By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
In part one, of this
major report about Iran we mentioned the so called 'Constitutional Revolution'.
Ervand Abrahamian (1979) has provided an excellent picture
of linguistic diversity during the Constitutional Revolution:
The geographical
barriers were compounded often by linguistic differences. Persians, Bakhtiyaris, Qashqayis. Arabs,
and Lurs lived in the Central Plateau. Small groups of Baluchis, Afshars, and Arabs were scattered in the southern deserts.
Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Afshars, and Mamesenis
inhabited the western mountains. Azeris, Shahsavans,
Kurds, together with scattered settlements of Armanians
and Assyrians, lived in the northeastem districts.
Gilakis, Taleshis, and Mazandaranis populated the
Caspian provinces. Finally, Persians, Turkomans, Kurds, Shahsavans,
Afshars, Timurs. Balushis, Tajiks, and Jamshids
resided in the non-Eastern regions. Iran, thus, was a land of linguistic
diversity. (1979, p. 389)
As expected, a
Fars-centered ethnic nationalism failed to include in a democratic manner the
non-Persian groups and nationalities within an emancipatory discourse. In spite
of this, the non-Persian ethnic groups and their representatives in the
parliament managed to insert in the constitutional text a very important
article regarding the formation of "Anjomanha-ye
Ayalati va Velayati"
(the local and provincial councils). Although such councils were not permitted
to take form, this clause served to affirm that non-Persian ethnic groups were
fully aware of their ethnic and national identity and the rights to which their
distinct identities entitled them vis-a-vis the dominant Persian group.
Peoples of various
ethnic origins, such as the ancestors of contemporary Azeris, Kurds, Baluchs, Turkomans, Arabs, Gilaks,
and others have lived in Iran for centuries. These diverse ethnic groups have
always constituted the numerical majority in Iran, from ancient times up to
present. However, the continuation of the Pahlavi regime's monolingual and
monocultural agenda for Iran has brought the country to the brink of ethnic
discontent and nationalistic tensions since 1925.
As we have seen,
after the fall of Pahlavis, the Islamic Republic has
continued to emphasize the importance of Shia Islam and the Persian language as
the two tenets of Iranians ' national identity. However, the conventionally
dominant view of a national identity based on the Persian language and Shia
Islam is increasingly wearlng thin, particularly in
the face of growing demands for the recognition of various ethnic. National,
cultural, linguistic, and religious rights and freedoms. The current Islamic
Republic's response to the growing challenge of diversity has been dismally
inadequate. Moreover. the fall of the Soviet Union has culminated in the
creation of a number of important nation-states such as Azerbaijan and
Turkmenistan in which the Azeri and Turkmeni
languages have become official and national languages. The ruling elite in Iran
has been using polemics such as the inadequacy of non-Persian languages to
become languages of instruction, correspondence, etc. How can they explain this
lame excuse now that these languages are the languages of instruction,
learning, and teaching in neighboring countries?
There has never been
a census in Iran based on language or ethnicity regarding the country's
population composition. All the available figures and numbers alluding to the
linguistic breakdown of Iranian society are based on secondary sources and
unsubstantiated estimates. The latest national census conducted in 1996 showed
Iran' s total population to be 60,055,488, of which 50.81 per cent were men and
49.19 percent women. According to this census. about 61 percent or 37 million
of the population resided in urban areas and 39 percent or 23 million in rural
areas, with a small percentage living as nomadic tribes. Of the total
population, 39.56 percent were below the age of 15; 56.12 percent were in the
15-64 age group and 4.32 percent in the 65 and above age group. Life expectancy
was 69 for women and 66 for men. Not surprisingly, the census indicated nothing
about the diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds of Iran's peoples.
Among the various
ethnic groups inhabiting Iran. there are no visible physical markers such as
the skin color distinguishing different groups and individuals from one
another. The diverse population iso however. distinguishable from one another
through easily identifiable cultural characteristics such as language, religion,
ethnic affiliation, and to some extent, geographical location.
The reformist
president Mohammad Khatami, took notions of Aryan race' and 'true owner of
Iran' to new heights in recent years.
And politics of
using the race card and belonging to the same 'Aryan race' slogan became major
issues that Ardashir Mehrdad (2001) explored in an
interview with Mostafa Hejri, a Kurdish activist and
a former First Secretary to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran.
