Iran Cultural Policy toward Kurds in the Light of its Constitution, Laws and Formal Records

Abstract

The Contemporary Iran government is the result of the post-mashrutyat movement (as an enlightenment movement). It has been sealed off by the coup of Sayd Zyaddin and Raza Shah. Starting from those days until the present Islamic Republic of Iran, the government has used history, formal state records (historians, political elite and academic institutions) and education to make allegiance among the Kurdish intellectuals. This has been adopted in accordance with the military, security and general policy of the state. It has shaped the Kurdish history and memory to reflect and underpin the formal narrative the state discourse sponsors; it does not reflect the facts and arguments residing in the memory, history and manuscripts of the Kurdish people. This research uses a historically descriptive-analysis and depends on evidence from the written records; it tries to answer these questions: what is Iran’s cultural policy (the state and the elite policy) toward the Kurds? How is the Kurdish Identity imagined in the formal records, the education and the state, what position does that image have? What are the ways it has been used for political, nation-building and state-building ends?