Iranian Discourse Research Articles

Lexical analysis of surveillance discourse in Iran's legal system; Emphasizing Foucault's paleontological method

Lexical analysis of surveillance discourse in Iran's legal system; Emphasizing Foucault's paleontological method

A case study on the COVID-19 discourse in politicians’ speeches: Investigations into the speeches of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

This paper aims to analyze former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s thirty speeches on COVID-19 delivered between February 2, 2020 and April 27, 2020. We apply Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse analysis to investigate and analyze Rouhani’s rhetorical and discursive strategies in making meaning of COVID-19. Findings showed that COVID-19 discourse in Rouhani’s speeches has mainly revolved around three nodal points: “the country”, “the enemy”, and “the state of exception”. Thus, the structural articulation of COVID-19 discourse resembles the hegemonic discourse in Iran. Our results also explain how Rouhani used COVID-19 as an empty signifier to reinforce the hegemonic discourse in Iran while trying to redefine his relations with the state-leaning organizations. Furthermore, we analyzed the rhetorical practices that Rouhani employed to articulate the COVID-19 discourse. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature into discursive aspects and implications of a global pandemic by providing empirical evidence form an understudied context: Iran.

Discourse Formation of Political Dissents via Twitter: Political Sociology of the Subversion Discourse in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Four decades after the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the rise of the Islamic Republic (IR) system, several anti-IR groups have emerged. In the past, the disorganized structure of these groups, their flaws, and dissonance over a common criterion to support or oppose IR and its activities posed some obstacles to their unity. However, over the last decade, they have reached consensus over the subversion of the IR. As a decentralized and disorganized social movement emerging in the wake of 2017 and 2019 protests, this discourse has gained momentum among the political activists, and more people are joining this trend every day, and it is very popular on Persian language social media, especially on Twitter. Loss of faith in the reforms of the IR is one of the issues upon which this discourse movement has reached a general consensus. By exploring and describing the main signifiers of the disorganized subversion discourse in Iran, the article seeks to identify its major characteristics through the qualitative-descriptive analysis of Farsi Twitter content. The research method was the content analysis of Farsi Twitter hashtags of the most popular user accounts belonging to the subversive movement in Iran by extracting the main signifiers and their discourse analysis to examine the main characteristics of the subversion discourse in Iran after 2017.

Power dynamics and pragma-cultural sources of unsourced evidentiality in Persian

Abstract This paper investigates participants’ reflections on power relations embedded in the cultural-pragmatics of unsourced evidentials in Persian texts. Using Fairclough’s (2013) critical discourse analysis, we adopted Hanks’ (2018) ethnography of referential practices and Foucault’s (1980) power dynamics to analyse 16 Persian texts through follow up interviews and focus group discussions on two opposing pairs of texts – one pair on Iranian national identity versus Persian literature, and another on Iranian politics versus religion. Our analysis revealed that unsourced evidentials appear in Persian predominantly due to censorship and sometimes due to deliberate use by authors (e.g., for winning an argument). Text consumers often overlook unsourced evidentials while reflecting on politico-religious referents, such as inequalities and bigotry. This has roots in Persian literature, religion, and politics of power embedded in the culture, and the participants’ attention to inequalities and discriminations has roots in referential practices in current Iranian discourse.

Understanding Colonialism and Decolonization in Iran’s Contemporary Socio-Political Discourse

