Iranshahr, Ideology, and Imagination

Stories and narratives of a nation are the makers of the political world, and the construction of these narratives is made possible through the element of imagination. Imagination has always held a fundamental place among Iranians and has played a central role in shaping their identity and sustaining it in the form of a mythical history. In this work, based on Paul Ricoeur’s intellectual framework, ideology is also considered a form of thought structure that can be attributed to any specific group, class, or nation. The intended meaning of this concept in Ricoeur’s view is a form of application rather than the dissolution of all values into vague beliefs like communism or community. Therefore, Iran is examined within a network of concepts such as imagination, ideology, myth, and narrative, with an effort to explore the relationship between ideology and Ricoeur’s conception of it—that is, convergence or integration. Iran, in this interpretation, is a fictional narrative concept, and the author’s assumption is that the only positive narrative of Iran is the idea of ‘Iranshahr,’ which does not suffer from the deficiencies of previous ideological perspectives on this concept.