Iranian sociologist Seyyed Javad Miri believes there is a need to re-establish an understanding of Iran as a cultural space without any imperialist connotations. In an interview with political scientist Shamsiddin Rizoev, Professor Miri spoke about how ideas of national identity and multiculturalism are being constructed and broken through in contemporary Iran.
Seyyed Javad Miri is the author of 70 books and over 130 research papers on the history of religion, Sufism, anthropology and social relations. Miri received his BA and MA from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden before moving to England in 1998. There he received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. Currently, he is a sociology professor at the Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran.
The contemporary public discourse in Iran is in many ways terra-incognita for Central Asian audiences. In an era of mass politicisation of all forms of public life, the question of national identity is also a central topic. In your book “Iran in Five Narratives: About National Identity, Linguistic Diversity, Mother Tongue and the Issue of Turkish Language in Iran” you speak of this notion. What is “national identity” according to you?
Identity can be described in different ways, for example, on the psychological level, identity can be defined as an individual phenomenon, i.e. a form of self-consciousness. However, the sociological approach that I use involves analysing identity in the context of social relations. This means that, as a phenomenon of human relations, identity is conditioned by history; it cannot be predetermined and exist as something objectively given and immutable. Identity transforms in the context of events. When it comes to Iranian, Tajik, Turkish and other identities, we need to understand that they are not immutable, or frozen, but may acquire new understandings and perceptions of themselves under the influence of different circumstances or over the course of various historical epochs.
Is it fair to say that you are alien to a primordial (primordialists argue that each individual has a single innate ethnic identity, independent of historical processes – ed.) understanding of identity, which assumes that social groups have immutable qualities?
Yes, you could say so. There is certainly a view of national identity that operates on the philosophical categories of essentialism and primordialism, which ascribe to an object of social order a set of immutable, permanent qualities, e.g. if a community could maintain itself unchanged through the ages without experiencing any significant change. But this does not seem possible to me; I see identity as being relative, changing in response to historical processes, so my view is anti-essentialist and in opposition to the primordial scientific tradition.
But nevertheless, aren’t there a number of undeniable constants of identity, such as language or culture?
Over the last 100-200 years, as states have entered the era of modernity, the concept of a national language has come into use. For a modern state to perceive itself as a whole, a single official language is capable of representing one form of a particular culture. But if we look at the context of culture, whether Iranian, Tajik, European or any other, it is clear that it was not formed within the framework of one particular language. For example, looking at the history of pre-Islamic Iran, we find that three to five languages were in common use, each corresponding to a function – liturgical, literary or judicial. The languages of the social groups – farmers, urban dwellers and the nomads surrounding them – were also different. The upper classes, such as theologians, scholars and rulers, spoke two or three languages.Even in contemporary Iran, where the national, i.e. state language is Persian, Islamic scholars write their most important texts in Arabic, and if they need to address a global audience, English will be used. Thus, the language of high culture in different social and historical contexts has not always corresponded to what we today call a national language. The national language is an ideological construct of the 19th and 20th centuries, which has become a global phenomenon.
And yet one cannot deny the fact that every nation has its own characteristics that shape its identity and that’s what your book is about, isn’t it? Aren’t you drawing on specific Iranian narratives to describe contemporary Iranian identity?
Let me tell you the reason why I decided to write my book. I had a number of hypotheses that prompted me to take up this work. One of these hypotheses is an attempt to revise a view that has intensified in the last decade about the nature of Iranian culture. According to this view, Iranian culture is a single and established form of identity that has preserved itself pristine throughout its existence, expressed in one and only national (Persian – ed.) language. However, if we refer to the text of the Constitution of Iran, we can find a distinction between the terms “national” and “official” languages. These definitions are not identical. Persian is the official language of the country, and according to some Iranian intellectuals, it is also the national language. This assumption means that the mother tongue of all Iranians is Persian. I would call this view romanticized, and as a sociologist, I cannot accept it, because there are many “native” languages in Iran. Persian itself reflects this linguistic diversity and it is easy to see the difference between the mother tongue (zaboni modari) and national language (zaboni milli), which in turn is not equal to the concept of the official language (zaboni rasmi) and there is the phenomenon that we call lingua franka, the common language (zaboni mushtarak, myonchi) that everybody uses. In my book, I am attempting to put forward the following argument: it would be better to define a national language as a confessional language. In Islamic culture, there is the expression “the people of Ibrahim”, because in this context the word people does not have ethnic connotations, but it has a distinct religious attribute. Applying this principle to the study of society, we find that Persian cannot be the religious language of all Iranians. The Muslims use Arabic for prayers, the Jews use Hebrew, the Zoroastrians use Pahlavi, the Catholics of Iran use Aramaic, and the Gregorians use Armenian for divine worship. By pointing to this fact I am trying to prove that the Iranian identity is multifaceted. Reducing that diversity to a single form of identity is extremely strange, and I would call the attempt at such unification rather an anti-Iranian stance. And therefore, in my book, I have used texts or narratives from five contemporary Iranian intellectuals who have understood and described Iranian identity in different ways.
