Politics & Power Quote by Abdolkarim Soroush

Decline is doing the heavy lifting here, not identity. Soroush is pointing to a recurring modern pattern: people don’t “discover” who they are in a vacuum; they often consolidate who they are when they feel they’re losing ground. The phrasing is careful, almost clinical - “awareness and consciousness” repeated like a diagnostic refrain - suggesting identity isn’t an essence but a mode of perception produced under pressure.

The intent is partly explanatory and partly cautionary. By tying “national ethnicity” and “Islamic identity” to the same trigger, Soroush collapses a common culture-war opposition: secular nationalism versus religious solidarity. In his telling, both can be reactive projects, born from the same historical wound. That subtext matters in postcolonial societies where humiliation, dependency, or political failure can make identity feel less like heritage and more like emergency shelter.

Contextually, Soroush is writing in the shadow of Iran’s 20th-century upheavals: Westernization drives, revolutionary Islamism, and the afterlife of empire. The line reads like an account of how modernity, when experienced as defeat rather than liberation, breeds intensified self-narration. People start asking “What are we?” precisely because “What are we becoming?” looks grim.

There’s also an implicit warning about the politics of wounded consciousness. Identities forged in decline can be energizing, but they can also become brittle - prone to purification fantasies, scapegoating, and ideological overcorrection. Soroush’s move is to treat identity less as sacred inheritance and more as a historical symptom: meaningful, powerful, and deeply contingent.