Abstract
This study examines the interplay of politics, religion and discourse in the representation of the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in government-controlled news websites in Iran. It is grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Van Leeuwen’s social actor network model (2008) is used as the theoretical framework to analyse the linguistic representation of the Iranian leader. In the samples analysed, Khamenei is discursively depicted by features associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Imams of the Shia tradition. Such representations elevate the authority of Khamenei in texts, and naturalise the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih, which authorises a Faqih (Jurist) to assume political leadership in Iran. In this way, the texts are used to maintain and reinforce the dominance of people in positions of power.
Keywords
Introduction
Iran is a theocratic country ruled by Islamic hardliners, with Muslims comprising around 98% of the population (Cheng and Beigi, 2012). Following the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Iranian constitution underwent major changes, and Islamic laws were introduced in all socio-political arenas in the country (Jahanbakhsh, 2003). One of the most significant differences between the era of the Shah and the era following the Islamic revolution is that in the former, the Shah was the dominant leader of a secular state. However, under the Islamic political system, a different dominant power was legitimised through the constitutional law of Iran. This hegemonic power, having unlimited control over the legislative, executive and judicial branches, is called the Vali-ye Faqih, or ‘guardianship of the jurist’ (Jahanbakhsh, 2003; Rawshandil and Lean, 2011). The Vali-ye Faqih holds the highest political and religious position, comparable to that of the Shah before the Islamic revolution.
The men and women who brought the Shah down in 1979 were no doubt seeking more equality and human rights. They might have thought that by changing the political system of Iran, they could be freed from monarchy and dictatorship (Jahanbakhsh, 2003). Nevertheless, as Rawshandil and Lean (2011) note, what happened in reality after the Islamic revolution was the construction and reproduction of another dominant power position, that of the Vali-ye Faqih. According to Rawshandil and Lean (2011), the Vali-ye Faqih is ‘a disputed position of Islamic jurisprudence run by the highest religious scholar, called the Faqih’ (p. xii). This hegemonic power was constructed and legitimised under the constitutional law of Iran following the Islamic revolution.
Khomeini appointed himself the first Vali-ye Faqih in Iran. As Jahanbakhsh (2003) observes, the constitution produced by the cleric-dominated Assembly of Experts [Majles-e Khobragan Rahbari] . . . established the first clerical government of its kind that granted the mandate of the jurists, the [Velayat-e Faqih] based on Ayatollah Khomeini’s interpretation of Shiite theory of political authority. (p. 245)
While the Islamic system in Iran recognises the position of president, the Vali-ye Faqih can veto decisions made by the Iranian president or other powerful bodies. As Hashemi-Najafabadi (2010) clearly states, Velayat-e Faqih ‘gives the governing jurist the same authority as’ the Prophet Muhammad and the Shia Imams to manage ‘the Islamic society’, and this places the Vali-ye Faqih ‘in the position of the’ saints in the Shiite tradition, ‘giv[ing] the people a secondary and supportive role instead of a primary and determinant one in the administration of society’ (p. 203).
Since Shia Islam considers the Vali-ye Faqih to hold the sacred position of Allah’s representative on earth, the person who occupies this position has even more power than the Shah of Iran (Mesbah-Yazdi, 2007). The new hegemonic power constructed and legitimised through the constitutional law of Iran controls every aspect of Iranian society, and no one is in a position to object to the decisions made by the holder of this political and religious position. The Vali-ye Faqih is the symbol of dictatorship in the religious system of Iran (Kadivar, 2004), and the execution or imprisonment of Iranians who insulted the Vali-ye Faqih after the 2009 election rallies in Iran (Irangreenvoice, 2012) shows how any objection to this hegemonic power may lead to disastrous consequences.
According to the latest developments in Iran, the fraudulent nature of the last presidential election in 2009 and the Supreme Leader’s biased support for AhmadiNejad, the disputed winner of that election, have brought into question the authority of the Vali-ye Faqih and thus opened to challenge the highest political and religious rank in Iran (Rafiei, 2012). The Iranian government no doubt requires a high turnout for the 2013 presidential election in order to reinforce the suppression of opposition groups and deter foreign threats. As PressTV (2013) reports, the Iranian Supreme Leader also expressed his concern that there could be a low turnout for the next presidential election in the middle of 2013.
One way of ensuring a mass turnout might be to restore the Supreme Leader’s damaged legitimacy through more intense promotion in government-controlled online media. These news websites could naturalise and legitimise the elevated authority of Khamenei through texts, as they are connected to powerful groups governing Iranian society (Fairclough, 2001). As Ganji (2012) convincingly argues, many executive bodies and authorities have always striven to promote the enshrined aspect of the Vali-ye Faqih. The veneration of Ali Khamenei in this role was expedited by the Iranian authorities following the disputed 2009 election (Rafiei, 2012), and as Vatanka (2012) observes, Khamenei has become the subject of more visible veneration on internet websites.