A. Mehrdad: Since
Khatami was elected as president there has been a shift in the official
propaganda towards the Iranian nationalities. A discourse has emerged with
clear racist nationalism at its core. It claims that Kurds are Aryans and of
the same racial characteristics as the Fars. Not only does this viewpoint deny
Kurdish claims for national distinction, but also it aims to put a barrier
between them and other nations and thus weakens the national solidarity within
Iran. What do you think? Indeed what are your views of the racial viewpoints on
the national question?
M. Hejri: Given the discriminatory and racist politics of the
Islamic Republic, it is no wonder that the Islamic government is playing the
race card to seduce different nationalities away from pursuing their legitimate
social, cultural, and national demands. President Khatami of Iran attempted to
present a nationalistic image of himself among the Iranians. Like other sorts
of Iranian nationalism, his nationalism is also deeply rooted in Aryanism, the
Aryan-Persian ownership of the country, and eventually the supremacy of one
Aryan ethnic group over others. Ethnicities like Kurdish, Baluchi, Luri, Gilaki and Mazandarani are looked at by the dominant
group as speakers of Iranic languages. And from this
linguistic definition the dominant group extrapolates a racial understanding in
the sense that. if all these groups belong to the same language family, then
they must be related racially as well. And from this categorization they
propagate the absurd notion that as speakers of an Iranic
language, these diverse ethnic/national groups are and ought to be the true
owners of Iran. This line of argument may appeal to the ultra
nationalist element amongst these otherwise marginalized communities.
The majorities of people, however, do not buy into this absurdity and continue
to struggle for their cultural and national rights. This is a fact to which the
continuously fierce and bloody struggle of Kurdish community attests. The
people of Kurdistan have sacrificed, and suffered, hugely. We have given tens of
thousands of lives in these two decades. We have lost such personalities as Dr Ghasemlu and Dr Sharafkandi and
many Kurdish militants. We know that approximately 5,000 pishmargehs
from the KDP-I alone have been martyred. Hundreds of Kurdish freedom seekers
are in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. If the Islamic Republic believed in
the right of the Kurdish people there would have been no need for so much
bloodshed and imprisonments. It is totally erroneous to believe that these
achievements, and the democratic process, which have been obtained through the
blood of committed people, is a present by this regime. The Islamic Republic is
too weak to be able to give freedom to the people of Iran. I have no doubt that
the people of Iran will get their freedom through their own efforts. There are
many cultural associations. Books are now being translated into Kurdish and
there are now writers who write in Kurdish. They are forever being arrested and
tortured but they go on writing. (2001, pp. 3-4)
Amongst Iran' s
various nationalities, perhaps the Kurdish nationality has been the most
persistent and determined in its struggle for national, social, cultural, and
political rights. Yet, by all accounts the Kurds are speakers of a language
belonging to the Indo European linguistic family. If there were any truth to
the claim of the dominant group that Iran belonged to the Aryan race.' then the
language and nationality of the Kurds would have been accorded similar status
as those of the Persians. However, the Kurds have been subjected to acts of
assimilation, genocide, and cultural annihilation similar to the other
nationalities-if not more so.
The forced
Aryanization of various ethnic groups in the country has come to find its
expression in the humiliation and marginalization of Iran's non-Persian
peoples. Non Indo-European speaking nationalities and ethnic groups in Iran
have been constantly attacked in the Persian literature for being subhuman
savages, donkeys, bare-footed lizard eaters, and so forth. Echoing the goveming apparatuses. the majority of Farsi intellectuals
along with the Farzi intelligentsia have advocated
the notion that the Aryan race is the superior race in Iran and has therefore
the exclusive right to role over all other
nationalities and ethnic groups.
In January 1999, also
more than 65 Azeri parliamentarians, writers and poets wrote an open letter to
President Khatami of Iran. demanding that, among other things, the use
of Azeri language in media as well as its teaching in schools and
universities be permitted.
“All segments of our
people's social life has been cut off from their mother tongue. Our radios, Our
televisions, our press. Our wedding cards and obituaries, even our tombstones
are talking in a language other than our mother tongue. It is a bitter fact
that Iran is the only country in the world where the language of millions of
people are absolutely discarded. (Qurtulush,1999, p.56)
In spite of hundreds
more of these requests and demands, there has not been a single positive step
taken on the part of government today, to address any of these legitimate
concerns. The demands made by the marginalized communities illustrate the high
importance that non-Persian groups attach to the use of their language in
schools, universities, press, media, government and elsewhere.
In August 2004, a
collective letter signed by over 100 Turkic speaking students of the city of Maragheh was sent to the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lran's current supreme, spiritual leader. Today (April 2,
2006) they still are not allowed to read and write in their mother tongue. The
future looks even bleaker as far as their right to education in their language
is concerned.
