Manijeh Moradian published a memoir essay in 2009 under the penname Nasrabadi in which she described her relationship with her father. The essay appeared in Callaloo—a journal dedicated to “matters pertinent to African American and African Diaspora Studies worldwide.”1 It was a fitting venue given the elder Moradian's years of service as a professor of architecture at Howard University, an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) where during the 1970s he sympathized with and supported student activists in the Iranian Students Association (ISA).2 The venue is all the more fitting given the younger Moradian's recent monograph which, among many groundbreaking contributions, demonstrates “affects of solidarity” between Iranian and Black American student activists in the 1970s.

Throughout the twentieth century, Azeri Turkish was intermittently banned, occasionally tolerated, but always marginalized in relation to Persian, which was perceived as the unifying, defining, essential language of the nation. Despite the substantial population of Azeri Turkish speakers in Iran—the largest linguistic minority—any attempt to teach the language publicly or to publish in Azeri Turkish has often been regarded, even to this day, as a highly political act of dissidence. Historical analysis of Azeri Turkish texts and a review of policies in language teaching, publication, and censorship within Iranian Azerbaijan reveal a symbiotic but simultaneously paradoxical interaction between this mother tongue and the official master language.

Until a decade ago, it was unusual for officials in the Islamic Republic to use the word aqaliat (minority) to refer to ethno-linguistic minorities or Muslim sect minorities. Efforts to cast Sunni Muslims as a minority, or Azeri speakers, were treated with hostility, as the state, following a specific proclamation on ethnicity and sectarianism by Ayatollah Khomeini, viewed these concepts as divisive to the ummah and ultimately a threat to national security. Aqaliat was instead reserved for non-Muslims, specifically those recognized as minorities in the constitution: Assyrian, Chaldean and Armenian Christians, and Zoroastrian and Jewish Iranians. It is therefore worthwhile to examine how one such minority community, Iranian Armenians, has reacted to these changes.