Iranian Diaspora and Political Identity with Keanu Heydari

What defines Iranian identity, both within Iran and across its global diaspora? In this thought-provoking conversation with historian Keanu Heydari, we peel back layers of complexity surrounding one of the world's most politically fragmented diasporic communities.

Heydari, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan specializing in Iranian student activism in post-war France, offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective that avoids both regime apologetics and demonization. The Iranian diaspora, he explains, represents a fascinating anomaly – unlike other immigrant communities that typically organize around cultural markers, Iranians abroad primarily define themselves through political discourse coalitions. From hardline supporters of the Islamic Republic to advocates of monarchy restoration, these political positions often prevent meaningful dialogue between community members.

We trace the historical trajectory of modern Iran through pivotal moments like the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Mohammad Mossadegh and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, exploring how these events triggered waves of migration and shaped distinct political consciousnesses. Particularly fascinating is Heydari's analysis of how Iranian nationalism occupies a liminal space between European nationalism and anti-colonial struggles, making it simultaneously attractive and repellent to Western leftists.

The conversation ventures into provocative territory when discussing Michel Foucault's misunderstood writings on the Iranian Revolution. Rather than dismissing Foucault as naively romanticizing a repressive regime, Heydari connects Foucault's interest in "Islamic political spirituality" to his broader intellectual project concerning self-transformation and political practice.

Whether you're interested in diaspora politics, Middle Eastern history, or the complex interplay between religion and leftist thought, this conversation challenges simplistic narratives and offers fresh perspectives on Iran's place in global politics. Share your thoughts about this episode and let us know which aspects of Iranian diaspora identity you'd like us to explore further.

Here are the two articles discussed: 

Threads of Belonging, Echoes of Exile

Iran, Israel, & the Logic of Escalation

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:36 Introduction to Iranian Diaspora Scholar
• 5:08 Historical Context of Iranian Politics
• 15:09 Iranian Diaspora Identity in France
• 20:08 Relationship Between Diaspora and Homeland
• 28:11 Political Divisions Within Iranian Communities
• 36:25 Race, Identity and Integration Challenges
• 48:23 Religious Politics and Foucault's Perspectives
• 1:00:36 Reflections on Iranian Political Spirituality

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:49

Hello and welcome to the VAR blog. Today I'm with Kianu Haidari, a history candidate at a history PhD candidate. Excuse me, that doesn't make any sense. You can't just be a history candidate at the University of Michigan, whose primary areas of research are the Iranian diaspora and its intersection with European history, and I think specifically you focus on France correct.

Speaker 2: 1:12

That's correct. Yes, I focus on Iranian student activism in post-war France.

Speaker 1: 1:18

All right, and you have some interest in. You know the intellectual history and critical theory, and obviously I have interest in both. I moonlight as a amateur critical theorist, which is to say that I'm a critical theorist because I just do critical theory but I don't have training in it, or I do, actually, but it's a philosophy background and and I have given papers at intellectual history conferences, but I have no training in that field. So so, which is which it's funny, I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Speaker 1: 1:58

I one time said, uh, as a person who's trained in anthropology and in literary studies, and I was asked yeah, how do you find working in a intellectual history paradigm like it isn't, which did not make me particularly popular, um, uh, but uh, to get into your work, um, I became aware of your work through uh, both twitter and um, then particularly uh, through the new international, where I guess I'm a contributing, although I've only contributed part of an article, but you have written two for them and they're both on the subject of Iran, and this subject has come up a lot in my channel before. I've had various other specialists, but I will tell you I've had some Iranian leftists have me remove their show from my archive when they go back to visit their family, you know, and then put it back up later. And I find that strange when you know, when I have, you know, regular like Twitter, marxist-leninist, telling me how I should like give full-throated support to the Iranian regime as a key point of the axis of resistance. And what I found about your writings is you problematize this relationship without you know, I mean for obvious reasons, without becoming particularly anti-Iranian, but without softening or doing apologia for the regime. So I, just before we get into these two articles and the specific problems I bring up, I, you know, um, why did you get interested in the iranian diaspora's influence in france and and the less kind of strange, quixotic relationship to that?

Speaker 2: 3:55

of strange quixotic relationship to that. That's an excellent question, believe it or not. I began my PhD career after taking a gap year when I finished university. When I was in college I was focusing on 19th century French secularism, so the development of laicite French secularism, so the development of laicite, its institutionalization in the Third Republic, all that kind of stuff. In fact, I got very keyed into something called the Jesuit conspiracy or the anti-Jesuit myth. Jeffrey Cubitt has an excellent book on this with the same name. Basically, in a culture today where we have endless amounts of right-wing conspiratorial thinking, qubit's book helped us see that there was a time in late 19th century France when there was a preponderance of left-wing conspiratorial thinking, and some of that left-wing conspiratorial thinking was focused on anti-Jesuit sentiment and framing the Jesuits as a primary problem to be dealt with in French society.

