The Islamic Republic of Iran's use of both nationalist and religious rhetoric to justify its role in the Middle East and to legitimize its nuclear program has made it increasingly important to understand how Iranian elites have employed and reconciled nationalist and religious discourses to achieve their goals. How does the Islamic Republic, which sometimes stigmatizes nationalism, utilize the concept to its advantage? How does the regime formulate nationalism and combine it with religious and revolutionary concepts to further its interests? In what ways have these discursive strategies and devices changed over time?
This panel responds to these questions by analyzing the intermixing of nationalism and religion in the Islamic Republic's discourses on issues of defense and development. The panel's four papers are based on analyses of Persian-language sources and interviews with Iranian leaders and activists. Two focus on historical issues (rural development and the Iran-Iraq War) and two on contemporary issues (Iran's nuclear program and Islamizing the social sciences).
One early motivation for the synthesis of nationalism and Islam was the need to spread the revolution to the countryside. To this end, the Islamic Republic utilized both nationalist and religious themes to mobilize activists, improve development, and consolidate power in villages. Iraq's invasion of Iran also played an important role in integrating nationalism into regime discourse. While most scholars focus only on the religious narratives used to justify the war, Iranian leaders' emphasis on territory, international law, and national defense was also significant.
More recently, the Islamic Republic has employed nationalism and Islam in its nuclear discourse. In claiming the purely civilian character of the nuclear program, Iranian leaders have emphasized the Islamic prohibition of nuclear weapons while appealing to non-domestic audiences and the nationalist drivers behind the program to retain the population's support in the face of sanctions. The nuclear program is one element of the "Iranian-Islamic model of progress," the state's drive to "indigenize" Western social sciences into Islamic disciplines. The conceptualization of this model offers insight into how nationalism and religion are refashioned by Islamic elites.
Together, the papers challenge the conventional thinking on the Islamic Republic's history and politics by demonstrating that nationalist and Islamic ideologies are less discordant than is often assumed. The regime's complex and multifaceted discourses integrating both nationalist and Islamic concepts hold significant implications for understanding Iranian politics as well as Islam and nationalism in the Middle East more broadly.
History
International Relations/Affairs
Political Science
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Prof. Annie Tracy Samuel
In the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the country’s new leaders worked to reshape Iran’s political identity. They focused particularly on rejecting the symbols that had defined the Iranian polity under the rule of the shah and by making Islam its central pillar. For Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies, nationalism was closely associated with the monarchy and was therefore suspect. However, and despite Islam’s centrality, nationalism remained a driving force in Iran under the Islamic Republic.
Iraq’s September 1980 invasion of Iran had much to do with that. On the one hand, the attack by a foreign power ignited deep and strong patriotism throughout Iranian society. On the other, the leaders of the Islamic Republic were faced with the task of mobilizing the population to defend the country and to prosecute what became a drawn-out conflict. They therefore capitalized on the rising tide of nationalism to sustain the war effort.
This paper will examine the nature and significance of nationalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran following the Iraqi invasion and during the ensuing eight years of the Iran-Iraq War. In particular, the paper will analyze how the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and other leaders of the new regime portray nationalism and its relationship to the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.
The examination will be based on a textual analysis of publications produced by the IRGC and of statements made by Revolutionary Guards leaders about the war, along with related sources produced by the Iranian government. The IRGC publications consist of analytical studies of the conflict in Persian, which have received hardly any scholarly attention. They provide a rich and detailed account of the war that sheds new light on both the conflict and on the IRGC, and that demonstrates the importance the Guards attach to shaping the history and memory of the war.
Those sources reveal that concepts and terms traditionally associated with nationalism figure prominently in the way the Guards define and describe the war and the Islamic Republic of Iran more generally. In many cases, nationalist terms are interwoven with references to Islam, the Islamic Revolution, and the Islamic revolutionary ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, a fact which reflects the synthesis and concordance of the various strands of the Islamic Republic’s politics and ideology.
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Dr. Payam Mohseni
While the concept of modern “nationalism” is largely considered to be doctrinally antithetical to the tenets of Islamic political ideology in Iran, the Islamic Republic has employed and re-imagined nationalism alongside Islam in a variety of ways since the revolution. Interestingly—and perhaps paradoxically—one of the significant areas in which this phenomenon has occurred is in the state’s renewed drive to “indigenize” the Western social sciences into alternative Islamic social sciences since the end of the twentieth century. A key component of this program is what the Supreme Leader has repeatedly described as the “Iranian-Islamic model of progress”—a model rooted in Islam but with an eye to the unique qualities and assets of the Iranian nation, a model that should serve as the guideline and vision with which to undertake state reform and transformation in a path different from either East or West.