The article analyzes the perception of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle in modern Iran. The Iranian authorities attach particular importance to the anti-colonial struggle and condemnation of the colonial practices of the West, taking into account not only formal colonization, but also the actual subordination of formally independent states to the will of Western powers. In this regard, particular importance is attached to liberate the oppressed of the whole world. The purpose of the study is to examine the history of colonialism in Iran, the views of the spiritual leaders, presidents and senior officials of Iran on issues of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle, to identify historical events and personalities who played a key role in the anti-colonial movement in Iran. For this purpose, the materials of the Iranian agency IRNA and the speeches of Iranian spiritual leaders were analyzed. A statistical analysis of the most common terms on the subject of colonialism was also carried out. As a result, it was found that the Iranian discourse focuses on condemning the crimes of the West, especially the United States and Israel, against Muslims, as well as praising the resistance of the Iranian people to colonialism in the past and present, with an emphasis on the special role of Ayatollah Khomeini in the Iranian anti-colonial movement. Western colonialism in Iran is divided into several aspects: war crimes committed in the countries conquered by the West, preventing the free development of weaker countries, the struggle to change independent and patriotic regimes and impose rulers ineffective and obedient to Western elites on the peoples, and the imposition of destructive manifestations of Western culture. In addition, the Iranian policy in the Middle East is praised as being driven by noble motives and aiming to provide all possible assistance to the peoples of the region to achieve liberation from the colonialists. The case of Syria is cited as an important example of Iran’s anti-colonial struggle in the Middle East, when Iran helped the government of Bashar al-Assad to regain control of the country and to defeat the armed opposition.

Արցախյան հակամարտության ընկալումն ԻԻՀ ներքին խոսույթում՝ քառօրյայից մինչև քառասունչորսօրյա պատերազմ (2016-2020 թթ.)

The examination of the views, analysis, and positions in the internal discourse of the IRI on the Artsakh conflict is important from the point of view of understanding the logic forming this country's approaches to the conflict. The approaches of policy-making institutions and various political parties are reflected in internal discourse through the views of individuals associated with them and through the main media resources. During the military operations in 2016, the elements of a "positive approach" to the Artsakh Republic prevailed in Iran’s internal discourse. These days, the Iranian discourse is also more homogeneous in terms of its approaches to the conflict. In terms of the opinions expressed and the publications made during the war in 2020, the differences in the approaches of the decision-making institutions were quite noticeable. Particularly, the Foreign Ministry was promoting a policy of "active neutrality" and "mediation" when in parallel the military power structures (especially ICRC) were more focused on activities aimed at security targets. The article discusses the above-mentioned peculiarities both in the context of the dynamics of changing the perception of the Artsakh conflict in the internal discourse, as well as in the context of its place in IRI's foreign policy and IRI-Armenia relations.

Justice and vilayat in post-revolutionary Iranian Shiʿism

Justice and the guardianship of the jurist ( vilayat-i faqih ) have been the two ideological pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran ever since the 1979 Revolution. Unlike vilayat-i faqih , the meaning and essence of justice in post-revolutionary Shiʿi-Iranian thought has not received due attention in the scholarly debate. The hegemonic Shiʿi discourse in Iran defines justice as based on three principles: awarding every person their due rights according to the law; ‘setting everything in its place’, and the elimination of tyranny and oppression. It maintains that true justice can be realized only within an Islamic system ruled by the ‘fully qualified jurist’. This formula has elicited additional debate, especially since 2011, over the reciprocal status and dependence of the two concepts. The debate was triggered by intra-elite tensions, and subsequently by the need to respond to public disaffection over the deficiencies in the implementation of social justice in Iran. It culminated in subordinating the ideal of justice to clerical authority and to the principle of expediency as determined by that clergy. Thus, vilayat-i faqih has been transformed from the means to implement justice to the ultimate self-serving end-goal of the regime’s ideology.

Walking with Bourdieu into Twitter communities: an analysis of networked publics struggling on power in Iranian Twittersphere

ABSTRACT This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu’s field theory. Networked publics, as agents of this field, are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate this field, we focused on two networked practices: networked framing and narrating. Persian Twitter in 2017 presidential election provides a good context to analyze how such a field is constituted. Combining a social-network analytic approach with discursive and textual interpretations, we analyzed a corpus of 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main networked publics in the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, and diaspora users. Having identified the most influential users in each community based on PageRank metric, we thoroughly investigated all of their tweets. The results show that ordinary users constituted the major population of conservative and diaspora publics. The reformist community included mostly journalists and to a lesser extent media. Findings also confirm that all networked publics used the same strategies to gain more power in the field. They produced quite the same frames and narratives to compete with each other. Moreover, the battle was more about the routine and electoral debates, not the legitimacy or entity of regime. Hence, none of the networked publics challenged the hegemonic discourse in Iran significantly.