Speaker 2: 5:00

Long story short, that project didn't pan out because, as you note, I mentioned the book that I wanted to write has already been written about this topic. So I sort of pivoted to uh in in about my second or third year of graduate school, pivoted to a discussion of something that was closer to home for me. Um, I'm fluent in Persian and so I figured, why don't I just apply my linguistic skills to, uh, the country I've already been studying, france, um, and just look at a later time period, um, so it was a very pragmatic decision. To be quite honest, what linguistic resources did I have at my disposal? And could I say anything interesting about the Cold War milieu of students who are not exactly political exiles at least not at this point but who experience their time abroad, in France as a kind of exile? And I essentially argue that in the late 1940s, early 1950s, marxist Iranian students were helping to create a very generative intellectual political culture that then in the early 1960s gets consolidated under pro-Iranian monarchy kind of international relations projects. This gets kind of disrupted in 1958, when the main organizing body of Iranian students in France, the Union of Iranian Students, gets kind of kicked in the butt, restarted. And from 1958 forward everything you know about the craziness of the 1960s of Iranian students climbing the Statue of Liberty to protest the Shah and to protest global Western imperialism, all of that story that we're familiar with becomes more relevant. But the early chapters of my research focus on the pre-1960s context for the development of this kind of activism.

Speaker 2: 7:10

To address your question specifically about the fear that a lot of Iranian academics who are situated on the left feel about censorship and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 7:25

I think it behooves me and for my own you know safety, to say that I do not identify with Twitter, twitter, firebrand, marxist Leninism. I don't think I don't think it makes very much sense to speak from a position of such privilege of, of you know, being able to say let's screw all practical considerations, let's have full-throated consent and critical support for a regime that year after year, comes up short with regard to human rights indexes, to economic development, to many, many, many other things and problems which we could go into. But I frame all of my critique from the perspective of dispassionate academic inquiry and even that I say that I recognize that this presents substantial risks to my health and safety. There are tons of academics who study precisely what I study, namely Iranians and the relationship between Iran and France and between Iran and Europe, all this kind of stuff who have been arrested while doing field research in Iran. So yeah, not a good situation.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Yeah, definitely not. I mean, it seems to me that Iran is a particular chimera for a lot of leftists in that it is a legitimately anti-imperial state that is also not left-wing not left wing, and it does have some elements of a social safety net, you know, and yet it is hard to support. Now I will say this personally, I've never been a fan of the sanctions on Iran. I mean, particularly when we don't sanction, like most of the Gulf states for doing similar things. I have always really advocated for de-escalation with the current Iranian regime. As far as like the way, the way the United States postures towards it, I would definitely support, like the nuclear you know, the nuclear deal that Obama put up. It's one of the only good things I actually liked about the Obama administration.

Speaker 1: 9:59

All that said, I've never been able to continent presenting Iran as a regime I would support because of its stances on Palestine, particularly because I know that you know the axis of resistance and Iran's influence on the Palestinian occupation.

Speaker 1: 10:23

It's actually not always as appreciated within Gaza and the West Bank themselves as it is internationally and you know, about a year ago there were some Palestinian scholars and activists who made that a little bit more clear and to the surprise of a lot of people in the United States States who wanted a much more simple view of that relationship. Now, you've written about that. But I think we do have to kind of get into Iranian identity and Iranian diaspora identity, because I don't think those two things are as sugeniously obvious and I think your work makes that very clear that it's not actually extremely obvious and it's not easy to break down. It's just oh, I am a supporter of the Islamic State or I am a supporter of the Shah or the prior liberal reforms or whatever that both Iranian identity within Iran and Iranian identity outside of Iran are much more complicated than that. So you know how would you like to present that scholarship? And maybe we will start with where you're a specialist, which is France, and then maybe go to the United States.

Speaker 2: 11:43

Sure, definitely interesting problems that a sociologist like Nader Vahabi, a very important name in the field of Iranians, iranian students, especially in France, is we're not exactly sure numerically how many there are. One of the most interesting features of Vahabi's work is in one of his articles in French he kind of asks the question what do Iranians in France, how do they see themselves? Numerically? Now, you find this across most demographics, apart from majority demographics. People tend to overstate the presence of their communities within any you know, given geography. But in the time the essay was written there were maybe 30,000 at most Iranians in France. Right, the figure could go between 20,000, 30,000. Some people have reported 100,000. We're not exactly sure. It really depends on your definitions and your sources. But that's the figure we're talking about, right, between 30, 40 at the low end, to about 100,000, the higher end. All that said, a brief understanding of the historical trajectory of Iran and its relationship to the West might be beneficial if your listeners would not, you know, have that context ready to hand. People normally tell the story about Iran coming into people call it international consciousness, but in reality it's just when did Iran start being relevant to white people? In reality, it's just when did Iran start being relevant to white people, which was established in the 1920s, first with the father, reza Shah, and then, after his forced abdication in the 40s, you have the ascent of his son, muhammad Reza, to the throne until the inflection point of 1953, at which point there was a coup that was orchestrated by the British government and the United States, along with other commercial political interests, to remove Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister, from power, mostly due to his intransigence related to the ownership and refinement and production of oil, particularly in the south of the country. The Anglo-Iranian oil company, owned by the British, wanted to make sure that oil would continue to flow smoothly. Mohammad Mossadegh, one of many in the cast of characters in the 20th century journey of decolonization and independence, all this kind of stuff he said no, we want to have autonomy over the oil Didn't end up well for him Kicked out from office. So from the period actually this is something that's not brought up very often From the period of the ascension of the sun, muhammad Reza, in the 40s, up until that point in 1953, there was actually a renaissance of press freedom, there was a renaissance of intellectual activity and foment and vitality, and we see the tremendous rise to popularity of Iran's Tudeh party or communist party, which formerly had ties with the Soviet Union, or Communist Party, which formerly had ties with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2: 15:41