Even this year (2006)
collective letters were written and signed by hundreds of students from such non-Farsi
speaking areas as Tabriz, Orumiyeh, Zanjan, Hamadan, and even the capital- Tehran.
While the dominant
order in Iran seek to colonize the identities, languages, cultures and
histories of marginalized non-Aryan communities, these communities have started
to resist acts of colonization and assimilation.
In conjunction with
the writing of their indigenous/local histories today, this creative act of
decolonization takes place not just by way writing of the history today, but
also through the establishment of festivals, meetings, and rituals whose aim is
to validate various historical events, heroes and figures that have often been
appropriated by the dominant group. A standard example of this took place late
summer 2005, when many Azerbejanis intended to attend
a celebration in Babek Qalasi.
President Ahmadinejad, in turn send the Basiji militia, plain-clothes secret
service agents plus 40.000 of his Revolutionary Guard. They set up checkpoints
where they confiscated the drivers' registration and car ownership documents of
those Azeris who wanted to drive to the city. Furthermore they rented, before hand hotel rooms, hostels. and rental spaces where
visitors were going to stay and they marked the open areas around the city
center as spaces reserved for military exercises. They pitched large khaki
tents in every available nook and cranny. Furthermore Ahmadinejad's current Governement dispatched groups of religious fanatics all
dressed in black to mourn the death over 13 centuries ago of Hazrat-e Fatemeh, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad.
From intimidation to
psychological warfare to open arrest and detention, the 40.000 members of the
Revolutionary Guard next would stop any pilgrims that made it into the city
walls by walking there, all to prevent Azeris from participating in their
festival. The dominant Fars-centric media and press furthermore censored any
reporting about what took place, and of which we know because since this was
the time when we started our investigation for this project, one of our two
field researchers responsible for bringing this material together, was in
the town at the time.
The dominant media,
in Iran and particularly its extension abroad on the other hand is run by
pseudo-intellectuals who dismiss the legitimate demands of non-Aryan or at
least non-Persian communities as backward, traitorous, and reactionary demands.
They brand the democratic struggle of these communities to restore their human
rights as inspired by (outside) imperialist powers.
Meanwhile the Azeris,
a distinct ethnic group numbering over 30 million, still have not a single
school where they can read and write in their own language. They
cannot contribute to works of history, literature, anthropology,
sociology, self-expression, and self-identification.
Iranian racism openly
identifies Iran as the land of these so-called Aryans who are in turn
identified with the dominant Persian group, its language, culture, and
identity. Through this racist process. Farsi -becomes the national language and
the Persian culture gets identified as the national culture of an lranians; just as Iran' s history gets appropriated to the
advantage of this so-called 'Aryan' race by excluding, distorting, and erasing
the histories, stories. and narratives of other ethnic groups. This exclusion
takes place in government-sponsored research projects schoolbooks, university
texts, curriculum, allocation of funding, etc.
So in conclusion of this researchwe
can say that:
1) Drawing on formerly
Nazi racist views, the dominant discourse in Iran equates language with race
and tries to fabricate Indo-European language ties for non-Farsi speaking
peoples such as the Azeris in an attempt to show that over a thousand years ago
they spoke an Indo-European language and are therefore Aryan. This kind of
racist reconstruction of prehistoric (imaginary) languages is based on a
fabricated history of origins, arrivals. etc., giving rise to the absurd idea
about who has come earlier than whom. who has come first, who has come second,
who has come last, whose language was spoken earlier than the others; and who,
as a result, should have mastery over others. These kinds of non-sensical
absurdities serve to create unnecessary competitions among various ethnic/national
groups which lead to animosity, mistrust and lack of cooperation among them.
while leaving them vulnerable to be colonized and oppressed by the dominant
Persian group.
2) Using an
anachronistic method of analysis, the hegemonic discourse in Iran offers purely
racist and racialized interpretations of history, historical events, and
classical texts. It interprets these ancient texts in accordance with racist
theories and notions which were not in existence at the time these texts were
written. The anachronistic reading of these texts becomes central to the
maintenance of racist order in Iran in that such a reading legitimates the
ownership of the country by a single race, just as it privileges a single
language, history, culture, and identity. Anachronism gives a historical
justification for contemporary oppressions, exclusions, and annihilations in
Iran.
