Iran has produced constitutions with remarkable regularity, but never one that genuinely reckoned with its own diversity. This article traces the origins of Iran’s constitutional identity crisis from the Qajar period to the present, trying to engage legal scholarship in the midst of current geopolitical developments.

Introduction

Iran is one of the rare cases in constitutional history where the question “who are we?” has never received a stable answer and where that failure has repeatedly determined the fate of every constitutional project attempted. This is not a country that lacked constitutions. It produced them with remarkable regularity: the liberal constitution of 1906, the Islamic constitution of 1979, and dozens of amendments and revisions in between (Saleh, 2013). What it lacked was something more fundamental: a genuine reckoning with the society that those constitutions were supposed to govern.

What makes Iran a particularly compelling case for constitutional theory is precisely the persistence of this gap. Nearly forty percent of the population speaks a mother tongue other than Persian. Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis have lived within these borders for centuries, each with distinct languages, histories, and political memories. Yet every constitutional order Iran has produced has been built around a singular, homogeneous identity, first secular and Persian-nationalist under the Pahlavis, then Islamic and Persian-nationalist under the Republic. The content changed –the exclusionary logic did not.

This is the center-periphery conflict at the heart of Iranian constitutionalism. The center of the state, in whatever ideological form it has taken, has consistently defined national identity by what it excludes: the wrong ethnicity, the wrong language, the wrong interpretation of faith, the wrong vision of modernity. The periphery ethnic minorities, religious dissidents, secular urbanites, and suppressed communities have just as consistently experienced the constitutional order as something built without them, and therefore not fully binding on them.

This article traces how that conflict began and why it has never been resolved. The starting point is the Qajar period, when Iran’s modern identity crisis first took shape because the contradictions embedded in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 remain, more than a century later, the unfinished business of Iranian constitutionalism.

I. The Crisis That Created a Question

In the early nineteenth century, Iran suffered two devastating military defeats against Tsarist Russia: the Treaty of Gulistan (1813) and the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828). These were not merely territorial losses; the Caucasian provinces were gone, and with them, the deep sense of invincibility that had sustained the Qajar dynasty’s legitimacy. For the first time in centuries, the Iranian political elite was forced to confront an uncomfortable question: why had they fallen so far behind?

The answer, as a generation of Iranian intellectuals sent to Europe for education would discover, was deeply unsettling. They returned not only with technical knowledge but with an entirely new conceptual vocabulary: nation, citizenship, constitution, sovereignty. These concepts did not merely describe political arrangements; they demanded a fundamental reconceptualization of collective identity. Who were “the Iranians”? What bound them together beyond loyalty to a dynasty or adherence to Shia Islam? And,  most importantly, did the existing political order have any legitimate claim over them?

These questions inaugurated what we might call Iran’s “identity crisis”  one that has never fully been resolved, and whose echoes continue to reverberate through Iranian constitutional and political life to this day.

II. Three Competing Answers: Islamism, Nationalism, and Westernization

The Qajar intelligentsia did not arrive at a single answer. Instead, as scholar Reza Talebi has argued, Iranian identity came to be positioned at the intersection of three competing discourses: Islamism, Iranian nationalism, and Westernization. Each offered a different vision of what Iran was, and consequently, a different answer to what its constitution should protect.

As Talebi (2024) notes, the Westernizers, most notably figures such as Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Malkam Khan, argued that Iran’s salvation lay in adopting the laws, writing system, and rational institutions of European civilization.

. For them, the constitutional project was essentially a modernization project: replace the arbitrary authority of the Shah with the rule of law, and Iran would reclaim its place among civilized nations. As historian Reza Zia-Ebrahimi has noted, many of these intellectuals simultaneously absorbed European racial theories, constructing an “Aryan” Iranian identity that positioned Iranians as racially superior to neighboring Arabs. What Zia-Ebrahimi calls “dislocative nationalism” anchored Iranian identity in a mythologized distant past rather than contemporary reality, effectively severing it from lived experience.

