Armenian Christians in Iran

James Barry’s Armenian Christians in Iran is a welcome and important work on the understudied contemporary Armenian community in Iran. The only other book-length study that includes discussion of Armenians is Eliz Sanasarian’s laudable Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge, 2000). Through participant observation and interviews during 2010, 2014, and 2015, Barry explores Armenian ethno-religious identity, the internal and external factors that shape it, its positioning in Iran, and its relationship with “Iranianness.” The first four chapters treat both the external and internal factors at work in the construction of Armenian identity in Iran. What is particularly striking is the discussion of the generational difference in attitudes about belonging to a wider Iranian identity. Barry demonstrates that the shift from Pahlavi ethno-nationalism to post-1979 “religious nationalism” has largely marginalized Armenians, especially those raised in post-revolutionary Iran, and led to their feelings of disconnectedness from the Muslim Iranian majority. Barry argues that unlike, for example, the early twentieth-century constitutional movement, identity has become less fluid. This may not come as a surprise given the Islamic Republic’s emphasis on Shi’ism as the state’s religion, causing Armenians to “feel largely excluded from Iranian society” (p. 19). Sanasarian’s disquiet in 2000 that the government’s stress on a Muslim identity would adversely affect minorities’ belonging to the country is further substantiated by Barry’s more recent findings. Formal and informal discrimination from restriction of rights to state challenges to community autonomy have led Armenians to create their own spaces that exclude non-Armenians.

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