There's an assassination attempt on the Shah's life in 49. If you want to know more about that, you can look at Irvand Abrahamian's book A History of Modern Iran or his more dense book Iran Between Two Revolutions. He goes into all these episodes in much more detail. When the coup happens in 53, the Shah clamps down on a lot of things. He clamps down on the Tudor party, on press freedoms, on journalism and a shitty situation with the CIA.

Speaker 2: 16:09

Orchestrated coup in 53 leads into essentially one one party authoritarian rule by the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In some other point earlier in the 70s, he instituted a one party state led by what he called the Rastakhis or Resurrection Party. It was a mandatory one-party political state and people forget to mention that in their narrations of this right. During this time you have people moving and for me as a migration historian, that's something that we tend to forget in the way we narrate our histories that people are moving everywhere all the time, for reasons good and bad. The movement of students is a very contentious aspect of the narration of why the Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself took place, and this is a great segue into talking about the distinctions between people in Iran and its diaspora.

Speaker 2: 17:18

To zoom out as much as possible, the easiest way to narrate the distinction between people in Iran and its diaspora is to look at the linchpin moments, the most important being the coup in 53 and then the revolution in 79. You have lots of people leaving and coming into the country around these inflection points Following 79, you have the Iran-Iraq war, which caused unprecedented devastation. I think it's still the longest land war in world history. I don't know if it has the record still history. I don't know if it has the record still.

Speaker 2: 17:56

All that to say that people moving out of the country for fear of their own safety, depending on the way the wind was blowing in the country and who seemed to be on the ascendancy Was it the leftist Tudor party members? Was it the bourgeois liberal technocrats? Was it the compradore bourgeoisie or was it, you know, people who can fall anywhere else on that spectrum? And the last thing I'll say is that I think the Iranian diaspora is probably one of the most politically divided in the world, especially at this moment. People identify themselves normally by their religious outlook, by the foods they eat, by their customs. In the case of the Iranian diaspora, you identify yourself by your discourse coalitions. You identify yourself as someone who has complete um unmitigated hatred for the current regime, as an illegitimate expression of Iranian popular sovereignty, or you have hardliners who support the regime with unqualified support. You have people who fall all over the spectrum in between those two poles, and these people do not talk to each other, generally speaking.

Speaker 1: 19:16

And and these people do not talk to each other, generally speaking. And why do you think today that the Iranian diaspora has such a kind of resonance amongst mostly white, uh, western leftists and and particularly? I mean? This was true in the 70s in france, but it's also, I mean, like foucault, famously being all over the place on the islamic revolution, etc. Etc. Um, but it's also true today, like you know, and I think today is a little bit more obvious as to why because of the situation with, with, with the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinian peoples in Gaza and the increased occupation of the West Bank. But it's not entirely clear to me why that is the case. So why do you think that is?

Speaker 2: 20:18

So the question is the resonance of the Iranian diaspora in primarily Western audiences, one of the things that the way I choose to narrate this kind of betrays my own political sensibility. The way I choose to narrate this kind of betrays my own political sensibilities so your listeners might catch glimpses of different historiographical traditions. I won't bore the lay person who's not interested in the specificities right, but suffice it to say that dissidents in the Soviet Union, when they fled the USSR and came to more quote-unquote friendly countries, they never lacked an audience. It's never been the case that a Soviet dissident went to a Western country and wasn't received with open arms to talk about how awful and terrible the Soviet Union was right. Talk about how awful and terrible the Soviet Union was right. Similar dynamics occur with the Iranian regime. Now, the way I narrated all of that, you might get the impression that I'm somehow undermining or delegitimizing the veracity of the claims of repression made by former Soviet dissidents. That's not my intention. Only to say that the way one positions oneself has consequences for the ways one is received in a host country as opposed to the home country. So in the same way that Soviet dissidents crafted a particular narrative understanding of daily life and the experiences of brutality and repression under the Soviet uh Republic. Uh, you have the Soviet Union, excuse me, you have the same, the same dynamics going on for uh exiles, escapees, refugees of the current Iranian regime.