The nationalists drew from a different source: the pre-Islamic Persian heritage. Figures such as Mirza Agha Khan Kermani celebrated the grandeur of ancient Iran, invoking mythological heroes from the Shahnameh  Kaveh the Blacksmith, Fereydoun  as symbols of national resistance.(Talebi,2024) In this vision, the Constitutional Revolution was not merely a legal reform but a civilizational awakening, a return to Iran’s authentic self after centuries of Arab and Turkish “corruption.” As Abbas Amanat has shown, this narrative carried an implicit hostility not only toward Islamic identity but toward the very ethnic diversity that constituted Iranian society.

The Islamists, for their part, evaluated the constitutional project through the lens of Shia jurisprudence. The clerical establishment was deeply divided: figures such as Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri rejected constitutionalism as a foreign imposition incompatible with Islamic governance, while others argued that a constitution limiting tyranny was entirely consistent with Islam’s principles of justice. This ambivalence proved fateful  it was never resolved in 1906, and it returned with full force in 1979.

What is remarkable about the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 is not that it resolved these tensions, but that it institutionalized them. The resulting constitution attempted to accommodate all three discourses simultaneously: it established a parliament inspired by Western liberal models, acknowledged Islamic law as a supreme standard, and implicitly assumed a Persian-centric national identity. The contradictions embedded in this founding document were not incidental  they were structural.

III. “Millet” and Its Discontents: Who Belonged to the Nation?

In Iran’s process of modern nation-building, the concept of “millet” has been central to the transition from the traditional notion of subjects to modern political citizenship, yet it has been fraught with deep structural ambiguity (Saleh, 2013) Initially used in Qajar-era royal correspondence to refer to the general populace or specific religious communities, this term became a symbol of the “collective will of the Iranian nation”—conceived as the source of sovereignty—following the 1906 Constitutional Revolution (Talebi, 2024)

 However, this modern definition remained far from inclusive in practice; while the first election laws restricted the concept of “millet” to specific influential classes such as princes, religious scholars, and merchants, they structurally excluded nomadic tribes and ethnic communities with different native languages from this new national narrative (Amanat, 2012). This exclusionary approach constituted the primary source of the “discontents” underlying modern Iranian identity and led to a deep identity crisis that persisted for decades due to the failure to fully recognize ethnic minorities in constitutional texts (Talebi, 2024)

At the center of the constitutional debate lay a deceptively simple question: who was part of the nation? The concept itself carried historical ambiguities. Under the Qajar rule, the term “nation” sometimes referred to the “people,” sometimes to specific religious communities, and sometimes to the subjects of the crown. The Constitutional Revolution attempted to transform this into a modern concept of citizenship; however, this transformation was left incomplete and became deeply controversial.

The 1906 Electoral Law divided voters into six categories: princes, clergy, nobles, landowners, merchants, and artisans. Those notably excluded from this list were not only nomadic tribes, women, and religious minorities; implicitly, non-Persian-speaking communities that did not fit the new national narrative were also left out. What unites these exclusions is not an oversight but a structural logic: the new constitutional order was being built around a singular Iranian subject, and everyone who did not fit this subject was quietly left outside the borders.

The Azerbaijan case most visibly exemplifies this logic. Sattar Khan and Baqir Khan led the armed defense of the constitutional movement from Tabriz; with three thousand members, the Azerbaijan Society was the country’s largest revolutionary organization. However, this contribution was systematically erased in the subsequent nationalist historiography. As Talebi observed, the Qajar elites “did not grant Turks equal rights to their own rights” even as Azerbaijanis were dying for a constitution that would not fully recognize them. “This pattern was not unique to Azerbaijan: Kurdish communities were structurally excluded through the Election Law’s failure to recognize nomadic populations; religious minorities were offered tolerance instead of equality.”Talebi (2024). Each group participated under the conditions set by the revolutionary leaders and was marginalized in the emerging national narrative.

