National identity, transnational ideology, and cultural policy in Iran

Abstract

ABSTRACT The question of Iranian national identity under the Islamic Republic has been the subject of much academic debate in the past two decades but little empirical research has been conducted to assess the government’s cultural policy on national identity. This article seeks to scrutinize The Islamic Republic of Iran’s cultural policy vis-à-vis the Iranian national identity. We use a content analysis approach to explore the Iranian government’s cultural policy toward Iranian national identity. To do so, we analyze the documents of the highest body of cultural policy-making, Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR), at two levels to explore their relationship with Iranian identity. The results of our content analysis at level 1 unveil that the Iranian national identity, as a whole, has a marginal role in the SCCR’s documents. Content analysis at level 2 (i.e. semiotic analysis) explains why such a peripheral status exists and delineates that cultural policy based on the SCCR’s transnational ideology represents a situation whose most paramount features are (a) substituting a part of Iranian identity for the whole of it, (b) defining a transnational sphere as the main subject in adopting cultural policy, and (c) describing Iran as a part of the Islamic Ummah and its forerunner in the universal defiance against the West.