From a critical perspective, this article draws on Van Leeuwen’s social actor network model (2008: 23–54), a sociosemantic inventory, as a central framework to examine the way Khamenei, the Supreme Leader who holds the rank of Vali-ye Faqih, is discursively represented in government-controlled Persian language news websites in the run-up to the 2013 presidential election. Our analysis is divided into two parts: the first looks at the representation of Khamenei when he is activated as social actor in different processes, and the second examines the way the representation of Khamenei is incorporated into the text through the voices of other social actors. Using this framework, we can categorise the social actors according to sociosemantic rather than lexicogrammatical meaning, which enables us to factor into our analysis the way power is socially assigned to different social actors, and investigate the intended potential meaning of such choices. The linguistic and sociosemantic elements of text can be manipulated to produce specific textual personas for their intended audience (Van Leeuwen, 2008; White, 2005). Van Leeuwen (2008: 6) argues that discourses ‘not only represent what is going on, they also evaluate it, ascribe purpose to it, justify it, and so on, and in many texts these aspects of representation become far more important than the representation of the social practice itself’.
Representations of religious leaders in political contexts
There is an extensive literature on the linguistic representation of political and religious figures in texts and talk, and a great number of investigations have focused on political figures and the presidents of different countries. For instance, Neagu (2008: 173) analysed ‘the speeches held by three presidents representing Germany, Italy and Romania delivered before the European Parliament’.
The representation of religious figures in political contexts has also been the focus of numerous studies. For instance, Sammon (2008) analysed the politics of US bishops concerning abortion, Smith (2008) examined the political messages of Catholic clergies in the USA, and Geis (2009) claimed on scriptural authority that Papal infallibility would appear to be man-made.
In addition, this study identifies another type of leadership in the literature in which the political figure exploits religion to create legitimacy. Medieval kings, the late Kwame Nkrumah and the Iranian Supreme Leader are examples of this category of leadership. A considerable number of studies have explored different aspects of the status of medieval kings and of the late Ghanaian leader, Kwame Nkrumah. For instance, Addo (1999) analysed the religio-political aspect of Nkrumah, who legitimised his power through religion in Ghana. Viroli (2012) highlights various social and religious aspects of medieval kings in Italian history.
Despite a large number of publications on different representational aspects of religious and political figures in texts and talk, there is a paucity of data on the most influential political and religious figure in Iran, namely Khamenei himself. Among the few studies that have been published, Sadjadpour (2009) analyses Khamenei’s speeches in terms of his world view and foreign policy; but to date, no studies have analysed the discursive representation of Khamenei in Iranian online media funded and controlled by the Iranian authorities.
Politics can be regarded as a power struggle ‘between those who seek to assert and maintain their power and those who seek to resist it’ (Chilton, 2004: 3). In the political battlefield of Iran, there are dominant and powerful groups who strive to maintain the authority of the Vali-ye Faqih as an influential political figure. Habitualisation plays a pivotal role in supporting authority, and one significant process of habitualisation occurs through language (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Language plays a pivotal role in power and politics (Van Dijk, 2001) and legitimatises power and authority (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). Language can also ‘misrepresent as well as represent realities, [or] rhetorically obfuscate realities’ (Fairclough, 2006: 1). As Berger and Luckmann (1966) observe, vocabularies for structures of social relations ‘ipso facto legitimate’ these structures (p. 112).
Methodology and analytical framework
This study is fundamentally concerned with the way that online media, funded and controlled by the Iranian authorities, have discursively represented the elevated authority of Khamenei in the run-up to the 2013 presidential election. To this end, a corpus containing all the news reports concerning the Iranian leader published online by 12 government-controlled news websites was collected over the 11-month period from April 2012 to February 2013. Websites are fast gaining popularity as a potential research site for investigating the way in which people’s views on certain issues of interest to the website controllers are shaped.
As noted in the previous section, the Iranian authorities need a mass turnout for the upcoming presidential election following the tumultuous 2009 election, and in these circumstances the Iranian authorities have a strong motivation to reconstruct the authority of Khamenei in online news websites under government control in preparation for the 2013 election. That is the main reason for choosing this particular 11-month period. The next step was to make a selection from the corpus to form a sub-corpus of 500 articles that include the keyword Khamenei. It is also worthy of note that in analysing the discursive representation of the Supreme Leader, this study broadened its analysis beyond mere actor description to a detailing of the co-text of these descriptions in terms of the attributes associated with the leader in the direct or indirect quotes of other social actors activated in the sample texts.
A second sample taken from the same corpus included 250 articles that used the keywords Khamenei and Entekhabat (election), or Khamenei and Fetneh 88. The expression Fetneh 88 was coined by the Iranian authorities to refer to the unrest which followed the 2009 election (Radiofarda, 2013). Twenty-five articles in this sample were subsequently excluded on the grounds that they used the keyword Entekhabat to refer to elections other than the upcoming 2013 presidential election or the disputed 2009 election. A qualitative examination of the remaining 225 articles was made to ascertain how Khamenei was featured in the sample data.
