Representations of Gender Roles in University Textbooks on Iranian Medieval History based on Van Dijk’s Discourse Analysis

Ideology is the essential belief of a group with special political, social and religious opinions. This study follows Van Dijk’s discourse analysis approach which introduces the distancing strategy to explain the ways in which writers promote the positive characteristics of “us” by marginalizing the positive characteristics of “them”. Historical accounts in educational textbooks are, likewise, a place for the representation of such ideological constructs which are hidden in the accounts and narratives of the realities of the past. The present paper studies Persian and translated history textbooks (on the Samanid, Ghaznavid, Saljuqid, and Qarakhanid periods) in which the gender differences between men as “us” and women as “them” can be detected. The findings of the paper indicate that, firstly, both Iranian and foreign authors have mentioned few names of or roles for women, and, secondly, both groups of writers only emphasize the role of women in connection to marriage, and, thus, ignore the important part women played in Iranian history. This biased representation of women in history textbooks, which, ultimately, favours men, affects the students’ perception of gender roles.