Many Iranians have been protesting in front of Roberto Cavalli stores, accusing the designer of plagiarizing a symbol that is trademarked by Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi, School of Islamic Sufism (MTO). The Maktab’s members are vehemently expressing concern over the violation of their sacred imagery. The trademarking of their logo, the objection to its infringement, and the fervent mobilization to contest this violation all speak to the significance of the exclusivity provided by the boundaries constructed around the movement, meant to distinguish the group as both Iranian and Shi‘i Sufi. In this paper, I examine similar instances of religious innovation within the Iranian diaspora in the U.S., by looking at three new religious movements: MTO, the International Association of Sufism (IAS), and the 19ers, all in Northern California.
The socio-political disenchantments that characterize the post-Revolution diasporic experience have created a diverse religious landscape for Iranian expatriates. Religious innovations facilitate the continuous construction of identities at the intersection of being Iranian, American, Muslim, exiled, modern, progressive, and religious. Such constructions facilitate assimilation and subjectivity to newly formed notions of modernity and belonging. Their sense of modernity is multi-dimensional: it adopts the idealized modernity that was communicated through the Shah’s mythologizing of an ancient past that is pristine, superior, and able to abolish centuries of Islamic history to encompass a modernity that is post-enlightenment and European in character and non-Iranian in nature; it includes a modernity characteristic of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic; and it is a modernity that is painted with the anxieties of exile and separation from a homeland. How are these movements, which have formed through a Western subjectivity, facilitating a new sense of Iranianness?
Through a common discourse redefining both Iranianness and religiosity, these movements all reformulate Iranian history, modernity, and Islam, and this reformulation allows the reconstruction of their identity. Most importantly, it facilitates the diasporic experience. For example, MTO solidifies its boundaries to provide an exclusive, tangible space in which the angst of exile and the crisis of identity that characterize the diasporic experience can be alleviated. It allows for a transnational embodiment that consolidates the many dimensions of an Iranian diasporic identity into a single form of belonging, so that being a member of MTO is enough to alleviate the anxiety of being an Iranian in diaspora, being a Muslim in the West, and being a modern Shi’i.