Վարձկաններն Իրանի քաղաքական խոսույթում. թաքվիրական շարժումների դեմ պայքարը՝ որպես Միջին Արեւելքն ու Հարավային Կովկասը միավորող գործոն

The narratives of the struggle against the “takfiri forces” have a crucial place in the Iranian discourse on the Middle East. This struggle was a basis for the Islamic-political explanation of Iran’s engagement in the Middle East. During and after the 2020 war in Nagorno Karabakh, this religious-political structure entered also in the Iranian discourse on the South Caucasus: “taqfiri forces” was a definition Iran was using referring to the Syrian mercenaries used by Azerbaijan during the War. The article discusses the Iranian political responses to the involvement of the mercenaries in the Karabakh War and stresses the feature that the vocabulary of those responses can be explained as a tool for connecting the Middle East and the South Caucasus regions.

«Совершенный человек» vs «Праведный факих»: суфийские истоки политической концепции имама Хомейни

The main models of rationalization formed in the classical period of the Arab-Muslim culture (VIII–XV centuries) have had a notable impact on Modern polit­ical discourse in Iran. The paper presents an analysis of the political concept of the ideologist of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Applying the categorical model “explicit – hidden” (ẓāhir – bāṭin) to the analysis of Khomeini’s argumentation makes it possible to identify the most important references to the major philosophemes of mature Sufism in his main work “Governance of the Jurist: Islamic Government” (Vilāyāt-i faqīh: hukumat-i islāmi). The paper explores Khomeini’s views on the phenomenon of Islamic rule, personal qualities and duties of the ruler-jurist (faqīh). The result shows how the concept of the “Perfect Human Being” (insān kāmil), of the greatest Sufi thinker Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) is realized and fundamentally re­considered in Khomeini’s political manifesto. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s philosopheme the unity of God-and-world is manifested by the “Perfect Human Being”. The gov­ernance of Khomeini’s “Righteous Jurist” helps maintain God-and-people “con­nection” at state level. A comparison of Ibn ‘Arabi’s philosopheme and the polit­ical concept the “Governance of the Jurist” sheds light on the ways the “Perfect Human Being” concept increasingly associated with the figure of “Righteous Ju­rist” in socio-political reality of pre-revolutionary Iran

Towards a new methodological approach to social historiography of translation

AbstractIn an attempt to appreciate the contribution that social network analysis (SNA) might offer to translation historiography, two main approaches are presented and discussed in this study: explanatory SNA and exploratory SNA. The former is more concerned with SNA measures while the latter deals with three potential narratives of social networks. The aim is to employ SNA in diachronic and synchronic dimensions of literary translation publishing historiography in Iran from 1991 to 2010, a micro-macro framework that seamlessly integrates agents’ relationships, visualization and network analysis techniques to explore the impact of ideological-political shifts on the quantity as well as quality of major agents’ relations. Furthermore, the study attempts to explore how the synergy between Giddens’ Structuration Theory (GST) and SNA can support a deeper and more empirically grounded understanding of translation historiography. The goal of the study is both methodological and scientific. The results of SNA graphical outputs suggest that there is a significant relationship between the structure of relationships in fiction publishing field and the dominant political discourse in Iran.

Episodic Literary Movement and Translation: Ideology Embodied in Prefaces

This paper discusses translation practices from a historicist viewpoint, contextualizing them in their emerging “episode.” The latter is a concept drawn from sociology of literature and accounts for the rise of certain discourses and ideologies in a society. On the basis of the argument that translation practices are informed by the general literary and socio-cultural milieu in which they are produced and consumed (also known as ideology of representation), the paper studies the translators’ prefaces to three translations published between 1953 and 1978—a period dominated by Leftist and Marxist discourse in Iran. Drawing on a historically oriented model which holds that the translator’s ideology is revealed at the moment in which he/she chooses a text, and continues through the discourse he/she develops to translate that text, the research embarks on studying translation practices on two levels of choice mechanism and prefaces. Prefaces are discussed in the light of the dominant ideology of representation that is characterized by a revolutionary discourse. The research demonstrates that these translators opted for a strategy that incorporates the translations in the Persian cultural setting with minor changes in a way that politicizes the foreign literature.

