ehsan Kashfi is a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. His research interests include national identity and nationalism, discourse analysis, modern Islamic political thought, religion and modernity, and history of modern Iran. He earned a master’s degree in International Relations of the Middle East from Durham University (UK) and a second master’s degree in political science from the University of South Florida (USA). He currently works on discursive and institutional constructions of Shia identity in the post-revolutionary Iran.
Ali Shariati and Iranian National Identity: A Decolonial Narrative
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This paper seeks to critically examine how Ali Shariati articulates Iranian identity, exploring what constitutes Iranianness for him, where his narrative fits within the theoretical debate on the essence of modern identity and, more importantly, if it can accommodate differences and find commonalities, transcending the long-debated dichotomy between the ethnic/Persian and religious/Shia constituents of Iranian identity.
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Contrary to the dominant readings of Shariati, which portray him as an Islamist who in an attempt to articulate a nativist response prioritises religion over all other social bonds and cultural resources, this paper argues that Shariati can be situated within a different intellectual trend, that of decolonial thought, which rejects both the rigidities of the hegemonic universal, handed down by colonial powers, as well as an essentialist/nativist celebration of the particular, a return to a forgotten culturally distant glorified Persian past and/or an ahistorical Islamist orthodoxy.
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For Shariati, both narratives are inverted and similarly static cultural forms, epitomizing the hegemony of the West in providing the very language and discourse by which the colonized defines himself, the subtle yet another potent mechanism of the colonial discourse at work. Accordingly, the revival of ethnic thinking in the twentieth century is not ‘coincidental’. It is deigned to instill the racial inferiority of the colonized. Resorting to the ‘glorious’ Persian past to forge a homogenous identity is thus the embodiment and perpetuation of the colonial order, rendering our attention to fabricated, dividing ethnic differences.
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The false and falsifying fabricated dichotomy between ethnic and religious ‘cores’, dominated the Iranian political narrative for the longest time, should also be dismantled as a discursive colonial sketch which ignores the non-sectarian, hybrid disposition of Iranian identity. Instead of imagining a return to a 'pure' homogenized core, he argues for a return to a non-denominational self that exists immediately in present Iran but is yet to be realized. Residing in the collective consciousness and memory of Iranians, the realization of this self eventually would lead to a long-awaited social and political transformation in the country.
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