Rereading the components of Iranshahri political thought in the formation of the state in the discourse of the Islamic Revolution of Iran


Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 06 September 2026

Document Type : Original Article from Result of Thesis

Authors

1 Department of Political Science, khor.C., Islamic Azad University, Khorramabad, Iran

2 Department of Political Science, khor.C., Islamic Azad University, Khorramabad, Iran.

Abstract
This article examines how the political thought of Iranshahr was reinterpreted in the discourse that shaped the Islamic Revolution’s state formation. It addresses a central problem: how the revolutionary rupture of 1979 could coexist with, and even be narrated through, a historical continuity in Iranian statecraft. The analysis is organized in three layers. First, drawing on Tabatabaei, it traces a long-standing continuity in Iranian political imagination. Second, using Laclau and Mouffeaclau and Mouffe, it reads state formation as a process of hegemonic articulation rather than, it shows how Shi’a political jurisprudence functioned as a mediating filter that selected, translated, and legitim a supra-human that tradition. The findings indicate that the discourse produced a supra-human source of legitimacy, tightened the relation between religion and politics, and rearticulated the idea of a strong state through concepts such as wilāyah, guardianship, duty, expediency, and Islamic government. At the same time, hereditary monarchy and class hierarchy were rejected. The conclusion is that continuity was not preserved unchanged; it was transformed and refashioned within the revolutionary order, producing a new idiom for political and collective collective obligation in ways that bound sovereignty to moral responsibility and collective rule.

Keywords

Subjects