3) The dominant group
plays the race card to create hostilities among marginalized communities. Thus
Iranian racist order uses the coercive force of governing to marginalize,
criminalize those who advocate the cause of minoritized communities, labeling
them as traitors, secessionists, agents of foreign powers and so on. In so
doing so it refuses, justice and fairness.
4) Given the recent
treat by the current President of Iran to use atomic weapons, it did not come
as a surprise when one of our two field researchers currently still near the
border of Iran this week, reported about American funded activities in the area
and was able to find out the same is happening now in four different border
areas of Iran. Thus we decided to publish what we have, and move our fieldresearcher out.
It took years to
realize that Hitler and Stalin meant what they said. A huge leap of the
imagination is now required to take the measure of Ahmadinejad.
The son of a blacksmith, he grew up in the provinces, and owes his career
exclusively to the Islamic Revolution and membership in the Revolutionary
Guards, the paramilitary body responsible for the regime’s security, the
equivalent of the KGB or the SS. Personally he seems honest, a rare quality in
Iran where corruption rules, among the clerics especially. At any rate, the
ayatollahs parachuted him into the presidency to do their bidding, rather as
Boris Yeltsin once promoted the then unknown Vladimir Putin. The analogy is not
quite exact, since in Iran power is in the hands of the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the president has the subsidiary role of ensuring
the governing doctrine that "any action that weakens the sacred Islamic
Republic is not permissible."
To someone of such limited background and experience, the outside world is an
unknown quantity. Ahmadinejad’s religious beliefs are no doubt as sincere as
they are narrow, and they prompt regular pronouncements in a messianic style:
"The wave of the Islamic Revolution will soon reach the entire
world." Or again, "Our revolution’s main mission is to pave the way
for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi." In the middle of the
10th century, this imam went into hiding, supposedly in a well in Jamkaran,
south of Teheran, but it is an article of Shi’ite faith that he will return and
herald the End of Days.
Ahmadinejad and his
cabinet signed a petition to the hidden imam, proceeded to Jamkaran, and threw
it down the well for his attention. Similarly unself-conscious, he claimed that
while speaking at the United Nations "I became surrounded by a green
light," so that for 27 to 28 minutes all the attentive listeners did not
blink - the chronological exactitude is a touch a thriller writer might envy.
And he closed that speech by urging God to "hasten the emergence of Your
last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one
who will fill the world with justice and peace."
Nobody projected the
accompanying sense of impotence and humiliation more eloquently than Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani, a Shi’ite from Persia now Iran. Muslims in his view were
backward, but the blame for this lay with other people, and not themselves.
Europeans had stolen a march on Islam unfairly. He wrote, "It is science
that everywhere manifests its greatness and power. Ignorance had no alternative
to prostrating itself humbly before science." For him, science was not the
_expression of a civilisation, but something Muslims
had only to copy as a means to recovering the supremacy that is theirs by
right. The reigns of the two Pahlavi Shahs of Iran in the 20th century duly
paid attention to science, but not to Islam. The Islamic Revolution now aims to
reconcile the two elements. Ahmadinejad’s boast about the "young
scientists" doing nuclear enrichment corresponds to the spirit of Afghani.
The United States
alone appears to cast a shadow over the Shi’ite future, and so in the rhetoric
imposed by the need for honour and supremacy, it is
depicted as "arrogant" and the "oppressor." In strict
defiance of reality, Ahmadinejad asserts, "Our enemies should know that
they are unable to even slightly hurt our nation and they cannot create the
tiniest obstacle on its glorious and progressive way." A Revolutionary
Guards commander spells it out: "America should accept Iran as a great
regional power and they should know that sanctions and military threats are not
going to benefit them."
The Iranian regime
makes sure that nobody challenges it. The Interior Minister, Mustafa
Pour-Mohammadi, is responsible for the summary execution of thousands of
political prisoners. Hojjat Zamani was executed on
February 6 in Gohar Dasht Prison in the city of
Karaj, near Teheran, and Valiollah Feyz Mahdavi is slated to be executed there in May. The
charge against both of them was "enmity with God." Another who
received the death sentence is Ateqeh Rajabi, a 16-year-old orphan who went to work as a waitress
to feed her siblings. Her efforts were called "acts incompatible with
chastity." A crackdown on universities is under way, involving purges of
staff and students. In absolute control of the media, the regime uses
sophisticated equipment to censor bloggers, arresting them by the score.
A History of Iran: The Iran Documents P.1
The Iran Documents P.2: The Impact of Nazi Germany
The
Iran Documents P.3: Aryanisation 1950-2005
List
of consulted literature and references
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