This study is grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA) and adopts Van Leeuwen’s (2003, 2008) social actor network model in order to investigate the discursive representation of Khamenei as a social actor. An important feature of social actors is individualisation. According to Van Leeuwen (2003, 2008), nomination is one form of substitution in which social actors can be represented through unique identities ‘by proper nouns, which can be formal (surname only, with or without honorifics), semi-formal (given name and surname) or informal (given name only)’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 41). Although social actors could be linguistically backgrounded in relation to a given activity, ‘we can infer with reasonable (though never total) certainty who they are’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 29) because of the reference to them elsewhere in the text. Further, to expand the scope of analysis of the Supreme Leader, this study examines activation, beneficialisation, genericisation, assimilation, collectivisation, personalisation and impersonalisation in the sample data.
Social actors can be activated in different processes and beneficialised social actors benefit positively or negatively from an activity (Van Leeuwen, 2003: 45). Social actors can be genericised as different classes without specification, and they can be represented as a group through assimilation. One of the subcategories of assimilation is collectivisation, which represents social actors as groups without specific numeratives. Additionally, personalisation represents social actors ‘as human beings … but social actors can also be impersonalised, represented by’ abstraction and objectivation (p. 59). As Van Leeuwen (2003, 2008) notes, in abstraction social actors are featured by various qualities ascribed to them, and objectivation occurs when social actors are represented through metonymy.
What is noticeable, though, about the analytical framework of Van Leeuwen (2003, 2008) is that such a framework is explicitly based on the English language as a resource for representing social actors, and therefore cannot be applied without modification to Persian texts. The researchers were unable to find any analytical frameworks in the literature designed for Persian for the analysis of the representation of social actors. A significant contribution of this study is therefore to extend Van Leeuwen’s (2003, 2008) social actor model to include Persian. The analysis section shows how this can be done.
Representations of Khamenei as social actor
This section makes a detailed analysis of nine extracts, labelled A to I, containing the key term Khamenei. These extracts were drawn from our corpus of 12 Persian news websites under government control.
Attention is drawn in extract A to Khamenei as a significant social actor who is assigned a unique identity realised by surname and titulation in terms of honorifications such as ‘Imam’ (which is also bestowed on his predecessor Khomeini) and ‘Grand Ayatollah’; and he is categorised as ‘Islamic world leader’.
Source: Fars News (2012b).
In this context, it is important to be aware of the eminence associated with the honorific title Imam. In everyday usage, an Imam is the man who leads the prayers in the mosque, but as an honorific title it is used for the leaders of Islam through the ages. Shia Islam (the kind of Islam practised in Iran) recognises 12 infallible Imams who were the very successors of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Giving the title to Khamenei thus gives him (along with his predecessor Khomeini) the highest possible rank in present-day Islam. As Khan (2007: 64) puts it, Imam is the highest honorific rank bestowed upon ‘divinely inspired scholars and saints, ranking below only the Prophet himself in the Shia religious hierarchy’.
The other honorific title given to Khamenei is Grand Ayatollah. An Ayatollah is a ‘sign of God’ (Sadjadpour, 2009: 6), an authority on matters concerning Islam, and only a few very senior ayatollahs are given the title Grand Ayatollah. According to Childress (2011: 49), ‘Shia Muslims consider grand ayatollahs supreme legal authorities’. It is significant that only Khamenei is given the title Grand Ayatollah in the extract analysed or elsewhere in the data. Khamenei is also identified in terms of what he is rather than what he does, namely Islamic world leader, which makes a claim that speaks for itself. According to Van Leeuwen (2008: 41), this kind of nomination ‘blurs the dividing line between nomination and categorisation’.
The use of Imam and Grand Ayatollah entails the claim that, as the person who holds the position of the Vali-ye Faqih, Khamenei is the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muhammad and the Shia Imams, and that he has supreme legal authority as the Islamic world leader. This representation of Khamenei also underpins and legitimises Iran’s constitution, in which the Vali-ye Faqih is considered the highest political and religious rank in Iran.
The choice between formal and informal nomination and with and without honorifics is an important factor in the representation of the social actors. In extract B below, Khamenei and the Iranian president AhmadiNejad are nominated formally as sayers in the verbal process ‘to give a speech’ without the use of their personal names, which are, respectively, Ali and Mahmoud.
Detailed speech given by Source: Fars News (2012a).
In view of the supreme status of Khamenei, it is reasonable to expect anybody else, including the president himself, to be accorded lower status. This is clearly indicated by the use of the honorific title ‘Hazrat Ayatollah’ for Khamenei and no title at all for AhmadiNejad. Hazrat is in fact an exalted title used exclusively for the Prophet Muhammad and the infallible Shia Imams.
As in extract A, the exalted titles legitimise Khamenei’s position and the ideology that considers this position a sacred political and religious rank. The use of honorific titles in naming people formally shows respect in Iranian culture and the Iranian media. The lack of a title for the Iranian president indicates that the president has a lower status than Khamenei as the most influential religious and political figure.
Extract C utilises two kinds of representation, semiformal nomination (surname and given name, as in ‘Ban Ki-moon’) and possessivated functionalisation (‘the Muslim world leader’s speech’), with the social actor activated as the possessing participant of the product of what he does (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 43). The choice is important from a critical perspective.
