Neo-Iranian Nationalism: Pre-Islamic Grandeur and Shi'i Eschatology in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Rhetoric

Date

2016-03-01

Author

Fozi, Navid

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

279
views

0
downloads

In 2009, Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad began to invoke nationalist sentiments by paying homage to Iran's pre-Islamic history; a significant shift from 30 years of disparaging this period. Tracing the religious and political genealogies of Ahmadinejad's discourse, this article analyzes the climate that rendered both the Islamic Republic's Shi'i-oriented nationalism and the secular alternative proposed by the Pahlavi dynasty politically inadequate. Such a climate provided conditions to amalgamate, albeit incompletely, a "neo-Iranian" nationalist discourse based on restoring ancient Persia's grandeur and bolstered by Shi'i eschatology.

Subject Keywords

Geography, Planning and Development, Sociology and Political Science

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63918

Journal

MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3751/70.2.13

Collections

Unclassified, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Behind the Turkish-Israeli alliance: A Turkish view Bolukbasi, S (University of California Press, 1999-09-01) Arguing that Turkey's policy in the Middle East since the 1940s has been driven by its perception of geopolitical necessities, this article examines the shifts in that policy through the prism of hey issues of national concern. the perception of the Soviet threat, the Cyprus issue, the water dispute with Iraq and Syria, and regionalization of the Kurdish problem. Turkey's leaders tilted toward the Arabs in the 1970s when they needed Arab diplomatic and economic support. During the 1990s, reduced trade with ...
Globalization, Governance, and the Emergence of Indigenous Autonomy Movements in Latin America: The Case of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua Baracco, Luciano (SAGE Publications, 2018-11-01) A revisiting of Salvador Marti i Puig's approach to globalization and the turn toward governance in explaining the roots and impact of the political mobilization of Latin America's indigenous peoples since the 1990s recasts governance as a disciplinary regime that in the case of Nicaragua co-opted potentially radical oppositional movements into the neoliberal project that accompanied Latin America's democratic transition. The discussion takes as its empirical case the autonomy process on Nicaragua's Caribbe...
Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view Yardimci-Geyikci, Sebnem; Tür Küçükkaya, Özlem (Informa UK Limited, 2018-01-01) Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with polit...
Conversion of Ajarians to Orthodox Christianity: Different Narratives and Perceptions Aydıngün, Ayşegül; Köksal, Pınar (Informa UK Limited, 2019-02-07) Based on field research and interviews conducted in both Ajaria and Tbilisi, this article focuses on the different interpretations of the conversion of ethnically Georgian Muslim Ajarians to Orthodox Christianity. It is argued that Orthodox Christianity is an important aspect of self-identification and the national narrative of all Georgians. For many Muslim Ajarians, conversion appears to be a pragmatic act, with the ultimate goal of being recognised as 'fully Georgian' by both state and society.
Gender Climate in Authoritarian Politics: A Comparative Study of Russia and Turkey Dogangun, Gokten (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020-03-01) In Russia and Turkey, the pro-authoritarian regimes have largely relied on nationalistic narratives appealing to cultural authenticity, tradition, and religion for legitimacy and cultural resonance at the mass level. Within this narrative, as it is argued, traditional notions of family and femininity are endorsed so as to represent national power against the West and to invigorate social unity and morality in Russian and Turkish societies. The revival of traditional gender norms and patterns that characteri...

Citation Formats

N. Fozi, “Neo-Iranian Nationalism: Pre-Islamic Grandeur and Shi’i Eschatology in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s Rhetoric,” MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL, pp. 227–248, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63918.