Bibliography: #SP5JIL7Z

key	SP5JIL7Z
title	Religious Contentions in Modern Iran, 1881-1941
author	Yazdani, Mina
authority control	Mina Yazdani
item type	Thesis
publication year	2011
date	2011
abstract note	It has been suggested that in mid-twentieth century Iran, anti-Baha’ism played a seminal role in transforming Iranian Shi'i religious piety into the political ideology known as Islamism. This dissertation charts this transformation by offering a historical genealogy of the politicization of anti-Baha’ism. Using the post-colonial theory of Othering as a theoretical framework, and discourse analysis and microhistory as methodologies, it interrogates a wide range of hitherto neglected primary sources to analyze how Baha’is were gradually branded the nation’s internal Other. It tests the thesis it was mainly through the Othering of Baha’is that of the two national identities that struggled for supremacy in the decades that immediately followed the Constitutional Revolution, the pendulum swung towards a religious national identity and away from an ethnic-language based national identity (which had been officially dominant in the 1920s and 30s) as the nation approached the midpoint of the twentieth century. The process of Othering the Baha’is had at least three components; 1) religious, carried on by the traditionalist theologians; 2) institutional and formal, sanctioned by the state; and 3) political, the result of a joint and gradual process in which Azalis, former Baha’is and reformist theologians all played a role. This process reached its culmination with the widespread publication of The Confessions of Dolgoruki which resulted in a fundamental paradigm shift in the anti-Baha’i discourse. With the widespread impression of Baha’is as spies of foreign powers, what up to that point constituted a sporadic theme in some anti-Baha’i polemics now became the dominant narrative of them all, including those authored by traditionalist clerics. Consequently, as Iran entered the 1940s, the process that would transform Islamic piety to political ideology was well under way.
number pages	viii, 337
publisher	University of Toronto
place	Toronto
language	English
manual tags	IRAN; PERSECUTION; POLITICS; OTHERING; 1881-1941

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