Search

Muḥammad Karīm Khān Kirmānī (d. 1871) wrote Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah (Naṣīrean Epilogue), a concise treatise of a few pages, in 1865 (eighteenth of Rajab of 1273 hijri); thirteen years after the emergence of the Bābī movement and seven years after the execution of Sayyid ʿAlī Muḥammad Shīrāzī (d. 1850) in Tabriz. In this treatise, he expresses his loyalty to both the fourth Qajar monarch, Nāṣir al‐Dīn Shah (d. 1896) and Twelver Shīʿīsm. Furthermore, he expounds on the political inclination of Kirmānī Shaykhīsm as well as the suspicious affiliation of his school with the Bābīs, which was a matter of speculation for the court. Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah, which took its name from the Shah, should be treated as Kirmānī's political manifesto, reflecting his uncomfortable attitude toward the presence of foreigners in a Muslim country, which was resented by the monarch as well. Kirmānī not only takes sides with him, but also warns him of the harm of becoming too close to infidels, which may even result in the dominance of kuffār on Muslim territories. Kirmānī's outlook toward politics was largely shaped by the Bābī movement. As no hint of having any political philosophy is traceable in his writings prior to 1260 H/1852, and since Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah was written shortly after the suppression of the movement, one can come to the conclusion that the socio‐religious anxiety and the radical tone of Bābīsm made him adopt such a conservative approach, which seemed to be the only tenable way of representing his patriotism. Moreover, Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah, should be treated as the official response of the Shaykhī school to the messianic radicalism of Shīrāzī and his followers. Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah has a sister text, Nāṣirīyyah dar jihād (Naṣīrean in Jihād), which was finished in the same year, although it is lengthier and discusses Jihād, inter alia, in a more nuanced way. In some copies, Nāṣirīyyah is published with Khātamah as its epilogue. In this paper, I will read and analyze both Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah and Nāṣirīyyah dar jihād to investigate Kirmānī's stance on politics, religion and nationalism. Relevant to this are his arguments against any probable affiliation with Bābīsm. As a product of its time, Khātamayah nāṣirīyyah reflects the concerns of a jurist‐theologian who was able to foresee how the religious messianism and social radicalism of Bābīsm and similar movements, can bring considerable changes to state, society and faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the internationalization of survey methodology by discussing a case from a totalitarian state, the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2020, GAMAAN (The Group for Measuring and Analyzing Attitudes in Iran) conducted an online survey on religion. The survey had 50,000 participants, around 90 percent of whom lived in Iran. This article discusses the result that, after weighting, 8 percent identified as Zoroastrian—many times the number of Zoroastrians as recorded by scholarship on Iranian Zoroastrianism. We dub this phenomenon "Survey Zoroastrianism" and offer an explanation for this finding. After describing the position of Zoroastrianism in modern Iran and adding two further online surveys conducted by GAMAAN in 2022, we discuss the Survey Zoroastrians' demographics and their religious and political views. The analysis shows that participating in surveys beyond the government's control provided affordances for performing alternative identity aspirations tied to notions of nationalism and civilizational heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike many other Shiite political factions in Iraq, the Sadrist movement has become increasingly vocal in its criticism of Iranian influence in Iraq. Anti‐Iran chants have become almost ubiquitous in Sadrist demonstrations over the past few years, and prominent Sadrist politicians have unabashedly pointed the finger of blame for Iraq's crises at Iran. The growing Sadrist criticism of Iran has simultaneously come with the gradual ascendance of nationalist narratives in the religious movement. This article aims to study these narratives and their correlation with Iran. It argues that the Sadrist version of Iraqi nationalism encompasses three components that aim to differentiate Iraqi Arab Shiite identity from Iran. It also studies how Sadrist nationalism contributed to the rise of the Iran‐bashing trend among Iraqi Shiites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of the Islamic Republic of Iran's 1st‐ to 12th‐grade textbooks. This paper examines issues of language, race, ethnicity and religious nationalism in textbooks to cast light on how the state in Iran has striven to Perso‐Shi'ify the polity through its education system. The official textbooks depict the sovereign community (Persians) as the sole agent of history. The state considers alternative (unofficial) narratives treasonous. This is an in‐depth study of how Iran's state‐sanctioned textbooks, their situatedness and the contextual knowledge gained from them offer revealing points of interpretation, illuminating the foundation of the existing structural ethnolinguistic dividing lines, and shows that Islamism, as the governing bounded logic implanted in textbooks, lends solidity to racial theories and historiographies. This study sporadically discusses the views and experiences of a number of Kurdish schoolteachers with whom we could conduct in‐depth interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a cyber‐ethnographic method, this paper investigates how Kurdish women in Kurdistan‐Iran (i.e. Rojhelat/East Kurdistan or Iranian Kurdistan) represent and reconstruct their ethno‐national identity on social media. The research studied Instagram as the most popular social media platform among Rojhelat and Iranian women wherein different groups can now play an active role in the reproduction of their narratives, as well as in the representation of their own media content. The research discussed: 1) the dominant patterns related to the representation of the virtual identity of Kurdish women in Iran; 2) the strategies and techniques used in these patterns for the representation and reconstruction of ethno‐national identity; 3) the personal preferences or environmental variables influencing the different identity types of Rojhelat Kurdish women on Instagram; and 4) the factors that lead to the continuity of media practices with respect to the representation of these women's virtual identity in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]