Chapter 6 outlines the conclusions of this investigation and highlights the lasting impacts of modern nationalist discourse on Iran. In addition, the concluding chapter looks at the most recent examples of resistance, through the agency of Iranian citizens. It also looks at contemporary politics inside Iran, and political events related to US–Iran relations with events as recent as the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. In the case of modern Iran, the state and community have been imagined and contested, legitimized and challenged, through the interaction of the state and the people within the global context of colonialism and modernity. By appreciating the complexity of this interaction, we can hope to ascertain a better understanding of national identity in modern Iran. Thus, the book moves beyond the essentialist representation of bipolar Iranian identity, emphasizing Islam versus pre-Islamic civilization, and the more recent proclivity in scholarship to reject both identities as inauthentic.

The epilogue examines the importance of this study in relation to recent events and spotlights female Iranian voices and their ability to express themselves more freely on the Internet. Specifically, the epilogue uses Twitter as an archive to look at the complexity of how Iranians react to contemporary events, which often elicited national sentiments, such as the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, the 2017 Iranian election, the United States quitting the deal in 2018, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, and others. Though the topic of Iran is a staple of our mainstream media and foreign policy debates in the United States, knowledge of Iran’s history, which informs our current state of affairs, is commonly absent from the discussion. The epilogue thus draws on this study to examine the present circumstances of US–Iran relations.

My purpose in this chapter is to concentrate on the individual’s own remembrance of the past and how she renews memories to move history forward in accordance with her own imagination, as well as on the broader constraints and opportunities that shape her present life. The interaction that takes place between individual and collective remembrance requires further attention in the social sciences and within memory studies. This trend permits the formation of a distorted conceptualisation of how change occurs and at times results in overinvesting in a linear progression of history. I marshal various sources of evidence – including a special issue published by a Hezbollah cultural institute, some of the analysed articles from which are not publicly accessible – to argue this: at least one reading of Iranian women’s conceptualisation of their status and formation of rights, roles, and responsibilities in the post-revolutionary era is its nonlinearity and connection to individual goals and memories. I contextualise women’s own words from memoirs and other texts within long-term histories of activism in modern Iran and consider the conditions, structural spaces, and opportunities that made their acts of citizenship visible, and, at times, invisible.

During different moments of conflict, post-revolutionary Iranian’s formal and informal legislation ebbs and flows between plans to condition, eliminate or limit citizenship. This trend in the country’s post-revolutionary history also leaves much space for mediation and slippages that reconfigure national governance projects on the local terrain. In post-revolutionary Iran, then, it is not only the state’s republican elements that make it unpredictable through elections and the press (Osanloo, 2009). Women and the Islamic Republic has argued that when we integrate acts of citizenship into the state-building process, we see that the post-revolutionary Iranian state is heavily conditioned by the gendered legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. Moreover, authoritarianism is an ambiguous project when examined from within society.