S8 Ep292: BROKEN PROMISES AND LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION Colleague Brenda Shaffer. Shaffer details how the Islamic Republic initially promised ethnic minorities linguistic and cultural rights to secure power in 1979, only to violently suppress them once established.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
BROKEN PROMISES AND LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION Colleague Brenda Shaffer. Shaffer details how the Islamic Republic initially promised ethnic minorities linguistic and cultural rights to secure power in 1979, only to violently suppress them once established. She explains that this oppression continues today through the policing of non-Persian names on birth certificates and the banning of minority language education. Shaffer argues this linguistic discrimination fuels current unrest, exemplified by Mahsa Amini, whose Kurdish identity was suppressed by state mandates. NUMBER 2
1870 TEHRAN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel. It is December 1979, a constitution underway for the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by the Ayatollah Khomey, who's returned from exile in Paris. |
| 0:17.0 | But there are other Ayatollahs we need to speak of, and Brenda Schaefer's new book, Iran, is |
| 0:22.2 | more than Persia, ethnic politics in Iran. There is the Ayatollah Shariat Madhari, who speaks for the |
| 0:30.4 | Azerbaijani at the time. Eventually, he'll be persecuted, a house arrested, and die in 1986. |
| 0:39.1 | But he objected right away to what he perceived to be a Persian-centric, |
| 0:45.6 | Tehran-dominated decision-making by the Constitution. |
| 0:50.8 | And he was a brave man to speak up. |
| 0:52.5 | Did others from the other ethnic groups also speak up, Brenda? |
| 0:57.1 | The story of the Islamic Republic was that after Khomeini returned to Iran, his emissaries, |
| 1:06.0 | you know, basically they reached out to all the major ethnic groups, and they offered them, you know, language rights, |
| 1:13.4 | cultural rights, schools. |
| 1:15.0 | And so if you think about it, they offered this because they knew that this was attractive to the minority. |
| 1:19.6 | So it tells you something about, you know, those who claim that, oh, they don't care about their languages anymore. |
| 1:25.0 | And it's not important to them. |
| 1:27.2 | They try to seduce them to support the regime with language rights. care about their languages anymore and it's not important to them. They, they, they, |
| 1:28.1 | try to seduce them to support the regime with language rights and school rights to educate their children and their native languages. |
| 1:37.5 | But the minute they gained power, they crystallized their power, they take away this offer of these rights. |
| 1:46.6 | And this created |
| 1:47.3 | a huge rebellion among, you know, most of the ethnic minorities. When you read the history books |
| 1:53.3 | of the revolution, Islamic Revolution in 79, you hardly hear these stories, like the uprising |
| 1:59.1 | of the Hwasi Arabs, uprising of the Turkmen, you know, very fierce, you know, hundreds killed. |
| 2:07.1 | Kurds in Iran really took a decade, you know, while the Iran-Iraq war is going on, you know, Tehran is battling also its own Kurd its own courage, you know, really a decade of suppression. |
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