The Defence of National Identity as a Revolutionary Concept: Gharbzadegī, Islamic Modernisation, and Anticolonialism

The framework of Iranian national identity has been the cornerstone of the discourse of different social groups that aimed to establish their hegemony over the ‘imagined community’ of Iranians. The difficulty in determining the territorial delimitation of identity, as well as the process of creation-assimilation of a unitarian paradigm of identity characterised, and still characterises, Iranian politics. Therefore, the interdependence between domestic and foreign affairs and national identity can be explained under the lens of the struggle of hegemony of dominant powers and, specifically, through the theoretical framework of specific traditional or organic social groups that developed their political discourse around the different shades of Iranian ‘nationalism’.