Speaker 2: 22:12

The problem is that the ways that, especially since 79, up to 9-11 and from 9-11 forward, especially in places like Germany and France, the people who have their faces printed on books selling memoirs about their experiences um usually are profoundly islamophobic there. I have found in my own research that underneath the um contextually specific islamophobia that you find in these memoirs and testimonies, you find a very thinly veiled veneer of anti-Arab racism. You find a lot of you find this broadly distributed across the Iranian diaspora. To be quite honest with you, but especially on more conservative, but especially on more conservative, what I would articulate as more conservative sites of political activity in the Iranian diaspora you have people who lead remarkably secular lifestyles, who have been privileged by generational wealth, who are able to leave the exigencies of Iran and, for whatever reason, are forced to move to a different location, usually a European location, and the genre of exilic literature that they produce has become kind of a trope or a cliche in the academic analysis of this kind of exilic literature.

Speaker 2: 23:58

The controversial point for me is that the way Iran is framed in this literature is a barbaric, anti-human, almost like existentially evil, ontologically illegitimate state. Evil, ontologically illegitimate state, filled with religious hypocrites who want to abuse and oppress women, who want to erase and undermine the quote-unquote achievements of Iranian civilization. And the more right-wing you go, the more extreme you find the discourse of Aryan civilization. Find the discourse of Aryan civilization, why Iranians are actually white, why they're Aryans, and you can imagine very quickly how this leads into quite problematic domains of thinking. Oh yeah, and so the question of to what extent are Iranians actually white is something that comes up in almost Lacanian or libidinal ways. It surfaces to the eye almost as an expression of a symptom when we have that tension between expectation.

Speaker 2: 25:10

Suffice it to say that European racism tends to be more precise in its badness. People in the United States tend to have less familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of who counts as white in a broader, you know, postmodern sense of the plastic, uh, nature of whiteness, right, um, so it, depending on who I'm talking to. If I were in liberal bourgeois circles in paris, I would be a lovely example of a well-integrated white person who is Iranian in the United States. There that is largely unintelligible right and the reason? The reason why that is is that there is a discourse of civilization that is tightly indexed to race and racialization in Europe and a lot of these diasporic authors are contributing to the project of Western civilization as standing athwart the incursions of an irrational, barbarian Arab religious mentality. So that's the general impression that I get from the well-respected Iranian literature that's being produced in Europe. That doesn't mean that the government of Iran is not doing illegal, horrific Iranian regime's human rights abuses, while also participating in anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Yeah, absolutely. I mean Iran. It's fascinating to me and you bring up the American conception and I've always been big on pointing out that a lot of Americans do not not understand european racism because of the finer grain and civilizational, and also more internally conflicted due to prior nationalisms and ethnocentricisms, than the american generic whiteness. Uh, but even in the american generic rightness, legally speaking and a lot of you know, the Supreme Court decided at one point that Iranians were white. That's never carried over at all. You know, even at the time that it happened to any like white privilege being bestowed upon Iranians who were always seen as basically might as well be Arabs. I think technically also, arabs were considered white before the Portuguese were. But that again does not matter because legal categories and cultural categories have not had. You know, this was a legal distinction that had very little, you know, let's say like knowledge even by the average American, that it even happened. But I do, I do find that kind of tension fascinating because I've seen a lot of what you've seen. I knew a lot of people in the Iranian diaspora in Georgia. A lot of them were ethnically Baha'i and and they walked a pretty fine line on Islamophobia and Arab anti-racism and their more secular counterparts didn't even walk that line.

Speaker 1: 28:45

At the same time, I have been a little taken aback by people just denying what happened to the Tudeh party, not just during the period of the Shah, not just during the period of the Shah, but also during the period of the Islamic revolution, and are denying that you know, there have been like real oppressions in Iran, with things like the, the morality police, etc. Although I have been tempted to do the whataboutism to be like well, it's still not as bad as what happens in Saudi Arabia. But I realize that that's a logical fallacy and kind of an immoral argument, frankly. But when confronted with both anti-Persian and anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic, very Islamophobic narratives, particularly about I mean, I remember the, it must have been.

Speaker 1: 29:53

Maybe I can ask your personal experience, since maybe you don't want to get into it, maybe I can ask you your personal experience. Maybe you don't want to get into it, but like, if you seem like you are of age to have experienced the period where Americans realized that Sina, that Sunni and Shia were a thing right after the Iraq war, right, and the discourse about Sunni and Shia at that time was ludicrous, like ludicrously oversimple it was. It was floating around different sides. I mean, I remember sometimes on the left the Shia were seen as good, other times they were seen as barbarians, and it was a very like not even middle school textbook understanding of what was going on there when I was like, well, you know, there are multiple kinds of Shia, and even then I'm like there's 12 or, and it's mainly and like and like the Shia in Yemen aren't the Shia in Iran? And that's not the only thing at stake here. Like, no, we didn't even get to that.

Speaker 1: 30:48

Like, um, the, the right of the of the Iranian diaspora has been pretty well, uh, integrated into the European, you know, bourgeois circles, but it really can't be in the same way in the United States, even though it might be used for the same political reasons, you know. So you know that I weirdly, since so many Western leftists take their cues responding to what the Western right does, it probably does lead to, you know, inversions of Orientalisms or inversions of secularization that in some way are just as dehumanizing. Would you agree with that? Like?

