The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Discourse of Islamic Regionalism with a Network Approach in the Middle East

After the Islamic Revolution, Iran has pursued a special discourse at the global and regional levels. This new discursive identity seeks to achieve its discursive ideals in its traditional domain, namely the Middle East. The research question is: What are the characteristics of the regionalist discourse pursued by the Islamic Republic of Iran? And what tools does Iran use to realize the discourse of Islamic regionalism? The findings indicate that currently the three Salafi discourses of Saudi Arabia, the Brotherhood of Turkey and the revolutionary Shiites of Iran are competing in shaping this region. Their most important points of contention are how they deal with Israel and the role and influence of outside powers, including the United States, in the region. The main goal of the Iranian revolutionary Shiite discourse is the idea of uniting the Muslim world with the approach of civilizational warfare, whereas in another discourse, they pursue the nation-state approach and do not follow the idea of unity of the Muslim World. The central signifier of Islamic regionalism is political Islam and the central signifier of the other two discourses is secularism. Iran pursues the main goal of this discourse through networking with geopolitical, geo-cultural and geo-economic themes. The main referent of geopolitical networking is the Israeli threat, the referent of geo-cultural networking is displayed through close contact with the Muslim Brotherhood version of Islam, and finally, the referent of geo-economic networking is demonstrated from the Persian or Islamic pipeline. By combining the two concepts of meaning and geography, Iran seeks to confront the malignant Western hegemony. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the discourse of Islamic regionalism considered by the Islamic Republic of Iran using a descriptive-analytical approach.