In what way was the concept of Iranian and non-Iranian interpreted in the texts you studied?
My analysis is based on five books by prominent Iranian public figures of the 20th century: sociologist Ali Shariati, publicist Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, theologian Morteza Motahhari, philosopher Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub, and literary scholar Shahrokh Meskoob. Ali Shariati avoids nationalist rhetoric to explain Iranian identity, pointing to its multifaceted nature. Morteza Motahhari in his views is open to accepting the fact of the multiplicity of Iranian languages, placing the Islamic factor at the centre of his understanding of “Iranian”. Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub, on the other hand, sees the acceptance of Islam as a disaster of Iranian culture, believing that for two centuries after the acceptance of Islam, Iranian identity was lost until the next revival. Jalal Al-e-Ahmad does not limit his understanding of the Iranian identity to the use of Persian, for him, it is impossible to understand Iran without taking into account the Turkic tradition. As a non-Turkic, he was one of the first to pay attention to the Turkic factor in Iranian culture, criticising the efforts of the shah’s regime to restrict the use of Turkic languages in the Iranian public sphere. Shahrokh Meskoob proceeded from a primordial position; he considered Iranian identity as unified (only Persian) and unchangeable. Amusingly, by pointing to the lack of a painting tradition in Iranian culture, Meskoub thereby hyperbolizes the role of language in preserving identity. But there was and is a pictorial tradition in Iran, it is strange that he does not consider other aspects of culture that have specific Iranian features, such as architecture or material culture. For Meskoub, a true Iranian is the only one who speaks, writes and thinks in Persian. Thus, the pages of Iranian history associated with the Seljuk, Khwarazmshah, Timurid, Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar dynasties, according to Meskoob, are irrelevant because these rulers were not of Persian origin. This is a very distorted view of Iran’s rich history and culture. Thus, I come to the following conclusion: what we call “national identity” can always be viewed from different perspectives and be subject to debate.
Then you might ask, which aspect of identity would be the most relevant for a specific country? I think the basis is a civic idea or narrative which takes into account the participation of every nation in shaping its culture, because Iran is a country of Persians and Turks, Kurds and Baluchis, Georgians and Armenians, Christians and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites, we even have people who do not adhere to any religion.
To say that Iranian identity is based only on the Persian language and Shiism means that we put other languages and faiths aside. For example, Motahhari has a very interesting passage: describing the reality of Iran in the 1960s, when the population was about 30 million, he writes that if only Aryan or far-right nationalist ideology guided Iranian identity, then 23 million Iranian citizens would not be considered “true Iranians”. Because that excluded majority did not have grey and blue eyes, they were not white-skinned and tall blond, Persian was not their first language and Zoroastrianism was not their religion. Thus, a contemporary understanding of Iranian identity should express a sense of belonging rather than rejection, and inclusion rather than exclusivity.
Then what is the basis for describing the concept of Iran as a common home for all?
I have also written about this in my book. To better understand the meaning contained in the concept of “Iran”, we should consider it not as a modern designation of a separate country, but to imply Iran as a cultural space. In this case, a comparable concept to Iran can be the cultural concept of Europe. Until 1935 modern Iran was called Persia until Reza Shah Pahlavi wrote a letter to the League of Nations requesting that their country be called Iran. To some extent, this move was justified because many people in the country were not Persian, and it was a wise decision on the way to consolidate the nation. On the other hand, the renaming led to a blurring of the civilisational meaning of “Iran” and eventually led to the association with only one country, Iran. In its turn, the concept of Europe, emerging from Greek mythology, became a political-geographical, civilizational concept, with which many states relate themselves. It is the same as if today’s modern Greece would be called Europe which would be probably fair but ambiguous. It is unlikely that the French, Germans or British would want to call themselves Greeks, but they consider themselves Europeans.
Unfortunately, Iran’s understanding has been transformed in this very scenario: from a civilizational space to a nation-state. For example, modern residents of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan will not consider themselves Iranians, because calling someone “Iranian” today means a citizen of a particular country. If someone says today that Tajikistan is a part of Iran, this statement will be perceived as a manifestation of Iranian imperialism.
Intellectuals need to revive the understanding of Iran as a cultural space without any imperialistic connotations. For example, each country – Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia – is not part of the Iranian nation, but we have a common historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage. We have a common background, which was formed in ancient times within the Iranian cultural space. Understanding this fact needs an ongoing scholarly discussion, which, in fact, has not yet begun.
In that case, apart from the commonality of language and the preservation of cultural memory, what “stitches” together the space in question?