What the 1906 Constitution ultimately revealed was a foundational tension that no subsequent constitutional arrangement could resolve: Iran is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious society that has never been governed by a constitution written for all in the true sense. The document promised a nation; it delivered a contested nation.

IV. The State Builds an Identity: From Pahlavi Nationalism to the Islamic Republic

If the Constitutional Revolution left the question of Iranian national identity unanswered, the Pahlavi state (1925–1979) offered a forceful  and forcibly imposed  response. Reza Shah’s modernization program was simultaneously a nation-building project: mandatory military service, standardized education, forced settlement of nomadic tribes, and the prohibition of minority languages in schools. “Iranianness” was defined as secular, Persian-speaking, and anchored in pre-Islamic greatness. The 1935 replacement of “Persia” with “Iran” in international usage was itself a nationalist gesture, emphasizing the Aryan heritage that Nazi Germany had helped popularize.

Historian Afshin Marashi has shown how this project mobilized print culture, public monuments, museums, and commemorative rituals to manufacture a homogeneous national identity from above. The irony, as Abbas Amanat notes, is that this was “a mirror image of the then-populist European ideologies”  Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Atatürk’s Turkey all pursued similar projects of state-sponsored historical glorification. Iranian exceptionalism was, paradoxically, thoroughly unexceptional.

The Islamic Republic of 1979, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, replicated the same homogenizing logic with different content. Pre-Islamic glories were condemned; the Shahnameh was initially regarded with suspicion; the 2,500-year celebration was denounced as Pharaonic arrogance. In their place, the Islamic Revolution imposed a new master identity: the committed Muslim citizen loyal to the velayat-e faqih. Yet the structural dynamic was identical  a state imposing a singular identity on a pluralistic society, suppressing alternatives in the name of unity.

The numbers speak clearly. As Amanat reports, a 2001 survey published by Iran’s own Ministry of Islamic Guidance found that 86% of Iranians expressed pride in their national identity  one of the highest rates in the Muslim world. Yet simultaneously, as many as 25% reported no attachment to any particular religious denomination. After two decades of intensive Islamization through schools, media, and mosques, a quarter of the population had quietly opted out of the state’s identity project. The gap between official identity and lived identity had become a constitutive feature of Iranian society.

V. The Unresolved Constitutional Question

 What does this history mean for constitutional theory? While the following lessons are rooted in the specific failures and transitions of the Iranian state, they offer broader implications for constitutionalism in multi-ethnic and deeply divided societies. Iran serves as a critical case study illustrating that the success of a constitutional project depends not merely on its legal architecture, but on its ability to mirror the societal diversity it seeks to govern. Specifically, Iran’s experience brings several important lessons to the fore that hold relevance for constitutional theory on a global scopeFirst, constitutions cannot resolve identity conflicts they refuse to acknowledge. The 1906 Constitution’s silence on ethnic and linguistic diversity did not make that diversity disappear  it merely ensured that the tensions would resurface, repeatedly and violently, in the decades that followed. The same holds for the 1979 Constitution, which enshrined Persian as the sole official language of education and government in a country where nearly 40% of the population speaks a different mother tongue, including approximately 24% Azerbaijani Turkish speakers and 9% Kurdish speakers.(Amanat, 2012).

Second, national identity constructed exclusively from above is inherently fragile. Both the Pahlavi state and the Islamic Republic invested enormous resources in identity-building projects, and both ultimately discovered that a population cannot be permanently persuaded to accept an identity that does not correspond to their lived experience. The persistence of pre-Islamic symbols throughout the Islamic Republic’s tenure  Nowruz, Hafez, the Shahnameh  is not merely cultural conservatism; it is evidence of an identity that survived the state’s attempts to reshape it.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, the quest for self-determination remains the most powerful driver of Iranian political mobilization. From the Tobacco Boycott of 1891 to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, from the oil nationalization movement of 1951 to the Green Movement of 2009, Iranians have repeatedly demonstrated that what they seek is not a particular ideological content for their identity, but the right to determine that content for themselves.