Speaker 2: 31:47

with what you just said absolutely With regard to whether or not the same kind of dynamic that is occurring in Europe could actually occur in the United States. I think there's two ways one could look at that right.

Speaker 2: 31:59

The first is absolutely you're right, because it's a different context. Racism in the context of the United States, unless you belong to a very niche group of racists, has little to do with European civilizational supremacy. However, the reception and transmission of a certain idea of Persia is something that, with regard to Europe, goes to the 18th century, in a time when we're looking at the ways Europeans are conceptualizing the difference between the Ottoman experience of the Islamic world and, at the time, especially beginning in the 16th century, the Safavid or Persian experience of the Islamic world. A really great scholarship has been written about how, you know, diamond merchants visited from France, visited the Persian imperial court in the 18th century and literature was produced in France, like you know, the Persian letters, where the genre of a mirror for prints was used to covertly critique French society, not really interested in what's actually going on on the ground in the Persian Empire at that time. But we get into more complicated Iranian military conflicts with the Russian Empire in the 19th century. A lot of land was lost to the Russian Empire.

Speaker 2: 33:56

The way that the story of the Iranian revolution is really told is always already mediated through the context of the hostage crisis and any geopolitical situation that we find ourselves in today is hearkening back to the echoes and resonances of, I think, the national trauma, the national humiliation that the west, especially the united states, experienced the revolution in 79, as, um, and so the the image of these fanatical clerics has purchased in both Europe and in the United States. Uh, but it is helpful to alienate our frames of reference a little bit to say that, well, it seems that, you know, iranians are people and they live in a society, and so they would have similar problems as other people. And it turns out, yes, that's the case, um, there is religious fanaticism in iran, but there also is religious fanaticism in most other places. Right, and the way that right-wing Iranian sentiment plays out in the context of the United States might, to your point, be slightly more specific, because the Iranian diaspora tends to be concentrated in several places in the United States. One of them is Southern California, the other is Texas, virginia is another area, and then the East Coast, eastern Seaboard, generally speaking, especially DC.

Speaker 2: 35:49

You will find tons of right-wing, neo-monarchist Iranians, especially on the coasts, and they will frame discourse about Iran not so much through the rhetoric of civilization on the terms of Europe, but they will frame civilization on the terms of Europe, but they will frame civilization on the terms of the Iranian civilization. They will resort to ridiculous claims about the pedigree and the age of Iranian civilization and culture. They will resort to developing debunked racial hypotheses about the Aryan race and Aryan supremacy. So these phenomena do find a home in the United States, but you often find largely secularized Iranians who fit into these categories, who fit into what one sociologist calls the non-Islamocity of the Iranian diaspora. Right, you have that. But you also have either practicing or non-practicing Iranian Jews, who are, you know, very prevalent in Southern California and they tend to gravitate towards. In my general anecdotal experience, I have found that many people who in this community tend to identify with these more conservative tendencies in the rhetoric of the diaspora.

Speaker 2: 37:28

That's not to say that there isn't a left, an Iranian left right, the, that the iranian left has been virtually destroyed by the government. Um, uh, it did. This mostly took place in the 1980s and early 1990s through a series of targeted, uh, mass killings and state repression. Um, but the left always had a problem with religion, and one of the organizations that was at the forefront of this tension was the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or the MEK, and the way that the MEK features into the religious landscape.

Speaker 2: 38:12

The kind of political epistemology, political imaginary of most Iranians tends to be very negative. If you're on the left, the MEK is bad because it's a religious fanatic organization. If you're on the right, it's bad because they're arguing for communist Shiism. Basically Neither aspect of that sounds very appealing to a monarchist in the Iranian diaspora. So there is a left. It's fractured in the same way that every other component of the Iranian diaspora is fractured in Western contexts. Another thing you could do is to just say where is the money? You know, when you look at Iranian studies departments across various universities in the United States, you can very clearly tell their political orientation. You can very clearly tell where their funding sources are, the kind of clientele that these centers want to patronize and the kind of revisionist, nostalgic, historiographical impulse to rehabilitate the reputation of the Shah, despite his notorious human rights abuses and uses of state execution, state imprisonment, terrorism, all these kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 39:41

Uh, so yeah well, I guess that that does bring us to the another interesting part of the question. I mean, we talk about the iranian left. I have hinted at the fate of the Tudor party, but can you talk about a little bit, a little bit about that. And also, what role do they? I actually don't know what role the Tudor party plays today in either diaspora or in Iran itself. You know, in historical memory, Like what does it even have a role in historical? I just don't know.

