Language plays a key role in Iranian politics. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a rhetoric of engineering has come to dominate how politics and political dissent in Iran are conceptualized and explained. This preoccupation replaced the “medicalized” vocabulary that emerged during the 1905–09 Constitutional Revolution, with its emphasis on “diagnosis” of the “body national.” Makers of the Islamic Revolution crafted a Pasteurian conception of religion as the cure for national and social ills. In recent decades as problems have mounted that Islam cannot cure, the language of politics has turned toward engineering. Reconstruction Jihad, a revolutionary institution established in 1979 and upgraded to a ministry in 1984, provided a site where Islamic concerns converged with a discourse of engineering. These concerns became urgent during and immediately after the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), when the nascent Islamic government had to deal with extensive destruction. Postwar reconstruction was the focus of Iranian president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989–97), hailed as the “Construction Commander” (sardar-i sazandigi), and many engineers have since risen to national prominence.
The Emergence of Clerico-Engineering as a Form of Governance in Iran