Social movement scholars, especially scholars of right-wing movements, tend to see cultural and value concerns as the framing tool for rightist and/or conservative movements. That is, structural changes including immigration, rising status of minorities, and the devaluation of political and economic power of racial and ethnic majorities give rise to rightist movements. Culture helps right-wing groups frame structural anxieties. The rise of the Islamist, rightist movement in 1990s’ Iran problematizes this scholarly tradition. I argue that moral and value concerns, independent of structural changes, gave birth to the Islamist, rightist movement in Iran.
With the end of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Islamist, revolutionary groups perceived some of the cultural changes in the Iranian society as threats to ideological cores of the 1979 Iranian revolution. One of the most mobilizing cultural issues for Islamists was “bad-hijabi.” Drawing on Risalat, one of the most widely-read right-wing newspapers, I discuss how Islamists mobilized around various cultural and moral issues, especially bad-hijabi. This project helps me raise the understudied profile of value wars within rightist movement studies.
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