Speaker 2: 40:16

So, anecdotally, I can't really tell you like from a, from a personal angle. I don't know very many iranian leftists who are old-fashioned communists, who would say they identify as uh, today you know a partisan of the tuda party, um, I've encountered these people in my research, um, done interviews, etc, etc. But my personal experience has been either with a political center right or full-blown right-wing iranian diaspora. Um, you, generally, you, there's just not that many Iranian leftists, you know, like, there's just not that many. And those that do exist, I find there is a generational component to this where young Iranians in Western countries feel a lot of deracination and alienation from their heritage, from their culture. This is something that's been well documented and written about. The question that I think about is is that deracination an avenue for potential mobilization towards a more humane, a more politically socialist alternative vision for not just Iran but for the entire MENA region? And what are the ways that young Iranian people today can, who are in the diaspora, can actually educate, inform and raise consciousness about these issues? So that's something that I've been trying to explore. I haven't been very successful on that front.

Speaker 2: 42:26

With regard to the Tudor party, it reached the height of its popularity, obviously in the 60s and 70s, and it it began to decline at the same time as we move from and this phenomenon occurs across a variety of landscapes all over the world as we move from an old left, kind of unquestioning partisanship with the policies and political vision of the soviet union, towards a new left. And this new left, uh, was not allergic to political violence. This new left was not necessarily invested in the politics of labor unions. Um, it was. It was a pluriform space where competing intellectual genealogies and political epistemologies converged to really create this laboratory of political activism. And we're talking about everything from stochastic terrorism to occupying large public spaces, to doing embassy sit-ins, to writing manifestos, engaging in acts of poetic, literary defiance and rebellion, everything across the spectrum. Right, they threw everything they could against the shah. What was ironic is that its collapse um, there were, there were a bunch of uh confounding factors. A lot of the iranian left who could have been useful on the ground in 79 were abroad, in Europe.

Speaker 2: 44:17

But as Ayatollah Khomeini began to consolidate power and as the years went on, targeted assassinations of secular militant, communists and leftists began commonplace and there were several purges that occurred. So it wasn't as if the revolution itself was a revolution that sought to kind of, you know, with a universal accord, institute this vision of this neoplatonic Islamic velayat-e-fahri or rule of the guardianship jurist council. Right, there was no sense that this would be the ultimate, final vector of the development of the revolution. It was the gradual coalescence of the clerical, of the hardliner clerical establishment, to create a vision of Shia political Islam, to essentially and it really depends on what school of historiography you're looking at to determine like what was the big payoff of this point? Some say that the kind of Shia Islamism that you find in Iran is really a direct response and form of ideological competition with the kind of Islam that's being produced in Saudi Arabia. You can look at the ways political, religious propaganda diffuse from the centers of power in both Iran and in Saudi Arabia and you can see the differences in that respect.

Speaker 1: 46:02

I suppose I mean one of the things that occurs to me that didn't so much come up in your article, and I'll mention that specific article. We've been kind of both expanding and glossing simultaneously, which I gather is kind of a short form of like what you're actually working on a lot for Right, and that is Threads of Belonging, echoes of Exile over at the New International, the Arab diaspora and the Arab Islamic diaspora, because I do think that I haven't been able to quite grasp the. It does feel different to me when I've encountered it. But I'll tell you, as a white passing, like Jew of, like North African and European origin I you know with, with some Scotch, irish ancestry it's. I can't tell you what the specifics of the vibe difference is.

Speaker 1: 47:05

Right, I encounter it, I've lived, I've lived in Egypt, you know, and I've also encountered, you know, the Arab diaspora from other countries in Egypt and also in the United States. And I have weirdly have a lot of overlap and personally I didn't mention this to you I have a lot of overlap with the Iranian diaspora, just for reasons of total stochastic accident. I grew up with a little pocket of Iranian refugees in Georgia. I was taught by Susan Atafat, or Susan Atafat-Peckham, as she was known, was an Iranian-American poet. My wife actually at one point was engaged to an Iranian man in the diaspora.

Speaker 1: 47:52

So, like I, have a whole lot of experience in this, it's just arbitrary, it just kind of happened and I have not been able to piece together what I'm experiencing as difference, because both are subject to Islamophobia, both have provisional whiteness claims, both have privilege and lack of privilege simultaneously because of their class, background and their native countries. But encountering that in a European or American context, but yet it does feel very different, even with like Shia, you know, just limiting to the same sect of Islam, it does feel very different. Is there a reason for that or am I just imagining it?

Speaker 2: 48:34

No, no, I think there's a sense in which it really depends on what your organizing analytic frame is. To do a comparison right, I would make a very provocative argument that the way religion is practiced in a given time and place is the way that religion was practiced in a given time and place and that's really all we can say about it. Right, drawing generalizations about large scale social forces and processes is not really the domain of the academic historian, is not really the domain of the academic historian, I would say these kinds of generalizations would probably be more effectively done by someone like a sociologist or even someone engaged in policy about migration. But I can say that one of the things you might be noticing is that Arab as an identity is much, much more plastic than iranian as an identity. Now, this is completely relative, right, both terms are artificial, constructed, uh, historically contingent discursive formations. But the way in which Arab tends to be much more contingent is broadly connected to a self-consciously political project of Arab socialism in the 20th century.

