The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations by Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 7, no. 1 (2020), 86–89 ISSN 2169-4435 MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI MOBASHER, The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). Pp. 284. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 9781477316641. REVIEWED BY SAHAR RAZAVI, California State University, Sacramento, email: mailto:razavi@csus.edu Mobasher’s volume on the Iranian diaspora offers insights into a variety of diasporic Iranian communities, all in the West with the exception of one study on the Iranian experience in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The book aims to expand existing knowledge about Iranians in diaspora, expanding the field beyond previous studies which were small in number and limited in scope, and thus not generalizable to larger populations. While the chapters of the book are collected in a volume presenting a range of experiences in this particular community, taken together the book offers a glimpse into what Mobasher calls a “unique” identity in which the country of origin and the country of destination combine to form a new way to be Iranian. This new kind of “Iranianness” is in a constant state of construction and reconstruction as Iranians navigate the sometimes precarious social and political landscapes in which they find themselves. Sahar Sadeghi’s study on the sense of belonging and foreignness of first- and second-generation Iranians in Germany confronts segmented assimilation theory, which suggests that by the second generation, immigrants’ acculturation to the host country takes on the existing social stratification in their new societies. Iranians in Europe generally have high levels of human capital, including wealth and educational achievement, but this has not led to greater levels of integration in places like Germany, where marginalization from the opportunity networks enjoyed by “ethnic” Germans. Importantly, Sadeghi shows that in spite of high socioeconomic and educational achievement, language fluency, and social integration, the “impact of racialization, prejudice, exclusion, and discrimination” (70) result in similar levels of a sense of belonging and foreignness among secondand first-generation Iranians in Germany. This is not, she notes, a Mashriq & Mahjar 7, no. 1 (2020) 87 purely abstract notion, but has a significant material impact on immigrants’ quality of life and opportunity networks beyond the first generation. Halleh Ghorashi’s study on Iranians in the Netherlands argues that integration and assimilation are much more complex than can be conceptualized along a simple success-to-failure continuum. Iranians in the Netherlands adapted to their new host society and integrated successfully as a whole, yet this did not result in a “sense of belonging to Dutch society” (76). Orientalist images of the “other” persist in the Netherlands, creating an environment in which no matter how wellintegrated Iranian or Muslim immigrants are, even as they attain high levels of education and language fluency, they remain in the public imaginary as fundamentally distinct from the Dutch. Ghorashi relies on a “thick” notion of Dutch national identity to suggest that Iranian immigrants in the Netherlands may, at best, hope to be tolerated. In their analysis of Iranian immigrants in Great Britain, Kathryn Spellman Poots and Reza Gholami show that in comparison with Iranians in other European countries, those in Great Britain report lower levels of race-based discrimination. Iranian immigrants in Britain are often treated as more or less integrated in society based on perceptions of their secularism or religiosity. Even symbols of Islam in Iranian cultural settings in Britain tend to be presented as more artifacts of Iranian, rather than Muslim, identity. The authors note that “selective inclusion” on this basis sometimes takes place based on historically inaccurate ideas about an irreligious pre-Islamic Iran, many of which are tangled with imperial nostalgia among Iranians. When secular British Iranians “perform” their Britishness to bolster popular perception of their integration into British society, they may do so at the expense of other, more religious elements of the Iranian community in Great Britain. What results is a fracturing of the British Iranian diaspora, which has larger implications for the process of integration and acculturation. Behzad Sarmadi’s study on Iranians in the UAE is unique for two reasons. First, Sarmadi offers a novel examination of the ways in which proximity and impermanence affect Iranian identity for migrants of Iranian origin in...