Benedikt Römer, The Iranian Christian Diaspora: Religion and Nationhood in Exile (I.B. Tauris, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Benedikt Römer (BR): I have a background in the history of religions and in Middle Eastern studies, particularly focusing on modern Iran and Turkey. Through personal contacts with Iranians in the diaspora, I became familiar with the phenomenon of Iranian diaspora churches. Such churches are usually evangelical in theological leaning and at this point exist in virtually every major city in Central and Northern Europe as well as in Turkey, the United Kingdom, and North America. As I began to academically study these communities, I noticed that scholarly works on the subject often did not take into account the abundantly available Persian-language sources, among them Iranian Christian magazines published in exile and recordings of services and sermons in Iranian Christian diaspora churches. Given my proficiency in Persian, I decided to make Iranian Christian exile churches the topic of my PhD. From the beginning of this research project, I was struck by the constant references made by Iranian Christians to Iranian/Persian culture and its supposed affinity with the Christian religion. In result, the construction of a distinct Iranian-Christian national identity became the primary subject of my book.
... we can see that many religious narratives are deeply interwoven with and informed by the experience of forced displacement.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
BR: The book touches upon a number of issues and in many ways is an interdisciplinary work. First of all, the book contributes to our understanding of the religious landscape of contemporary Iran. While the Islamic Republic of Iran tends to present itself as a homogenous Muslim country, we know that many Iranians, as a result of their frustration with the Islamic religion as it is promoted by the Iranian government, turn away from Islam. Some of them give up religion altogether; in fact, many Iranians today harbor strongly anti-religious sentiments. Others, however, explore religious alternatives, one of them being Evangelical Christianity. Christianity is a recognized religion in Iran—however, this recognition only extends to the ethnic Armenian and Assyrian minorities. Freedom of religion for Christians only applies to religious services being held in the Armenian or Aramaic languages. Any Christian activity in the Persian language is sanctioned by the state and in many instances has resulted in severe repercussions, such as imprisonment, denial of education, and internal exile. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Persian-speaking Christian movement in Iran even experienced a series of assassinations and executions of leading pastors. This oppression has prompted many Iranian Christian leaders to emigrate from Iran—and the Iranian Christian exile milieu, in which my research takes place, came into being.
A second issue broached by the book is the relationship of religious practice and diaspora. Previous studies in the field of comparative religions have come up with a number of theoretical tools to study this relationship, one of them being “diasporic religion.” In the case of Iranian Christians in exile, we can see that many religious narratives are deeply interwoven with and informed by the experience of forced displacement. Hopes for a return to Iran are filled with religious imagery and articulated through references to Biblical stories.
Thirdly, the book should interest everyone studying religion and nationalism. The case of Iranian Christians demonstrates the fluidity of religious and national identities. Being Christian in the Iranian context is often conflated with being Armenian or Western in ethnicity. In fact, those Iranian Christians who have a Muslim background often complain that they are portrayed as “alien” to Iran because of their religion. The material I study in the book in many ways is a response to this ascription of foreignness from which Iranian Christians suffer. By connecting, for example, the Iranian new year festival of Nowruz with their Christian identity, Iranian Christians make a statement and say “It is perfectly possible to be BOTH Iranian and Christian at the same time.” Such narratives are somehow reminiscent of other contexts in which individuals or communities are marginalized by an official narrative of religious identity politics.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
BR: Since the book is based on my PhD thesis, it is really the beginning of my scholarly work. I had always been interested in religious minorities in the MENAT region, among them the Shi’is of Saudi Arabia about whom I had written my undergraduate dissertation. During my postgrad at SOAS, I mainly worked to improve my language skills and wrote a thesis in Iranian sociolinguistics that also touched upon the issue of Iranian nationalism. So there may be some connections, however they are rather superficial.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
BR: The book has different target audiences. On the one hand, I hope that it will be read by scholars in the field of Iranian studies. The Iranian Christian movement is an increasingly significant part of contemporary Iran and its diasporas. It is not just a marginal, passing phenomenon but one that will last and become more visible in the future. It should therefore be studied by those who have expertise on Iran. Secondly, the book could also be interesting to different NGOs and even governmental think tanks. Conversion to Christianity among Iranians has become a controversial issue in Central Europe; courts are facing severe difficulties when assessing the asylum claims of Iranian converts to Christianity. My book could provide decision-makers with a deeper insight into the background of such conversions and help them to understand dimensions shaping the religious biographies of Iranian asylum seekers. Finally, members of the Iranian diaspora, whether they are Christians themselves or not, may enjoy reading my book.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
BR: My new project goes in quite a different direction than this book. I have shifted my geographical focus to Turkey and am now studying portrayals of “the Arabs” in the Turkish nationalist discourse. I was inspired to embark on this research project by works in Iranian studies. Iranian nationalism often has a strongly anti-Arab aspect to it. In the Turkish context, works studying perceptions of the Arabs are yet scarce. A first article on this topic in which I analyze portrayals of the Arabs in late Ottoman/early Republican Turkish encyclopedias will hopefully appear next year.