This paper focuses on the ideas underpinning and driving the conceptualization of an “Iranian-Islamic model of progress” in order to gain greater insight into how nationalism and religion have been refashioned and re-combined by revolutionary elites who should expectedly be most disinclined to emphasize the nation. By studying the ways in which nationalist ideas permeate a seemingly non-nationalist enterprise—the Islamization of knowledge—this paper will identify the conceptual fault lines separating the normative authorities of religious thought and nationalism and will demonstrate how Islamic revolutionary thinkers have sought to reconcile the inherent tensions within such an undertaking. In addition, by contextualizing this movement in relation to reformist thoughts and responses, it will also shed light on the increasing theoretical sophistication with which the regime attempts to justify its rule and bolster its authority. Based on several months of fieldwork in Iran, in-depth interviews with Islamist thinkers, new primary sources of the content of such Islamic sciences, as well as an analysis of the speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and key regime and Revolutionary Guards officials, this paper will contribute to not only a more thorough understanding of the ideological currents and tensions within the wide spectrum of the Iranian elite but also to the larger theoretical literature on nationalism and religion in the Middle East more broadly.
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Ms. Ariane Tabatabai
Though the crisis over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme has entered its second decade, there is still a lack of clarity on the Iranian leadership’s intentions in this area. Indeed, while Tehran continues to claim that its nuclear programme is merely for peaceful purposes, the international community is not entirely convinced. To effectively convince the world of its peaceful intentions, while keeping the domestic constituencies committed with the programme, despite sanctions, the regime has developed a nuclear narrative. This narrative is certainly a complex affair, comprising two major themes: religion and nationalism. A key plank of the leadership’s argument that the programme is purely civil in nature is that nuclear weapons are prohibited under Islamic law. Tehran further claims that the nuclear programme, which is supported by all factions of the Iranian population regardless of political affiliation and religious background, is pursued to advance scientific and technological progress.
In claiming the purely civil character of the nuclear programme, the Iranian leadership has long made the argument that Tehran’s foremost political authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has issued a “fatwa”, prohibiting nuclear weapons, which has widely resonated in the west. In parallel to the religious discourse, various Iranian leaders, including former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his successor, President Hassan Rouhani, as well as Khamenei himself, have highlighted the nationalist drivers behind the country’s nuclear programme.
Each of these two themes has several strands, which have been highlighted by various actors, depending on the context, the present conditions domestically, regionally, and internationally, and the target audience. These strands encompassed in the religious and nationalist themes include: technological progress, what I refer to as the “enemy narrative”, and Islamic law as a limiting factor.
This paper will examine the Iranian nuclear narrative by identifying the function of each strand and its impact on Tehran’s nuclear and foreign policy decision-making. It is informed by extensive qualitative and analytical research, including textual and discourse analysis. The paper examines the much-debated Iranian nuclear programme from a different angle, while contextualising it in the broader defence and development debate in post-revolutionary Iran.
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Eric Lob
In spite of receiving scant scholarly attention, Construction Jihad (CJ) is considered among the Islamic Republic’s most important revolutionary organizations. Officially established on June 16, 1979, just months after the fall of the Shah and Khomeini’s triumphant return to Iran, CJ consisted of thousands of young activists who embarked upon an ambitious development campaign and spread revolutionary and Islamic values throughout the countryside. In the process, the organization transformed, modernized, and indoctrinated Iranian villages, and helped the fledgling Islamic Republic consolidate power against numerous domestic opponents and invading Iraqi forces.
Based on one year of interviews and archival research in Iran, this paper examines the role that nationalist and religious discourse played in the mobilization of CJ’s activists immediately after the revolution and in the political factionalism that endured and intensified during the decades that followed. Relying on a textual analysis of Khomeini’s speeches, the first section of the paper argues that the revolutionary leader invoked a combination of nationalist and religious themes, as epitomized by the term “nation” (melat) as opposed to “community of believers” (ummat), and the concepts of divine struggle (jehad) and heavenly rewards (savab). This, in turn, allowed Khomeini to maximize CJ’s recruits, to reify their individual and collective identities, and to lend meaning to their actions. While the literature on post-revolutionary Iran contends that Khomeini prioritized the public interest (maslahat) over the pillars of Islam (arkan-e din) toward the end of his life, these speeches demonstrate that, from the beginning of his rule, Khomeini instrumentalized religion to further regime objectives.
The remainder of the paper explores how, following Khomeini’s death, competing factions employed similar concepts and terms related to nationalism and religion to promote their respective agendas in the areas of development and politics. This section of the paper specifically traces how a fragmented network of former CJ activists in state institutions and grassroots associations appropriated the organization’s original symbols and tactics, through the ideological construct of jihadi management and culture (mudiriyat va farhang-e jehadi), to advance conservative and reformist aims. The paper contributes to and enriches the scholarship on post-revolutionary Iran, which focuses exclusively on intra-elite factionalism, by revealing how that phenomenon permeated and manifested itself at the state and societal levels.