Source: IUS News (2012).
By constructing Ban Ki-moon’s textual persona as bound to his personal and individual identity, a contrast is set up between him and Khamenei, ‘the Muslim world leader’, a designation used exclusively for him and one that points to his exalted status. This title is commonly used in Shia Islam to refer to the Prophet and the 12 Shia Imams.
Notice the use of possessivation to activate Khamenei as a social actor, backgrounding agency changing ‘the Muslim world leader’s speech’ into the possession of a verbal process (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 43). Another interesting point is the active participation role assigned to Ban Ki-moon in relation to Khamenei. The representation of Ban Ki-moon in the active role of ‘making notes from the Muslim world leader’s speech’ conveys the asymmetrical power relationship between the two social actors, the former a student or novice, the latter the master.
The representation of Khamenei in extract D as a sayer in the active and dynamic role of delivering a speech automatically assigns the audience the passive role of undergoing the activity of listening.
Source: IranBrazil Embassy News (2012).
Khamenei is nominated formally with the honorific title Ayatollah, and identified and categorised as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. He is also given two significant new titles in this sample, Valie-amermoslemin and Farmodand. The first indicates that he is leader, commander and guardian in Iran in accordance with the Velayat-e Faqih, as stipulated in Iranian constitutional law. Very significantly, such representations are also used for Shia saints.
The second title, Farmodand, has to do with authoritative sayings, which have an extremely important status in Islamic tradition. The Hadith, for example, contains the collected sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The term Farmodand is mostly used in Persian religious texts in connection with quotations from the Prophet and the 12 infallible Imams of the Shia tradition. Giving this title to Khamenei implies that he is an author of sayings and has the same rank as the Prophet and the 12 Imams. It is also significant that he is given this title in the context of giving a speech. The implication is that the Farmodand has said something of major importance in his speech.
In extract E, Khamenei is activated as sayer in verbal processes, that is, to state and to point out. His activation is realised by nomination as the Supreme Leader and anaphorically by the honorific pronoun Ishan, which shows respect and corresponds to the English ‘he’ or ‘she’ according to context.
Source: Supreme Leader News (2012).
It is significant that Ishan refers uniquely to ‘the Supreme Leader’, and it is not used to substitute for any political positions other than the Vali-ye Faqih. This use of the pronoun confirms Khamenei’s political and religious rank as equal to that of the Prophet of Islam and the Shia Imams, and illustrates another way in which he is exalted through the use of language.
This situation could construct the elevated authority of the Supreme Leader in texts and legitimise the ideology that the Vali-ye Faqih is a sacred religious and political position reserved for the appointed representatives of Allah from the Prophet Muhammad through the Shia Imams. In addition, the Vali-ye Faqih is activated in the verbal processes of preaching and advising the Iranian nation in many instances of the analysed news.
Khamenei is not subjected to (or in Van Leeuwen’s terms beneficialised by) any criticism or suggestion. Nor do any news websites mention any interviews with the Iranian leader. In the Shia tradition, only Masoum or infallible figures are believed to be guarded against sins (Lalljee, 1990), and this eliminates the possibility of suggestion or criticism. Since Khamenei is not the recipient of any criticisms or suggestions or challenges in any interview in the samples analysed, or in the corpus as a whole, discursive representations of this kind characterise him by implication as infallible.
The choice to represent the activated social actors as classes or specific identifiable individuals can be utilised to suit the interests and purposes of the audience for whom they are intended (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 28). In extract F, Khamenei is individually identified as the Supreme Leader who is coded as sayer in the verbal process of saying.
The Supreme Leader said … those who wish to become presidential candidates [for the 2013 election] should consider qualifications as stipulated by the Iranian constitutional law upon which the Guardian Council also emphasises … The presidential candidates must … abide by the constitution … Source: Khamenei.ir News (2012).
The significance of representing Khamenei as the Supreme Leader is noteworthy because it gives him the authority to give advice on matters concerned with presidential candidates. In his speech, a group of social actors are assimilated and collectivised as potential presidential candidates and they are required to be loyal to Iran’s constitutional law and assess their qualifications according to the Iranian constitution. The collectivisation of these social actors in extract F represents them as a ‘homogeneous, consensual group’ and ‘helps to signal their agreement’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 38). This could also exclude as potential contenders those collectivised social actors who are against the constitution. A group of social actors are impersonalised as the Guardian Council and are activated in the process of underlining Iranian constitutional law.
In other analysed sample articles, the Guardian Council is also featured as a government body having the central role in vetting or approving presidential contenders. Such an impersonalisation ‘can lend impersonal authority or force to an activity or quality of a social actor’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 60). Extract F also excludes those social actors who wrote ‘the Iranian constitution [which] is full of contradictions’ (Hasib, 2004: 10) and revised the constitution under the direct command of Khomeini three months before his death, so that Khamenei could take on the mantle of supreme power (Milani, 1993). In the corpus collected for this study, these social actors are radically excluded. This could obscure the controversial reality that the appointment of Khamenei as the Iranian Supreme Leader may be tainted with bias and prejudice.
