Religious Minorities in Iran - Review

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2001 by Farideh Farhi

Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 228 pages. Hardcover $59.95.

WRITING IN AN EVEN-HANDED MANNER about the treatment of non-Muslim religious minorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the ways they cope with government policies must surely be one of the most delicate scholarly tasks endeavored. Yet this is precisely what Eliz Sanasarian manages to do in this terrific book about the life and trials of religious minorities in Iran in the first decade of the revolution. Rather than falling prey to either facile denunciations or convenient justifications, the usual dichotomous terms of the debate on religious minorities in Iran, she offers a complex picture of the overall policy of the theocratic state toward its non-Muslim religious minorities and the various ways minorities have dealt with state intrusions in their lives. In the hands of Sanasarian, the Iranian post-revolutionary state becomes a multi-vocal and in many ways flexible institutional entity whose blatantly discriminatory minority policies are often open to negotiation, local variations, and even input by mi nority groups. Minority groups, in her hands, also turn out to be, far from passive victims, rather resourceful communities of varying interests and voices whose engagement with the state is part and parcel of a strategy not only to survive but also live with dignity under very difficult circumstances. Sanasarian's systematic insistence on analyzing state-minority relations at a variety of levels, dealing with officials, institutions, policies, and ideology, explains why a book focused on a very small percentage of the Iranian population can end up offering such a penetrating analysis of the workings of the post-revolutionary Iranian state as well.

As is well known, contemporary Iran is a long-standing heterogeneous polity with a mixture of ethnic, tribal, religious, communal, and national crosscurrents marking its diversity. Ninety eight percent of the population is Muslim (93 percent Shii and only 5 percent Sunni) of various ethnic backgrounds (Persians constitute only 51 percent of the population and Persian, despite being the official language, is the mother tongue of barely half of the population). Religious Minorities in Iran deals with the remaining 2 percent composed of Christians (Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Iranian Christian converts), Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahais. According to Sanasarian, modern Iranian history has exhibited constant fluctuations between extremes of ultra-nationalism and religious bigotry, moderated by "an almost altruistic notion of existence" (p. 162). The result has been a rather dismal record vis-a-vis religious minorities and yet remarkable in that it did not become worse or out of control during the tumultuous po st-revolutionary years of the early 1980s. The intent of this study is to explore these early post-revolutionary dynamics as they played themselves out in the first decade of the revolution, their impact, and the response of religious minorities.

Sanasarian begins with a short discussion of her theoretical framework, which is based on the notion that not all aspects of state-minority relations can be explained through the analysis of levels or disaggregated parts of the state. Effort must also be made, she argues, to examine the distinctions among minority communities and their responses through psychological and cultural dimensions of minority behavior as well as understanding the way each minority community is organized. Next Sanasarian offers a succinct and very useful background to Iran's ethnic, tribal and religious makeup. This sets the stage for some of the basic arguments of the book that historically religious minorities have been a minute group, which unlike some Muslim ethnic groups, have had no claim on any discrete part of Iran's territory. Furthermore, having experienced local tyranny and being always aware of menacing alternatives, they have proven obedient subjects of the modern state system and, accordingly, many of them have achieve d upward social mobility and have come to see themselves as Iranians.

Such generalizations, however, do not prevent Sanasarian from making the very important point about the differential relations religious minorities have developed with the Iranian polity and society. As far as she is concerned, the Christian Assyrians and Chaldeans, which constitute a very small number of religious minorities and whose history has been intermingled with the missionaries, have not played a dynamic role in the modern Iranian nation-state. The Armenians (the largest Christian minority community) and Zoroastrians are considered "the most dramatic actors in the Iranian political scene" (p. 54), made possible by strong communal organizations and better leadership. The Jews and Bahais, on the other hand, despite relative prosperity under the reign of the last shah, have lived under the perpetual threat of assault for most of the last century. The Jews were mostly bent on survival and lacked strong religious leadership. The Bahais, most harshly and consistently persecuted and never recognized as a r eligious minority, have relied on their own internal solidarity buttressed by international networks to live in their homeland.