| Summary/Abstract |
Sectarian polemic directed at Sunni Muslims in Iran and elsewhere in the Shi’ite world has traditionally foregrounded the historic conflict over and fallout from the Prophetic succession as one of the primary markers of Sunni difference. In contrast to this precedent, I argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a newly formulated parallel discourse in the trajectory of sectarian polemic that is rooted less in such age old concerns and instead couches difference more as a matter of the supposedly problematic contemporary social behaviours of the maligned community. In demonstrating this, I focus on two elements—efforts to associate the Sunni populations at large with fanaticism and violence, and the construction of Sunni Muslims in Iran as hyper-fertile. Drawing on a mixed methodology of media analysis and anthropologically informed ethnographic fieldwork in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, this paper concludes by pointing to the origins of this rhetoric in a confluence of the weakening of traditional mythopoetic discourse among the youthful middle-class, their replacement by a new ‘nationalist Shi’ism’, and its subsequent receptivity to a globally circulating anti-migrant and nativist ideology.
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