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.