who is iranian?

by tala khanmalek

“The Arabs destroyed our country!” my grandmother always proclaims. “They destroyed Iran; they destroyed our language and our culture.”

But, who is Iranian? What qualifies someone or a group of people as Iranian? Is there a minimum shared attribute that signifies Iranian-ness in spite of anything else? My grandmother’s statement assumes a fixed notion of Iranian national identity that is bound to the dominant language, Persian, as well as the dominant ethnicity.

However, my grandmother’s understanding of Iran as linguistically, racially, and culturally uniform is a far cry from reality. Iran, like most modern nation states, is certainly not monolithic or singular in any way.

In the formation of Iranian identity, “the Turkish, Arab, Turkoman, Baluchi, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Kurdish, Luri, Armenian, Assyrian, and other religious, linguistic, and tribal communities that lay within the administrative boundary demarcating the Iranian plateau during the transition to modernism were all termed Iranian,” says Mostafa Vaziri as quoted by Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi in Iran as Imagined Nation: The construction of National Identity.

The creation of national identity requires, and Iranian identity in particular required, the erasure of linguistic, racial, and cultural differences. The mainstream definition of “Iranian” presupposes sameness, and lumps together the particularities of ethnic groups within Iran to produce a static and homogeneous identity.

In Language Reform in Turkey and Iran, John R. Perry follows the development and activities of the Persian Academy, founded in 1935. In particular, he looks at state-sponsored language reform in Turkey and Iran that was “characterized chiefly by attempts to ‘purify’ Turkish and Persian of their centuries-old accretion of Arabic loanwords.”

Image from The First Post

Language reform constituted a cleansing of Persian and the reinstatement of an exclusive national identity. The purging of Arabic loanwords established “us” as Iranian and “them” as Arab, producing a strict binary. The dubbing of Persian the standard language of Iran coincided with a rise in nationalism, which simultaneously vilified Arabic language and culture and propagated Persian ethnocentrism.

The Iran-Iraq war necessitated the promotion of such nationalist spirit to categorize and pin-point the common enemy—the Other or “the Arab.” The irony lies in the fact that we have a lot in common with the Other that we have imagined. Not to mention, folks in the south of Iran speak Arabic and borrow largely from Arab culture.

In Black Skin White Masks, Franz Fanon states, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Thus, a language presupposed a civilization, and to speak a langage is also to embody its implied culture or world. To my grandmother I therefore propose a reinvention of language that foments an evolution of what we consider and don’t consider Iranian culture.

Let us explore a redefinition of Iranian-ness that includes difference and purges ideas of racial intolerance; let us examine a redefinition that unites us with our neighbors against U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. And let this be a guiding principle for nation states around the world.

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Tala Khanmalek is a third-year undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.