With the radical political change in 1979, Iran’s revolutionary state assumed the responsibility of re-rewriting the past history to forge a new sense of belonging, a particularly collective religious (Shia) identity. It launched a complex process of forgetting and remembering to first eliminate the ethnic (Persian), non-religious memories and heritage, associated and celebrated by the previous regime, and then establish a sense of continuity with the country’s Shia past; a feeling markedly engendered with a distinguishing symbolic reservoir of Shia traditions and memories, presented in history books, literature, the media, and everyday culture.
This paper seeks to examine the role of street names in this process of reconstructing a new religious (Shia) collective memory and identity with particular reference to Tehran, Iran during the 1979–2019 period. It seeks to analyze the widespread renaming of streets and public spaces in Tehran as one means of both ‘de-commemorating’ the pre-revolutionary regime and celebrating the Shia legacy and memories. The new names commemorating a) revolutionary personalities and religious heroes, b) religiously significant events and ‘turning points’, c) sanctified sites, and d) religious ideals and principles and are assigned to forge a religious meaning for Iranian identity.
As a case study, this paper gives particular attention to the renaming of Shayad Square and Tower, constructed in the previous regime to mark the 2,500th year of the foundation of the Imperial State in Iran, as the manifestation of the revolutionary regime’s effort to construct a new collective identity. The paper, in short, argues that Tehran’s street names can be ‘read’ as a mirror of the state project seeking to ‘correct’ the long-lasting conflict over the meaning of Iranian identity and its ‘remembered’ collective memory.