A Comparative Study of Traditional and Modern Left Discourse in Iran ̉s Educational System after the Islamic Revolution

The purpose of study was to analyze the discourse-ideology of the State of War (with a traditional left orientation) and State of Reform (with a modern left orientation) in order to represent their discourses through the educational system of Iran. Research method was qualitatively comparative using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis method for describing, interpreting and explaining the nature and discourse aspects of education in both States. Findings reveal that both States have tried to control, monitor and intervening Iran’s educational system through influencing the law-making process as well as producing and modifying the content of school textbooks to change the cultural-educational discourse and represent the dominant discourse. Research findings indicated that in the value system of both discourses, Islamic ideology has had a high position. Also, religious modernism, school-oriented approach and fostering of democratic citizens in the modern left discourse and traditionalism, centralism and training of committed and revolutionary citizens in the traditional left discourse are the main differences between these two States in the Iran’s education system.

Literary Criticism and Interdisciplinary Studies in Iran with a Closer Look at the Book Literary Theory and Criticism: An Interdisciplinary Textbook

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Interdisciplinary Textbook is written by Hossein Payendeh as a university textbook for master's degree course in Persian language and literature. It was first published in two volumes in 2018 by SAMT publications. Given the global importance of interdisciplinary studies in literature in recent decades as well as the need of the same in Persian literature, the current article makes an attempt to investigate the extent and manner of the application of interdisciplinary approaches in the aforementioned book. Taking into account historiographical and critical-analytical approaches, we could obtain a history of the theory and literary criticism in the West and then in Iran. This topic has also been presented in the official curriculums of Iranian universities. The form and structure of the book were studied after explaining the prevalence of the literary criticism discourse in Iran. In the section on reviewing the content, while enumerating the most important variables of the book, the relation of topics with the current situation of the theory and literary criticism in the West and Iran was explained and its contents drew the attention in order to confirm interdisciplinary studies in Persian literature. Based on the findings of this article, it can be argued that the publication of Literary Theory and Criticism: An Interdisciplinary Textbookwhile preserving the link with literary theories, indicating a break from those theories and turning attention to interdisciplinary studies in Persian literature. Its publication as an academic textbook can be considered as a turning point in academic literary studies in Iran.

Challenges and Opportunities of Promoting Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in Iran’s Internet Arena

ABSTRACTPromoters of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) increasingly benefit from the use of the Internet. The purpose of this article is to study the barriers and opportunities facing the promotion of complementary and alternative medicine in Iran’s Internet space. The main research questions are: What are the obstacles encountered in Iran while using the Internet to promote CAM? What opportunities are available for promoting CAM on the Internet? How did Iranian users interact with complementary and alternative Internet sites? In the study, 24 executives of CAM websites in Iran were interviewed; executives were selected through purposive sampling. According to the findings, the greatest opportunity provided by the Internet in Iran is “the Internet as a new arena to compete with modern medical discourse.” Yet, barriers to engaging in the Iranian Internet include “obstacles related to different ways of users’ presence,” “obstacles to CAM site management,” “obstacles caused by Iran’s Internet regulations,” and “the dominance of modern medical discourse even on the Internet.” Thus, the Internet has provided an opportunity to challenge modern medical discourse in Iran, but due to the specific conditions of Iran’s Internet, there are still many limitations to the presence of competing medical discourses on the Internet.