Additionally, the discourses of ‘Contenders’ loyalty to the constitution’ and ‘Contenders’ obedience to the Guardian Council’s decisions’ are supported in a large number of cases within the analysed samples. One potential reason for the emphasis on the adherence of presidential candidates could be that Article 5 of the constitution stipulates the importance of the Vali-ye Faqih in the political hierarchy of Iran. On the same note, based on Article 99 of the constitution, the Guardian Council, as one of the most influential institutions, has the central role in vetting or approving presidential contenders. This council is ‘held by individuals either directly appointed by Khamenei or deeply loyal to him’ (Sadjadpour, 2009: v). The underpinning of the discourses of ‘Contenders’ loyalty to the constitution’ and ‘Contenders’ obedience to the Guardian Council’s decisions’ could reconstruct Iran’s closed cycle of power under the unquestioning leadership of Khamenei in the government-controlled online media.
Ultimately, the activation of Khamenei in the process of administrating Iran and his depiction as an important religious figure, are prominent features of all the articles in the corpus compiled for this study. Such discursive representations could be described as overdetermination, in terms of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) inventory: ‘Overdetermination occurs when social actors are represented as participating, at the same time, in more than one social practice’ (p. 47). This recurring feature makes a remarkable distinction between Khamenei and other world leaders, such as the Queen of England and the presidents of other countries. While other important world leaders may have political or religious influence and so be activated in one of these social practices, Iran’s constitution authorises Khamenei as the most influential political and religious figure in Iran. This may also be the reason Sadjadpour (2009: i) identifies Khamenei as ‘Iran’s most powerful leader’.
In all the extracts so far, Khameini is given some kind of honorific title. What is interesting about extract G is that he is nominated without honorification.
… it seemingly became visible to everyone [following the 2009 post-election unrest] that Source: Sadidnews News (2013).
The most likely explanation is that this is an example of interdiscursivity taken from political discourse, in which it is common to compare leaders to their predecessors. Perhaps the most famous comparison in recent political history occurred in the US vice-presidential debate in 1988, when Bentsen put down Quayle by telling him, ‘Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy’. This case is slightly different, in that ‘Khamenei is another Khomeini’ is taken directly from the slogans chanted by crowds in praise of the Supreme Leader before and during Khamenei’s speeches. Like any slogan, it has to be kept short, which is a reason for not using titles; and without titles, the comparison is reinforced by the near phonological parallelism of the two names Khamenei and Khomeini. Of course, the comparison can in principle be favourable or unfavourable, and a Western leader can be compared to Churchill or to Hitler. On the lips of adulatory crowds, however, it can be taken for granted that the comparison is intended to be favourable.
As Van Leeuwen (2008) notes, ‘all nominations can be used as vocatives and do not occur with a possessive pronoun, except in contexts of special endearment’ (p. 41). This representation of Khamenei without honorification can thus perhaps be considered a kind of vocative. Owing to the lack of nomination of Khamenei in a non-vocative sense in other sample articles, and based on the context and co-text of the depiction, one can argue that this representation in extract G is a technique to praise and depict the elevated authority of Khamenei.
It is interesting to note the contrast between the representation of Khamenei as the Supreme Leader and in the context of his personal and kinship relations (see extracts H and I). In this context, his family members, namely wife, mother and siblings, are activated in relation to him in his relational roles as husband, son and brother.
In extract H below, Khamenei is activated in two ways in the process of getting married: by formal nomination representing him as a specified individual, and by relational identification possessivated by means of a genitive which represents Khamenei in his personal relation with another, namely his wife (Khamenei’s wife). Note here the lack of titulation.
Source: Aftab News (2012).
In the announcement of his marriage to Ms Khojasteh, Khamenei is personalised and individualised and nominated through semi-formalisation (given name and surname), but he is also given the honorific title (titulated by) Sayyid, a term used to refer to descendants of the Prophet in Muslim societies (Böwering et al., 2013: 190). This further elevates his authority and legitimises the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih. Sayyid simultaneously implies a family relationship in Persian. In this way, this is an example of the blurring of the distinction between titulation and relational identification to achieve ‘specific representational effects’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 53). It is argued that ‘in actual discursive practices, the choices’ for the representation of social actors ‘need not always be rigidly’ distinctive (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 53).
Khamenei was nominated through informalisation in a few cases, especially in the context of his family. In extract I, only his given name is nominated, as one might expect in a family context, but very significantly, it is accompanied by the honorific title Sayyid. Here, Khamenei is beneficialised by the social act of his mother Khadija, represented in her relational role by means of the possessivated relational identification, as in Khamenei’s mother.
Ms. Khadija [ Source: Aftab News (2012).
Notice that the two brothers (i.e. Sayyid Ali and Sayyid Mahmoud) are categorised through relational identification and individualised through the use of their given names and the honorific Sayyid. In this case, as in the last example, the use of the term Sayyid blurs the distinction between titulation and relational identification.
