Making the Others Invisible: The IRI and its Undesirable Minorities

The IRI is a hybrid entity, as the name already suggests. On the one hand it claims to be committed to 'Islam' and on the other hand it considers itself as a national state, a political actor in the modern sense. This commitment to both the Islamic and modern traditions not rarely leads to the representatives of the system ending up in a quagmire, as the values of these traditions do not always dovetail. Both discourses construct their own reality and regulate the behavior of their subjects through defining their field of 'sayables' and 'thinkables'. In other words, each discourse controls the violation of its boundaries through implicit and explicit taboos, internalizations and regulation of consciousness of the subjects.
In this paper, I shall address the conflicts arising through the commitment of the IRI to both ‚Islamic‘ and ‚modern‘ discourses with respect to the Bahá’i faith and homosexuality. On the one hand, the systematic prosecution of citizens due to their mere belonging to a ‚minority‘-group is considered to be a severe violation of the rules, which an actor is expected to comply with at the international level. On the other hand, both groups mentioned are substantially irreconcilable with the IRI’s understanding of Islam. Accepting Baha’is as a religious group implies at the same time the recognition that prophecy might exist after Muhammad, an assumption which is generally rejected in Islam. In the same manner the recognition of homosexuality as a lifestyle - not as a mere sexual act - is contradictory with the ‚islamic‘ heteronormative understanding of sexual order.
Considering language as a practice producing and regulating power, I shall study the rhetoric of the functionaries of the IRI regarding these groups. Thereby I hope to show which strategies of denial of the collective character of these groups are used by representatives of the IRI in order to legitimize the potential prosecution of the citizens concerned as the consequence of an individual breach of law, i.e. as something that is generally accepted as a less reprehensible act than the systemati c prosecution of minorities. This strategy enables the state at the same time to forego the prosecution of these citizens, if necessary, without undermining its claim to being true to Islamic tradition, as these undesirable acts are made invisible and therefore could be spared from prosecution.