THE CULTURAL DEFINITION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN AND ITS INTERACTION WITH THE DIALOGUE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Hossein Godazgar

Hossein Godazgar (PhD) as an Assistant Professor is
currently working at the Department of Social Sciences, The University of
Tabriz, Iran.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 gave Iranian nationalism a new
meaning. Although Iran had experienced liberal nationalism' during the
Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) and the Nationalist Movement under the
short-lived premiership of Dr M Musaddiq (1951-3), it never departed from the
widespread forms of nationalism in the twentieth century. Thus, nationalism took
a mainly secular form in Iran in the twentieth century before 1979, thereby
making religion appear to be reactionary, backward and traditional. However,
unlike the Constitutional Revolution, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 aimed to
achieve cultural independence by stressing an indigenous and genuinely Islamic
model of modernity, i.e. cultural nationalism.

My researches on nationalism demonstrates that cultural
nationalism', in the sense of claims about the superiority of Iranian national
identity based on ideas of traditional culture, has taken at least three forms
in post-revolutionary Iran:

1. an ideology which is anti-West, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism;
   
2. an ideology emphasising the distinctiveness of Iranian nationalism as in
   the slogan Neither the East nor the West, but the Islamic Republic';
   
3. a specific stress on the need to segregate the sexes as a means of
   prescribing moral purity, particularly on women.

The intimate association of Iranian nationalism with Islam and
with notions of the cultural superiority of specific ways of life in Iran makes
Iranian nationalism highly distinctive and potent as a strand of ideology. The
discussion of dialogue between civilizations would inevitably have repercussions
for post-revolutionary definition of national identity. This paper will examine
aspects of such repercussions to avoid any possible paradox between this
definition and the dialogue of civilizations.