Recent growing educational, professional, and residential mobility led about a quarter of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens to attain middle class status. This mobility dents Israel’s customary wall of segregation and leads to greater mixing of Jewish and Arab citizens. It is suggested in this paper that the experience of these Arab citizens is best understood as an example of a coming “out of the ghetto” ordeal that parallels that of European Jews, following emancipation and Black Americans, following the end of slavery and northward migration. In each of these cases, the mobile minority encountered severe backlash in the form of surveillance of frontiers and racialized violence as means of policing social boundaries, making this a particularly fraught and dangerous period. Lehava, a Kahanist vigilante movement, plays a similar role in contemporary Israel. It is supported by part of the authorities and substitutes religious for racial criteria of policing.

Iran after 1979 anointed itself advocate and agent for the rescue and revival of the oppressed of the world, including, above all, the community of believers or ummat al-Islamiyah. As such, the boundaries of Iran’s imagined community extended in the post-1979 era beyond the borders of the traditional “Guarded Domains” to include its Arab and Muslim neighbors, now conceived as both participants and beneficiaries of the Islamic Revolution. This essay argues that this new internationalist aspiration was in fact the latest expression of an old nationalist project, fostered by the Pahlavi and late-Qajar states and rooted in the traumas of the 19th century. In the new reverie on what it means to be “truly Iranian,” the plight of the “forlorn Arab” served as symbols and reminders of the indispensability of preserving Iran’s sovereignty against foreign encroachment, the dismemberment of Lebanon and Palestine less an inspiration for global struggle than they were contemporary reminders of the catastrophes of Turkmenchai and Golestan. Drawing upon 30 years of post-revolutionary textbook materials this essay traces the development of the Muslim Arab in the early elementary curriculum. Whereas the Pahlavi state portrayed the Arab Muslim as an abject figure incapable of redemption other than by the grace and intervention of Iranian civilization and culture, he was rendered merely pitiful by an Islamic educational system committed to instilling Iranian exceptionalism in its students.

Shia-Sunni Conversion Among Arab Minority in Iran This study investigates the Shi'a-Sunni conversion among Arab minority in Iran. During the past decade, hundreds of young Arabs mainly in the poor neighborhood and slums in different cities of Khuzestan, a province located in the southwest of the country, have converted to Salafi Islam. The political dimensions of religious conversion have been the focus of many studies. Scholars suggest that the converts may deploy religious conversion to express their political or cultural dissent and to resist state and/or religious authorities. By the same token, scholars on Islamist movements suggest that the resurgence of Islamic activism in the Middle East and North of Africa can be understood as a form of social protest of urban dispossessed. The underlying assumption of these theories is that urban poor in response to their disillusionment and frustration from poverty, unemployment, inequality and state failure resort to Islamism to protest those who they see as the cause of their despair particularly corrupted authoritarian states and imperialist interventions. Despite the great insights that these studies provide, the role and importance of ethnic relations and state nationalism in the rise of Islamist movements largely absent in these theories. This study through exploring the experience of the conversion to Salafism among Arab minority in Iran will examine these questions that why members of an ethnic minority convert from the majority religion to a minority religion? What does the religious conversion mean for the converts? And how the religious conversion affects the state-citizenry relationship? In this study, based on an ethnographic study, I propose that the conversion among Arab minority is generally a refusal of an incomplete, religious-based inclusion that the state adopted after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. I argue that the state appropriation of Shia-Islam compelled Shia Arabs to use the conversion to express their dissent and to challenge the state strategy of partial, religious-based inclusion. My finding suggests that there are class and gender dynamics in the religious conversion. While most of the converts in poor neighborhood embrace an apolitical version of Salafism, middle-class Arabs see the conversion as a strategic move to subvert state religious policies toward ethnic minorities and mobilize geopolitical tensions to fight back. I will also discuss the gender dynamic of the religious conversion among Arab minority in Iran.