Speaker 2: 50:11

In the context of Iran, there is a archaic veneer, right, there is the sense that, oh, persian civilization goes back to Cyrus the Great and Darius and the Cyrus cylinder. Oh, iranians invented human rights, blah, blah, blah, stuff like that, right, mm-hmm? There's that. But the most provocative historians will tell you that a sense of Iranian identity as we understand it today, you either are going to make the case that it comes about in the 16th century with the Safavid dynasty. I would actually make a more skeptical argument that it, in the sense that we fully understand it today, comes about with the advent of the monarchy in the 1920s. So you have the collapse of the Khajar dynasty, which was popular from the end of the 18th century until it collapsed in the beginning of the 20th century, the first quarter of the 20th century, and the development of the Pahlavi monarchy. I would say, at that crucial transition point, you really have a sense of Iranian identity that we can identify today.

Speaker 2: 51:21

And that difference between what kind of Arab are you like? How do you envision your relationship to Arab identity? It's much more polyvalent. I found it's much more polyvalent, whereas Iranian identity in the first few quarters of the 20th century is a state-created project of identity that is tied closely with nationalist myth-making. Project of identity that is tied closely with nationalist myth-making, so very similar to the creation of the French identity in the Third Republic, where you have normal schools, producing secular school teachers, sending them to various parts of France to stamp out regional dialects and enforce, you know, standard Parisian French and kind of do all those kinds of activities. Similar things were happening in Iran, as standard Tehran-based Persian was sort of forced on religious and ethnic minorities in other parts of Iran to stamp out difference and create a unified Persian identity, and so I would say you're seeing similar dynamics occur. It's just that there seems to be different scales of Arab versus Persian and there seems to be different domains about like what's happening at different registers and different scales and like.

Speaker 1: 52:51

And the other question is, phenomenologically, how you experience these categories is usually, I would say it's so specific that it really depends on a person at a particular place at a particular time a weird way mirrors a little bit more than other MENA countries and cultures a European nationalism, in that it has a national myth with an ancient culture and in some ways maybe again analogous to some someplace like the French or the German. There aren't as many what we might call for lack of a better term Persian identities that have identified as anything like Iranian. I mean, the obvious one is, like you know, kurdish is a Persian language, or at least you know, and yet we don't think of the Kurds as Persians. Like I have to remind myself that there's a linguistic and ethnological relationship to Iranians. Pashto is another one, like you know. So you know, we kind of think of Grand Persia as already existing in Iran, when we do not think about that with Grand Arabia. I think that's an interesting dynamic.

Speaker 1: 54:27

I don't know what that means for politics exactly, except that in some ways it makes sense that the European mind would be easier, more accepting of Persians, not just because of the Indo-Aryan linguistic history, but also because the nationalism in some ways, even at an earlier date than many Arab countries, could be analogous to European nationalism in a way that it's very hard to even say like Saudi nationalism, looks like a European nationalism? It just kind of doesn't. But I guess that does lead to one problem for like orthodox Marxists because orthodox Marxists do take this European conception of nationalism as their framework for like what makes a valid nation, what makes valid national liberation. I do see as Iran's almost a liminal space there, in which case it both resembles European national liberation struggles but also resembles anti-colonial national liberation struggles, and yet the valiance of the Islamic revolution doesn't really match either. I could see how it would be encountered as like an interesting but almost incomprehensible.

Speaker 1: 56:04

Fourth thing, precisely because it looks a little bit more like developed world nationalisms and your work got me thinking about that and I don't know what I make of it. I don't know if I can draw any conclusions. I'm not a sociologist, as you said, and I only masquerade as an intellectual historian. But it does seem to me that there's something there in the political economy of Iranian nationalism that makes it both attractive and repellent to a lot of European leftists at the same time, because occasionally you will see European leftists who pick up the same dialogues and discourses about Iran as the European rightists do. I mean it's not unheard of, it's rarer, mean it's not unheard of, it's rarer, but it's not unheard of, and yet you know, when you read Foucault talking about the Ayatollah, it does read like you have no idea what you're talking about. You're about to get blindsided by something.

Speaker 2: 57:10

Believe it or not, I'm actually presenting at the American Academy of Religion this year on the topic of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Oh, so it's? I'd love to hear you talk about that. It's a very complicated, sticky issue. Myself and a couple other people are really pushing against the dominant strand of scholarship which paints Foucault as this naive, idealistic, reverse orientalist who is romanticizing an oppressive, brutal, authoritarian regime. That's the standard line. My argument is that if you actually are familiar with Foucault's intellectual project and if you know something about the people who were Iranian, with whom he was conversing, had some familiarity, it would have made sense that he said what he said when he said it, the fact that he chose to walk back well, he never really walked back his claims that he published when he wrote his series of news articles in the Italian newspaper right. However, he never addressed them again after silence. Uh, I think he said what he had to say that islamic political spirituality is a legitimate domain of praxis in the context of uh global, the ascendancy of global forms of neoliberalism, the ascendancy of uh, uh forms of organizing society and politics that are moving beyond disciplinary formations and, as Deleuze talked about, moving towards a society of control, the kind of political spirituality that the late Foucault was thinking about, this idea of epimelia huetu, care of the self, this eschesis, forms of self-fashioning, political responsibility and praxis. All of these things were really interesting, foucault at this time in his life, and we see some strategic connections with his writings on the history of sexuality and all this kind of stuff as well. We get a person who is perhaps a little bit misguided about the real implications of Ayatollah Khomeini's power grab, a real problem that the western left is unable to meaningfully inscribe sincere religious commitments within a frame of political practice. This has been a generic problem that has been facing the left since the left became a category in 1789. So islamic political spirituality in the vein of Shia Islam, specifically 12-er Shia Islam, where the story of the martyrdom of the relatives of the Prophet, particularly the martyrdom uh, the sunni caliphate that was uh, broadly viewed as the legitimate successor to the prophet, as opposed to the uh, the ahlul bait or the family of the prophet, the line of ali and she, literally followers of the line, like partisans of the line, followers of ali, the, the, the, the martyrological imagination that takes root in the religious symbolism of uh of iran is a very powerful engine to mobilize not only societal, political, but self-transformation, and I think that's something that Foucault picked up on.