Conventional Secularism and the Humanization of Islam: Theory and practice of religious politics in Iran

ABSTRACTThis article is a critical examination of a post-revolutionary Iranian discourse on secularism. This discourse seeks to offer a new understanding of Islam and reformulate its relationship with politics. Intellectuals who were important figures within the post-revolutionary establishment articulated this discourse. ‘Abdolkarim Soroush has been the leading voice of this discourse. Soroush’s project is an attempt to penetrate the individual Muslim’s self-perception through reinterpretation of the nature and role of religion. This article argues that Soroush’s modernist project is a defense of conventional secularism and does not address the challenge of continuity.

Philosophical Root of Moderation Discourse in Iran’s Eleventh Presidential Election

Abstract Moderation was a triumphant discourse of Iran's eleventh presidential election. It’s a new attitude in the political realm and most of the movements relate themselves to it and each one interprete their actions according to moderation. For clarifying this ambiguous trend, we should refer to its philosophical root. It seems that Aristotle is the first one who represented this theory. In fact, moderation is one of the main principles of Aristotelian ethics. Understanding this concept requires understanding the basic concepts of the intellectual and moral theory of Aristotle. Moderation is the center of his theory of virtue. According to this principle, all the moral virtues are intermediates and excess, and defects in the actions and emotions cause moral vices. This theory could be the best way to pass excess and deficiencies in Iran's political sphere.

Iran's daughter and mother Iran: Googoosh and diasporic nostalgia for the Pahlavi modern

AbstractThis article examines Googoosh, the reigning diva of Persian popular music, through an evaluation of diasporic Iranian discourse and artistic productions linking the vocalist to a feminized nation, its ‘victimisation’ in the revolution, and an attendant ‘nostalgia for the modern’ (Özyürek 2006) of pre-revolutionary Iran. Following analyses of diasporic media that project national drama and desire onto her persona, I then demonstrate how, since her departure from Iran in 2000, Googoosh has embraced her national metaphorization and produced new works that build on historical tropes linking nation, the erotic, and motherhood while capitalising on the nostalgia that surrounds her.

Non-understanding and Minority Formation in Iran

ABSTRACTTaking negative hermeneutics as an analytical frame, this article focuses on the way religious minorities are created in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Referring to the Qur’an, Khomeini’s utterances and the constitution, religious scholars and political scientists demonstrate their lack of understanding or purposeful misunderstanding of the quest for dignity made by members of those minorities. Instead, the authors under review refer to the status of the “protected minorities” as defined by Islam and allude to their obligations with regard to the Muslim majority. The official discourse in Iran depends on political imperatives and quite easily adapts to changing political contexts. Consequently, the Baha'i Faith can be treated as an organisation created by imperialists in order to destroy Islam, the Muslim world and Iran respectively. And at the same time, Baha’is can be considered apostates who want to destroy Shiite Islam from within in analogy to Zionism that is accused of destroying Judaism. In addition, conspiracy theories are quite helpful when it comes to misunderstanding and incomprehension.

Consumer Culture and the Design of a Modern Self in Iran: The Cultivation of Mind and Body in Iranian Lifestyle Magazines

This paper examines two distinct forms of how a modern Iranian self is crafted in relation to and in negotiation with Western modernity. Consumption as a way of forming and expressing identities is a strongly contested practice in Iran, where identity politics have changed drastically after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. An examination of the visual and discursive material from two contemporary Iranian lifestyle magazines shows that practices such as managing and disciplining the self and the constant improvement of one's personality and body are an important part of the public discourse in Iran. They are reflected in the journals by endorsing different products, tastes, and choices of lifestyle. Analysing the magazines’ strategies to address different income groups brings to light distinct ways in which practices of modern self-management are embedded in an Islamic framework. As will be demonstrated, the journal targeting high income-level groups frames the successful self almost exclusively in relation to the outward appearance while the more middle class-oriented magazine instead engages in discourses based on religious or moral values. Refuting perspectives focused on religious or cultural identity exclusively, the paper points to the socioeconomic background as an influential factor in the process of conceptualising images of a modern Iranian self.