A huge billboard in the center of the Iranian capital often features images with a political agenda close to the hard-liners. But the space above Valiasr Square does not belong to Tehran’s municipality; it is owned by Owj, an emerging media powerhouse with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that is branching out in Iran’s cultural space.

On June 18, 2017, 11 days after the Islamic State (IS) launched unprecedented attacks on Iran’s parliament and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the IRGC retaliated by firing multiple missiles at IS sites in northeastern Syria. Amid this rare display of Iran’s ability to directly hit its foes, Owj’s flagship billboard featured a new image: The launch of five missiles in the palm of a man's hand wearing an IRGC uniform, with the caption, “I am the Guardian of Iran.” While this may appear as standard Iranian state propaganda at first glance, it in fact embodies an emerging — and possibly tectonic — shift in the official discourse of the Islamic Republic.

For more than four decades, Iranian leaders have struggled with how to incorporate both nationalism and religious ideology in the political identity of the state. This duality — and the ongoing effort to maintain a balance between its two components to achieve optimum political outcomes — is evident in most instances of major political and military crossroads in post-revolutionary Iran. At this junction in the country’s history, it is apparent that a new nationalism is emerging. To be clear, the struggle surrounding the duality in Iranian identity is not new. In the years leading up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a generation of prominent intellectuals attempted to merge Shiism with revolutionary ideology and Marxism. The latter inspired some groups to take up armed resistance, which soon after the revolution became the embryo of the IRGC. The perhaps best representative of these groups is Mostafa Chamran, a Berkeley-educated engineer who left the United States in the mid-1960s, received initial training in Cuba and then joined the PLO and Amal camps in Lebanon as a skillful guerrilla organizer. His ideas of a transnational movement have lived on through Iran’s extraterritorial Quds Force, and still appeal to the loyal support base of the Islamic Republic.

Indeed, all this is epitomized in the IRGC’s very emblem that features an assault rifle in a raised fist and a globe suggesting expansion beyond borders. As professor and IRGC expert Afshon Ostovar has noted, this design was meant to represent a militant, Islamic and revolutionary organization, which is why it more closely resembles the standard of a resistance movement rather than the national army the IRGC has become.