Yet none of these lessons remain merely historical. All of them are being lived again today, and more sharply than ever.

The Israeli strikes against Iran in 2025 and the escalating US-Iran tensions that followed confronted Iranian society with perhaps the deepest question it had ever been forced to answer: if they do not know who they are in the face of an external threat, how will they respond to it?

The answer appeared, for the first time in such stark clarity, to be split in two. A significant segment of Iranian society  predominantly young, urban, and secular, both inside the country and in the diaspora  came to regard American or Israeli intervention as a potential instrument of liberation from the Islamic Republic. They opened the door, silently or openly, to the prospect of foreign intervention bringing down the regime. On the other side, an equally real and deeply felt current rose in its historical reflex against foreign interference  the memory of the 1953 coup, of British and Russian occupations, of Turkmenchay, remained very much alive. For this segment, the threat was not the Islamic Republic but the violation of sovereignty from outside, once again.

As established through the historical failures of the 1906 and 1979 projects, the heart of the crisis remains the center-periphery conflict. While the center has consistently utilized the constitutional order to enforce a singular identity by excluding ‘the wrong’ linguistic and religious traits, the periphery’s persistent detachment confirms that a top-down national project cannot achieve lasting legitimacy. Consequently, the periphery views the constitutional order not as a binding contract, but as an alien structure built in their absence

This is why the constitutional question in Iran is no longer merely an institutional problem but the question of an existential vulnerability. When a state reaches a point where a significant portion of the people within its borders regards external intervention as less dangerous than internal repression, the crisis of legitimacy can no longer be overcome through constitutional documents alone  only through a genuine confrontation with identity itself. And until that confrontation takes place  not through the state imposing a single answer from above, but through a constitutional accommodation that genuinely recognizes the country’s diversity  the identity crisis set in motion by Gulistan and Turkmenchay will remain unresolved.

Conclusion

Iran’s constitutional history reveals how long and arduous a nation’s struggle for self-definition can be. From 1906 to 1979, and from there to the present, each new constitutional project repeated the same fundamental mistake: it viewed diversity not as a source of strength but as a threat to be managed. Each time, the center grew stronger, and the periphery weakened. Each time, an official identity was imposed, and the lived identity was suppressed. And each time the suppressed returned — in a different form, under a different flag, but with the same fundamental demand: to be recognized as part of the whole.

Asadian‘s panoramic assessment of Iranian nationalism literature is illuminating at this point. Whether we read Iranian identity from an essentialist perspective like Tabatabai, view it as a modern construction shaped by state power like Marashi and Ansari, or assess it as a reaction to foreign pressure as Kashani-Sabet suggests, all these frameworks converge on a single observation: Iranian national identity has always been defined against something. Against the Arab other, against the Western other, against the Turkish other, against the clerical other. What is rarely defined is for all the people who truly live within its borders. That is why the crisis we see today  a society divided on whether foreign intervention or the state governing it is more dangerous  is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a constitutional tradition built on exclusion. For a state that has told a significant portion of its population for one hundred and fifty years that their language, ethnic identity, interpretation of faith, or understanding of the good life do not belong to the national narrative, it should not be surprised when these people refuse to defend it.

The most fundamental yet challenging lesson constitutional theory can offer Iran is this: legitimacy is not declared, it is earned through recognition, through inclusion, through the willingness to allow the nation to be as plural as it truly is. Iran has not yet crossed this threshold. And as it does not overcome it, the identity crisis initiated by Gulistan and Turkmenchay will continue to resurface at every new moment of fracture  not as a failure of the nation, but as the unfinished business of its constitution.

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Batuhan Aydın is an independent international relations expert who holds a BA in International Relations from Bolu Abant Izzet Baysal University. Currently affiliated with the University of Szeged, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, his research interests include constitutional law, national identity, and Middle Eastern politics.