Religious Contentions in Modern Iran, 1881-1941

It has been suggested that in mid-twentieth century Iran, anti-Bahā’ism played a seminal role in transforming Iranian Shī‘ī religious piety into the political ideology known as Islamism. This dissertation charts this transformation by offering a historical genealogy of the politicization of anti-Bahā’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 Bahā’īs were gradually branded the nation’s internal Other. It tests the thesis it was mainly through the Othering of Bahā’īs 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.