The Confrontation between the Discourses of State-Sponsored Archaism and Islamism during the Pahlavi Era: A Genealogy of Formation, Hegemony, and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Abstract

The question of national identity and its relationship with historical and religious components has been among the most contentious issues in the process of modern state formation in contemporary Iranian history. The emergence of the Pahlavi regime was intertwined with an extensive top-down nation-building project whose ideological and identity-related backbone rested on the revival, reconstruction, and selective reproduction of the symbols, myths, and grandeur of pre-Islamic Iran (Ancient Iran). Employing a descriptive-analytical approach and drawing on the theoretical frameworks of critical discourse analysis and historical sociology, the present study examines the roots, manifestations, transformations, and consequences of the structural confrontation between archaist and Islamist ideas during the First and Second Pahlavi periods. The central problem addressed in this article concerns the process through which romantic and archaist nationalism was transformed into the dominant and exclusive ideology of the state, as well as the responses of Islamist sub-discourses to this exclusionary hegemonization. The findings indicate that, during the First Pahlavi period, archaism was manifested through authoritarian modernization, administrative and legal reforms, changes in dress, linguistic purification, and the curtailment of religious institutions, thereby generating a profound conflict between the ruling discourse and the traditional-religious lifeworld of society. During the Second Pahlavi period, this confrontation moved beyond the symbolic sphere and intensified through costly state rituals such as the 2,500-Year Celebration of the Persian Empire, the elevation of the monarchy to the status of the supreme ideological signifier, the replacement of the Hijri calendar with the Imperial calendar, and the promotion of cultural secularism. These developments transformed Islamist discourse from a traditional and defensive force of resistance into a dynamic, revolutionary, and politically mobilizing ideology. The ultimate outcome of this discursive conflict was the Pahlavi regime’s inability to construct an “identity synthesis” between Iranian identity and Islamic identity, which produced a profound state–society cleavage, progressively eroded the regime’s political legitimacy, and ultimately contributed to the formation of revolutionary cohesion in 1979.