A little side project of mine which is more related to the topic of my book is an article about Iranian conversions to Neo-Zoroastrianism. Without going into too much detail here, those interested in the subject should look out for the journal Entangled Religions in which my article will appear in a few weeks, alongside other interesting articles on the topic of religious conversion.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 55-58)
Chapter Three: Naturalizing Christianity (I): Introduction and the festivals of Nowruz and Yaldā
Introduction: Iranian nationhood and the double foreignness of Christianity
When Hassan Dehqāni-Tafti, later the Anglican Bishop of Iran, in the early 1940s requested the approval for the publication of a monthly Christian magazine in the Persian language, he received the following reply: ‘Persian is the language of Muslims, Armenian is the language of Christians’. His request was subsequently denied. The answer of the governmental clerk responding to Dehqāni-Tafti’s request succinctly illustrates how the Christian religion in the Iranian context has come to be discursively conflated with Armenian ethnicity. Rooted in pre-modern epistemologies of ‘nationality’ and ‘religion’, the usage of the term Armani (Armenian) in the Persian language resembles pre-modern European usages of the term ‘Turk’:
In practice, ‘Turk’ was employed by Europeans quite differently, as an indiscriminate blanket term for a Muslim of any ethnic origin. Even Western Europeans who converted to Islam could be referred to as ‘Turks’ – as in the English phrase ‘to turn Turk’, meaning ‘to convert to Islam’ – though such converts were obviously neither natives of Anatolia nor native speakers of Turkish.
Along analogous lines, the term Armani in Persian has evolved as a catchall label for all Christians, irrespective of their origins, and the verb ‘to turn Armenian’ (Armani shodan) as a synonym for ‘to convert to Christianity’. Accordingly, one finds that the historian Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi refers to a nineteenth-century Iranian Sheykhi author who, in his discussion of the dangers resulting from a blind imitation of European modernity, raises the risk of conversions to ‘Armenianism’. Even members of the smaller Iranian Assyrian Christian community have been subsumed under the label Armani. Writing about the late 1930s, Ervand Abrahamian mentions a political prisoner referred to as ‘Yousef “The Armenian”’, adding: ‘(in fact, he was Assyrian)’. Similarly, Mehdi Dibāj, who later served as a pastor for the Jamāʿat-e Rabbāni churches, upon confiding his conversion to Christianity to his parents, heard the following response: ‘No way! You went and turned Armenian?!’.
The 1979 Revolution has further buttressed the hegemonic discourse of a Persian Islam and an Armenian Christianity. The Iranian nation (mellat) was reconceived as an Iranian ommat – a religious, Islamic community. This renewed turn has made self-identification as Iranian very difficult for Iranian Armenian Christians who suddenly found themselves living in an ‘Islamic Republic’, the public sphere of which is governed by Islamic principles, to be adhered to by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. While Iranian Armenians and Assyrians resorted to increasing self-segregation in minority-only gated compounds, Persian-speaking Christians were left behind as an ultimate religious ‘other’. Falling through the established cracks, they seemed not to belong anywhere. A 1979 article in the Anglican newsletter Message of Love (Payām-e Mohabat) used the Persian word gomnāmi to describe the situation of Persian-speaking Christians – a term one Persian-English dictionary tellingly translates as ‘the state of being unknown’.