Definitely a religion – Islam. Just as much as the intellectual tradition, which expresses itself through Sufism, the philosophical and poetic tradition. All of these elements link the present with the earliest days of Islamic history. For example, Al-Farabi, who was born in the territory of modern Kazakhstan, is embedded in Iranian intellectual history, and it would be even possible to speak of an independent tradition founded by Al-Farabi. The same argument is also true for the entire pleiad of Muslim scholars, poets, and state leaders, who brought their ideas into reality in the context of the Iranian cultural paradigm.
And what is the Iranian cultural space for non-Islamic states such as Georgia and Armenia mentioned above?
The history of Iranian culture and the scope of its expansion covers at least several millennia. Despite their religious specificity, the Georgians and Armenians are included in the cultural region I spoke about earlier. For example, in Iran, the Georgians are Shiite in religion, while the Armenians are mostly Christian. For example, the Armenian king Tiridat, who made Christianity the state religion of the ancient Armenian kingdom, himself came from an Iranian Parsi dynasty. Armenian poetry of the 13th-14th centuries is full of allusions to what we call Sufism.
For peoples outside the Islamic context, a binding factor is not only the poetic tradition, such as the Georgian poetic epos with its Shahnameh plots, but also the musical tradition, and of course, the similar ideas about spiritual and moral values: something that distinguishes us – Iranians, Central Asians, Caucasians, Eurasian Christians and Jews from the Latin tradition, from European Christians and Jews. Thus, we all share a common historical past. The diversity of religions, self-denominations, and languages is an important aspect of the Iranian cultural space that has yet to be explored. There is plenty of historical material showing the similarities between our peoples, but there is a need to study it, which is a task for intellectuals.
You mentioned the Turkic factor above. Is the expression of a Turkic identity a challenge for modern Iran?
Iranian cultural space is expressed in three important languages: Persian, Arabic and Turkic. When I speak of Persian, I am not only referring to the Iranian dialect, but also to the language spoken in Tajikistan, Afghanistan and some regions of Uzbekistan. Arabic, Persian and Turkic are important languages of the Islamic world in general, and of Iranian culture in particular. But with the advent of the modern age, the idea of one state with one national language has become established, which is a real threat to the cultural capital that each of these languages possesses.
Turkic and Arabic are seen by some Iranian groups as a challenge because these people have developed a Eurocentric understanding of the world – as a system of nation-states. But we have to look at linguistic and ethnic diversity as wealth. According to the Iranian Constitution, all the languages of the country compose the whole of the Iranian identity. And even though Persian is the official language, other languages should not be seen as a danger, and my academic efforts have been aimed at overcoming nationalist biases against non-Persian languages and cultures in Iran.
Do the national policies of the Central Asian countries follow similar trends?
Unfortunately, there is a policy of assimilation in our region, where diversity can be perceived as a challenge. The desire to cleanse the language of foreign words, the change of toponyms, and the restriction on the use of names are all manifestations of assimilationist processes. This can easily be transferred to the political plane, where pluralism is impossible. I believe that this system of views is a cultural problem. We have to understand that culture can be different but destiny is the same, unfortunately, this idea is very difficult to understand by decision makers. The problem of multiculturalism is common to Iran and Turkey as well as to Russia and the Central Asian countries and Afghanistan. I lived in Russia and wrote the book “The Transformation of the Caucasus and its Impact on Iran’s National Security Policy” based on my experiences in the North Caucasus. As a sociologist, I researched the region, talking to different groups – religious leaders, Sufis, young people, etc. I have also visited the Volga region – Tatarstan, about which I have also written a book.
From the position that national identity is a socio-political construct, can we say that it can also be used as an ideological tool?
Yes, national identity can be constructed as a tool for antagonising “others”, “us against them”. When this notion is used for populist purposes, identity can be explained through ethnic or confessional aspects, like “we are Shia, they are Sunni”, “we are Catholic, they are Protestant”, etc. This tool can be used to please political groups. If you pay attention to political practice, for example in England, conservative and far-right parties there use the notion of “national identity” against immigrants, against those who cannot be included and do not belong to “our (their – English) nation”.
The question naturally arises: how can this populist use of this category be combated or attempted to be prevented? European countries, for example, view ‘identity’ through the prism of belonging and in the categories of acceptance – inclusiveness, through the concept of universal values – a single identity, because ‘identity’ cannot be considered outside the ‘human’. In this way, it is possible to get to the level of discussing universal values that are common to all human beings. This understanding of identity contradicts the beliefs of nationalist groups, which view national identity as a citadel that cannot be accessed from outside.
One way of overcoming prejudice is through knowledge. Where can our readers read your books?
Most of my books are written in English, and some of them are available online and on Amazon. But my books written in Persian are almost impossible to find online. In Moscow there is the Ibn Sina Foundation for Islamic Culture Studies and the Sadra publishing house, where you can find some of my books translated into Russian. I have a suggestion to organise an online or offline conference where we could meet and share our ideas and perhaps build up new knowledge.