Although Khamenei and his brother are appropriately given the title Sayyid, there are others mentioned in the corpus who also qualify for the same title. These include the two opposition leaders, Khatami and Mossavi. However, they are never given the title anywhere in the corpus samples examined. The exclusion of this honorification in the case of these social actors could be used by the Iranian online media, funded and controlled by the Iranian authorities, to construct a lack of respect for the opposition to Khamenei. This gives further textual support to the authority of Khamenei as the Vali-ye Faqih.
Attributing Khamenei’s representations to other social actors
Fairclough (2003: 46) argues that ‘for any particular text or type of text, there is … a set of voices which are potentially relevant, and potentially incorporated into the text’. In this section, we expand on the previous analysis by giving details of the attributes assigned to Khamenei by the voices of other social actors activated in five further extracts (J to N). The social actors are activated as sayers in verbal processes of highlighting (the first part of extract J), reiterating (the second part of extract J), adding (the third part of extract J), saying (extracts K and L), reporting (extract M) and as senser in the mental process of considering (the third part of extract J).
In extract J, the sayer is individualised through formalisation using the Persian surname Nazari. Through the agency of Ayatollah Nazari, Khamenei is assigned the attributes of selflessness, prudence and frugality.
Source: Maznews News (2012).
In Islamic texts, these attributes are associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 Shia Imams. Note the use of remarkable to describe the characteristics of the Ayatollah. Nazari’s nomination is titulated in the form of honorification, namely Ayatollah, a title given in recognition of the sayer’s authority on matters concerning Islam. This nomination is significant as it lends credibility to his views about the need for the Vali-ye Faqih in Shia. This is made clear in the continuation of extract J, which is reproduced below: Ayatollah Nazari, a distinguished Alem lecturing at Mazandaran Islamic school, reiterates that Iran is Shia and this sector without Velayat-E Faqih cannot live. The Shias need Faqih and Mujtahid to succeed the Last Imam in the Shia faith who is hidden. Shia believes in Imamat thus they need the Vali-ye Faqih.
Nazari is functionalised as an Islamic school lecturer, and he is also nominated with reference to his expert knowledge in terms of identification as ‘a distinguished Alem’. Someone described as Alem is deemed to have extensive expertise in religious studies. In this way, Nazari is presented as a witness of unquestionable reliability, and his point about the importance of the Vali-ye Faqih for the Shia faith and Shia Muslims, presented in the second sentence in the form of free indirect speech, is to be taken seriously. In addition, this social actor indicates that the Vali-ye Faqih is of the same rank as the Mahdi, the last Imam of Shia Islam. According to Twelver Shia belief, the last Shia Imam ‘went into occultation and would return in the future as the Mahdi’ (Scharbrodt, 2008: 7). Nazari’s quotations also implicitly support Article 5 of Iran’s constitution, which gives authority to the Vali-ye Faqih as the dominant religious and political leader of Iran. This article clearly stipulates that ‘until Imam Mahdi reappears … it is the task of the Vali-ye Faqih, the leader, to lead the people’ (Robbers, 2007: 415).
Further on in the text of extract J (see below), Nazari individualises the Vali-ye Faqih through formalisation with the honorifics Hazrat and Ayatollah and the name Khamenei. In this way, Vali-ye Faqih is in Van Leeuwen’s terms (2003, 2008) backgrounded in the text.
He considers Hazrat Ayatolalah Khamenei as the perfect man, an efficient manager, great thinker, and observing fairness in every aspect. He added that Hazrat Khamenei is wise, thoughtful and kind.
The pronoun he is used to substitute for the social actor Nazari. In the indirect quoted predicate, Nazari assigns to Khamenei the attributes of the perfect man, an efficient manager, a great thinker, with the virtues of fairness, wisdom, thoughtfulness and kindness. These attributes also project the image of a holy person, and in Shia Islam texts, these attributes are also given to the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Shia Imams.
The sayer of the verbal process ‘to say’ in extract K is individualised and functionalised as the chairman of the Majles-e Khobragan Rahbari (‘Assembly of Experts’).
Source: Hamshahrionline News (2012)
This strategy of constructing legitimacy is what Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) refer to as legitimation through authorisation, that is, where authority is associated with a person ‘in whom institutional authority of some kind is vested’ (Vaara and Tienari, 2008; see also extract J with reference to Ayatollah Nazari). In the second sentence of the quotation, Khamenei is given the attributes of a Faqih (Islamic jurist) and the greatest leader and Islamic fighter. Mahdavikani notes that supporting Ayatollah Khamenei is vajeb (‘necessary according to Islamic law’) and that weakening his position is haram (‘forbidden’). In the Shia tradition, endorsing the Prophet and the 12 Shiite Imams is vajeb in light of the fact that they are infallible, and act as God’s representatives on earth. In this way, quoted utterances of this kind concerning Khamenei endorse the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih and the notion that this religious and political position has the same rank as the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 Shia Imams. In addition, this assertion clearly shows that the function of the Assembly of Experts itself, Majles-e Khobragan Rahbari, which is the sole government body authorised to review Khamenei’s ‘performance periodically and has the power to dispose and replace him’ in Iran’s constitution (International Business Publications (IBP), 2006: 32), is purely adulatory. Such representations of Khamenei could further construct the elevated authority of Khamenei.