It bears mentioning that many Iranian Armenians likewise endorse the dichotomy of a Persian-speaking, Iranian Islam and an Armenian-speaking, non-Iranian Christianity, mainly to avoid assimilation. Episodes from the interviews I conducted with Iranian Armenians who attended public Persian-speaking churches in Iran (when they still existed) suggest that the existence of these churches angered other members of their ethnic community. One of my Iranian Armenian interlocutors poignantly described this tendency by telling me how his mother, after she heard that her son now attended the Persian-speaking Jamāʿat-e Rabbāni church, reacted by incredulously asking him: ‘So you are going there and praying next to some ʿAbbās?’. The name ʿAbbās here, of course, serves as a paradigmatic Muslim name. I asked my Iranian Assyrian interlocutor Martin whether, in his perception, Iranian Assyrians possessed a similar sensitivity towards the issue as Armenians. He averred that the sensitivity was markedly more pronounced among Iranian Armenians for whom the affiliation with the Armenian Orthodox Church was a primary marker of their national identity. Nonetheless, later in the interview, Martin mentioned that the decision to conduct Persian-language services in his Assyrian Pentecostal church was met with resistance – also out of a fear of assimilation. Notably, both Martin and my Iranian Armenian interviewees suggested that matters today were more relaxed and the formerly hardened fronts loosened.
Apart from Barry’s illustrative 2019 book, few sources describe contemporary aspects of Iranian Armenian life in Iran. A 2019 episode of the Iranian podcast Radiomarz, however, provides further insights regarding Iranian perceptions of their Armenian compatriots. The podcast’s host invited a number of Iranian Armenians of different generations to speak about the clichés and misconceptions they were faced with when interacting with Iranian Muslims. One respondent, 23-year-old Nārineh, recounted that, when inquiring about her Armenian background, Iranian Muslims occasionally with benign curiosity asked whether they as well could become Christian, ‘or Armenian’. Another respondent, 68-year-old Shākeh, who now resides in the Republic of Armenia, suggested that the confusion regarding the religious and ethnic identities of Iranian Armenians was a matter of the past:
Whenever people have told us ‘Lucky you, when you travel abroad (khārej) you can speak English because you are Christian’, we reminded them that we are Armenians whose language is Armenian and not English. A Christian is not necessarily English or non-Iranian. This is one example of the unawareness widespread among Iranians who did not distinguish between nationality (melliyat), language and religion. That is, they did not know that to be Armenian and to speak the Armenian language is about national identity and that to be Christian denotes our religion. It is possible that an Armenian in fact is not a Christian but an atheist or whatever, a Bahai – everything really, also Muslim, though very rarely of course. But the majority of the Iranian people, those who did not reside in cities like Tabriz, Isfahan or Tehran where there are many Armenians, or in a smaller city like my birthplace Arāk, were not really in contact with the Armenian community. Today of course the situation is different … The awareness has increased markedly and such cute incidents (ettefāqāt-e bāmazeh) along the lines of ‘Lucky you, you can speak English’ no longer happen.
Shākeh’s account is indicative of a second ethno-religious conflation: that of Christianity with Western-ness. In Chapter 1, this topic has been broached in the context of the Western Protestant missions; we have seen how Iranian Protestants themselves have struggled for indigenization and autonomy from the Western churches. Moreover, I have pointed to the ongoing stigmatization of Iranian Christians as supposed ‘agents of foreign powers’, which ushers in their legal persecution. For non-ethnic Iranian Christians, who consider themselves fully Iranian ‘despite’ their religion, their association with the West can be a painful experience. The young Hassan Dehqāni-Tafti, when participating in a Shi’ite taʿziyeh passion play in his hometown of Taft, recounts that the locals made him assume the role of a European (farangi) who had embraced Islam after witnessing the tragedy of Karbala, thus alluding to his Christian faith. In his English-language autobiography, Dehqāni-Tafti comments on this episode by saying: ‘It pained me greatly in my deep pride of being Persian that having a Christian identity made me “foreign” in their eyes’.
In conclusion, we can observe that hegemonic notions of Iranian nationhood do not provide space for affiliation with the Christian religion. The dominant logic considers Christianity to be either synonymous with Armenian-ness in the Iranian context or an entirely Western entity. Christianity is ascribed with a double foreignness. As a result, Persian-speaking Christians find themselves in a marginal position. How do they react to their marginalization?
Note: In-text citations have been removed from the excerpt.
