Textualising the ethno‐religious sovereign, history, ethnicity and nationalism in the Perso‐Islamic textbooks

This paper is a study of the Islamic Republic of Iran's 1st‐ to 12th‐grade textbooks. This paper examines issues of language, race, ethnicity and religious nationalism in textbooks to cast light on how the state in Iran has striven to Perso‐Shi'ify the polity through its education system. The official textbooks depict the sovereign community (Persians) as the sole agent of history. The state considers alternative (unofficial) narratives treasonous. This is an in‐depth study of how Iran's state‐sanctioned textbooks, their situatedness and the contextual knowledge gained from them offer revealing points of interpretation, illuminating the foundation of the existing structural ethnolinguistic dividing lines, and shows that Islamism, as the governing bounded logic implanted in textbooks, lends solidity to racial theories and historiographies. This study sporadically discusses the views and experiences of a number of Kurdish schoolteachers with whom we could conduct in‐depth interviews.