In extract L, a former Iranian official who had previously held a position in Sepah Militia makes a close comparison between Khamenei and Hussein, the third infallible Imam in the Shia tradition.
[ Source: Ilna News (2013).
The former official Davood asserts that Khamenei’s recommendation influences Allah’s decision whether to send people to Hell or to Heaven. A common belief among Shia Muslims – but not necessarily among Shia Faqihs and scholars – is that the Prophet Muhammad and the Shia Imams will intercede (Shaffi-shodan) or influence Allah’s verdict on the day of judgement and change the evil deeds perpetrated by Shia Muslims (Gharavi, 2000). Giving the attribute of Shaffi (someone who intercedes) and comparing Khamenei with Imam Hussein enshrines this social actor and implies that the Supreme Leader holds the same rank as the Prophet himself and the Shia Imams. The discursive representation of this social actor in the same vein legitimises the ideology that sees the Vali-ye Faqih as head of the community of believers in an unbreakable line of succession leading back to the Shia saints.
An intriguing fact about the activated social actors who assign positive attributes to Khamenei in extracts K and L is that they were either influential political and religious figures in Iran or former Iranian officials (see e.g. Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). They were all activated in the process of praising Khamenei with his outstanding characteristics. Such discursive representations could further reconstruct the elevated authority of the Iranian Supreme Leader. In Van Leeuwen’s terms (2008), besides personalised social actors, some social actors were impersonalised and activated in the process of describing Khamenei’s attributes. These impersonalised social actors are sometimes metonymically represented. In other words, objectivation as a subcategory of impersonalisation ‘is realised by metonymical reference’ (p. 59).
Two groups of social actors were impersonalised and objectivised in extract M as Fars News Agency (an Iranian news agency) and Assafir newspaper (an Arabian news agency).
Source: Fars News (2012c).
The Assafir newspaper was activated in the process of publishing a note that assigned the attribute of thoughtfulness to Khamenei. ‘Impersonalisation … can lend impersonal authority or force to an activity or quality of a social actor’ (Van Leeuwen, 2003: 60). Hence, this type of impersonalisation ‘lends a kind of personal authority to the utterance’ that assigns a positive personal trait to Khamenei (p. 60).
Such discursive metonymical representations could be a technique employed by the Persian websites, funded and controlled by the Iranian authorities, to suggest that Khamenei is considered a capable leader by foreigners and Iranians alike. None of these articles made clear reference to their sources for further analysis by their readers and so it is impossible to verify the claims made in these articles concerning the favourable descriptions of Khamenei in foreign newspapers. In addition, none of these articles activated any foreign news agencies or newspapers in the process of assigning less favourable attributes to Khamenei, and this may challenge the impartiality of these articles.
The activated sayer in the verbal process of saying (i.e. Muhammad Hassan) in extract N represents Khamenei as a specific identifiable individual, the Supreme Leader, and a member of the national security and policy council – a government body ensuring the security of Iran and eventually Khamenei’s authority – as opposed to genericised social actors, candidates, political parties, political figures and enemies.
Source: Irna News (2013).
As Van Leeuwen (2008) notes, ‘In middle-class oriented newspapers government agents and experts tend to be referred to specifically: . . . the point of identification, the world in which one’s specifics exist, is here, not the world of the governed, but the world of the governors, the “generals”’ (p. 35). This could make the reader lose the point of identification of these social actors, and de-emphasise them against Khamenei and a member of the National Security and Policy Council.
The social actors activated include:
Muhammad Hassan: a member of the national security and policy council;
Supreme Leader: the social actor activated as the most influential figure in the upcoming election;
candidates and political figures and political parties: categories of genericised social actors which refer to different candidates and lobbies for the upcoming presidential election;
enemies: a category of genericised social actors abstracted with the negative feature of enmity which could refer to foreign countries, some domestic political parties, and individuals that the Iranian government regard as the opposition;
Khamenei: activated as a social actor through possessivation of ‘Farmayeshat’, a term commonly used when referring to the social practice of the Prophet and the 12 infallible Shiite Imams as sayers of quotations recorded in the religious texts of the Shia tradition.
The online media controlled and funded by the Iranian authorities are attempting to reconstruct the Supreme Leader’s authority – which was shattered by the 2009 post-election unrest – in the run-up to the 2013 presidential election. Associating Khamenei with ‘Farmayeshat’ could support the notion that this political and social position has the same rank as saints in the Shia tradition.
To summarise this section, Khamenei was not assigned any sinister or evil attributes in the quoted statements of personalised and impersonalised social actors. On the contrary, he was ascribed those personal traits typically mentioned in relation to Muhammad and the Shiite Imams in Shia religious texts. One can thus contend that such discursive representations of activated social actors serve to enshrine Khamenei, construct his elevated authority and naturalise the ideology that he is the legitimate successor.
