Constructing the  West in Islamic Republic of Iran's Official Foreign Policy (1979-1989)

International aspects of Islamic Republic’s discourses are the same importance as its national ones. Relation to the West has a key role in constructing the international discourse of Islamic Revolution. Islamic Revolution not only was a national movement against Shah’s despotism, but also an international action for redefining Iranian position in the west-oriented world. As far as international aspects of Islamic Revolution are concerned, one can look at critical events which happened after the Revolution, most of them caused Iran to be separated from the orbit of West in the world politics. For this reason, redefining the West is the cornerstone of Iranian international discourse in post-revolution era. The article aims to examine the different attitudes towards the West and its conceptual implications. Applying metaphor and predicate analysis, the article concludes that construction of ‘West’ in first decades of Islamic Republic’s era can be analyzed by four areas of metaphors such as Body/medical, non-human creatures, engineering and criminology and also three main predicative patterns including learnable, corrupt and looter West.