Speaker 2: 1:01:22

That, frankly, most people don't understand today. Frankly, shiism in 2025? Iran is a shell of its former self. It is not like people tend to be skeptical of the hard line, state-sponsored religious messaging that comes out of the Friday prayers usually broadcasted from Tehran and other large cities you find in most mosques, where people, whether they choose to attend Friday prayers, the messages you hear tend to be a lot more practical and focused on interpretation of theological points, the aggressive political messaging you see that's coming from Tehran. I don't know how powerfully that resonates with most religious people in Iran today. I think people, generally speaking, tend to be a little bit more suspicious of of this kind of grand martyrological uh, religious nationalist, uh. Anti-israeli political theology.

Speaker 1: 1:02:44

Um, I think I don't know how much currency it has and I, frankly, I don't know how much longer it can last well, you know, I I've always had an interesting dialogue with people who don't know that much about Islam but know enough to get themselves into trouble. People who know that Sharia exists but don't know the different schools or how Hadith work or anything like that, to be completely and utterly confused about Shia Islam in particular, because they'll talk about how basically barbaric the Islamic State is. And then I'll just mention the Ismaili Shia, which admittedly is a different sect but, like I mean, they're not Unitarian, universalist but religious hardliners and the way that Westerners conceive that of like Salafist or Wahhabist or any of that, they are not at all, you know, despite their origins, which are probably misstated through Western myth anyway. So I've always found that to be sort of darkly ironic, if nothing else, that we just assume that the Shia as protestant in some ways, even though that's not really a good way to think about it at all. But um, but um it's. You know, a lot of people do realize that the, the original religious authority in um and in the current Sunni world, is a lot more diffuse, seeming at least Precisely, although in practice I find that to be a little bit questionable. But nonetheless I think you have an interesting point here about religiosity.

Speaker 1: 1:05:15

I tend to be a leftist, secularist in the sense that, not that I think that we should advocate a secular world like a secular, non-religious worldview. I actually just think that's been a mistake. Uh, that we should have, we should advocate for governments that do not mess with social practices in that way and thus cannot pick sides in sectarian and religious debates, both between religions and within them. But I'm not a laicist in the French conception of that at all, and I unfortunately think both the Marxist and left liberal tradition have been too marred by laicism and that has been a way to hide I mean, in the French case it's barely hidden other forms of ethnocentrism and racism. It's weird that laicism ends up looking vaguely Catholic. It's weird that Anglo-secularism smells Protestant somehow. So I do think that there's a valid point there.

Speaker 1: 1:06:39

I'm not a scholar enough of Foucault to understand what he did and did not understand, but it is good to know that he would have been in contact with the French Iranian diaspora and it wasn't just projection on his part. And Foucault's relationship to religion, I think, particularly in his late writings, is underexplored, to say the least. I think maybe that'll get fixed a little bit now that we have what History of Sexuality, volume 4, actually translated into English. Foucauko's weird because, given how popular he is, there's a whole lot of key fukodian texts that have that took forever to get translated and I do not understand why. Um, it's just like well, the the.

Speaker 2: 1:07:26

if I'm not mistaken, with regard to the fourth volume of the history of sexuality, it was because the manuscript was found after not being found for a period of time. So that's my current impression. Don't hold me to it, but that's what I think, okay.

Speaker 1: 1:07:44

That doesn't explain all the Sabarn lectures that we didn't get for 30 years, though.

Speaker 2: 1:07:48

Right, right, right. The lack of good English translations of the entire Collège de France lectures was pretty jarring until recently. But I'll put one plug for someone I really admire and look up to the work of Stuart Eldon. He's his work on Foucault, his four-volume series on power and archaeology and the early Foucault and the late Foucault worth investing time in.

Speaker 1: 1:08:22

I'd like to thank you for coming on, and where can people find your work? I've mentioned two of your articles at New International. Is there anything else you'd like to plug?

Speaker 2: 1:08:31

I have a few titles in French. You can just go to my website, KeanuHedaricom. I have access to everything you need to know about me there. Alright, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Alright, bye.