Discussion
The different terms used to describe Khamenei’s position consistently confer upon him the most exalted status in the company of the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Shia Imams. Authoritative witnesses bear testimony to his manifold excellent qualities. He is selfless, prudent and frugal, and he is wise, thoughtful and kind. On the other hand, he has no undesirable qualities at all. What is left unclear in the extracts is the logical relationship between Khamenei’s exalted status and his personal qualities. One might expect them to be inferred from extensive observation of his personal behaviour, and yet none of the witnesses gives any evidence to support the claims made about his excellent qualities. The alternative is that given his exalted status, the qualities can be inferred by a process of deduction. His alleged lack of bad qualities, for example, follows as a logical necessity from the view that he is beyond criticism and cannot be questioned.
The logical coherence of the extracts depends in large measure on the religious beliefs incorporated in the meaning of terms and titles such as Grand Ayatollah. It is not easy for an Iranian who is also a Shia muslim to attack the ideology substantiated in the extracts, and at the same time avoid contradiction. For example, the claims made for Khamenei’s exalted position relate to his religious authority, and it is taken for granted without question or comment (as one might expect given a theocratic system of government) that he also wields political power. The critic therefore has to begin by arguing for the separation of religious authority and secular power, which is a philosophical position far removed from the real-world issues actually being contested.
The real issues include, of course, the alleged dictatorship of the Vali-ye Faqih (Kadivar, 2004); alleged vote rigging in the 2009 election; and the Supreme Leader’s continued support for AhmadiNejad, the disputed winner of that election, and the execution or imprisonment of Iranians following the 2009 election rallies (Irangreenvoice, 2012). The events of 2009 have now emerged as a problem in the run-up to the election in 2013.
Based on the pool of obtained data for this study, no Iranian websites under the control of the government individualised Khamenei through informalisation without the honorific Sayyid, through formalisation without honorifics or semi-formalisation without his designations and the honorific Sayyid. The formalisation of Khamenei without honorifics was used only as a vocative with reference to the context of slogans chanted to support the Supreme Leader before and during his speeches, and in the specific context of family in terms of his personal relation to his wife and kinship relation to his mother, possessivated by means of a genitive (Khamenei’s mother, Khamenei’s wife). Additionally, analysis of the co-text in which this social actor was depicted in terms of the descriptions of other social actors about the Iranian leader, revealed that all the characters in the analysed articles were activated in the process of highlighting favourable traits of Khamenei, which border on the attributes of the Prophet Muhammad and the 12 infallible Imams of Shia Islam.
According to Fairclough (2006) and Van Leeuwen (2008), any choice of words can depict the world in a particular manner and obscure realities. The lack of nomination of Khamenei through the above-mentioned features and ascribing saint-like traits to this social actor could construct his elevated authority in the media and depict this person as a holy identity, having the same rank as the Shiite saint Imams and the Prophet, and obscure the reality that this social actor is like any other and as such is fallible. In other terms, power and dominance are important aspects in CDA, which could be reconstructed through language (Fairclough, 2001). The connotative meaning of the honorifics Imam, Hazrat and Grand Ayatollah and attributing traits typically given to saints in the Shia tradition could reconstruct the ideology that the Vali-ye Faqih is a power legitimised by Allah’s will to govern people and thus can treat them as he wishes.
The representation of this social actor through designations such as commander, leader, guardian of the Iranian people and the Muslim world could also reinforce the idea that this political and religious position has absolute control over the lives of the Iranian people. This study investigated the social actors featured in relation to the 2012 presidential election in the analysed sample articles as well. The recurring themes suggested that the activation of all social actors in such news articles was aimed to foreground the supremacy of Khamenei and to reconstruct the closed cycle of power that ensures the dominance of the Vali-ye Faqih.
Conclusion
There is a sharp contrast between what many ordinary Iranians will remember in the aftermath of the 2009 elections and the characterisation of Khamenei and his government provided by government-controlled websites. Unless the allegations are entirely without foundation, there is little to be gained by answering them and entering into logical discussions with the opposition. Instead, the contributors to the websites very cleverly exploit the religious beliefs of the people to support the government. After all, if one really does believe that the Vali-ye Faqih is God’s representative on earth, it is difficult to oppose him and the government which he leads. Although the discourse uses the language of religious titles, good works and noble personal qualities, the thinking behind it is the rational thinking of realpolitik.
From a research point of view, the ultimate importance of this study is that the legitimisation and naturalisation of this political and religious position in texts was highlighted within the CDA approach and with the aid of Van Leeuwen’s (2003, 2008) social actor network model. This study has showed how the ideology of Velayat-e Faqih proposed by Khomeini, the late leader of the Islamic revolution, and stipulated in Iran’s constitutional law can be realised through discursive representation of the Iranian Supreme Leader by the online Persian news websites controlled by the Iranian government. In retrospect, considering Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) comment on the way vocabularies for structures of social relations ‘ipso facto legitimate’ these structures (p. 112), one can contend that such discursive representations can legitimise and naturalise the religious and political rank of the Vali-ye Faqih. This in turn has the potential to maintain the status quo, and ensure the continuing dominance of powerful people (Fairclough, 2001, 2012).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.