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Unintended Consequences: The Lead-Up to the Iranian Revolution

Lior B. Sternfeld

in Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran

The ultimate success of the nation-building project, led by the Shah, was evident in the decade leading up to the revolution—when the Jewish community in Iran finally achieved its release from ... More

The ultimate success of the nation-building project, led by the Shah, was evident in the decade leading up to the revolution—when the Jewish community in Iran finally achieved its release from traditional loyalties and viewed itself, first and foremost, as Iranian. This chapter explores the first manifestations of Jewish revolutionary discourse and actions and discusses postrevolutionary Iran and a new nation-building paradigm that Jews faced following the Islamic revolution. This chapter follows the Jewish response to the rapidly unfolding events: from the Shah’s overthrow through the redefinition of the Iranian national identity, from the Iran-Iraq War to the post-Khomeini period. In the post-Khomeini era, Iranian Jews had to navigate between their religious ancestral homeland (Israel) and their national and political homeland (Iran). They had to deftly maneuver between the misinterpretations and deceptions that characterized the harsh rhetoric between Israel and Iran.Less

The Urban Provincial Periphery in Iran: Revolution and War in Ramhormoz

Ehsani Kaveh

in Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics

This chapter sheds light on some of the developments that have affected provincial Iran since the 1979 revolution. Postrevolution Iran is socially and geographically a far more integrated society ... More

This chapter sheds light on some of the developments that have affected provincial Iran since the 1979 revolution. Postrevolution Iran is socially and geographically a far more integrated society than it was 30 years ago, a fact that has become increasingly evident since the contentious Iranian presidential elections of 1997, when a reformist government was elected with widespread participation by voters from the provinces. Subsequent elections and opinion surveys also indicate that political coalitions, collective identities, and public opinions are not shaped solely in Tehran and other large cities, but also in the smaller communities and provincial localities. The complexity of contemporary Iran can be understood only if the multilayered social transformation of the country's rural and provincial society is taken as an integral part of its postrevolution history. The goal of this chapter is to describe and analyze how national events and processes that transformed Iran after the revolution equally affected small towns and rural areas.Less

Tehran 1979—Damascus 2011

Robyn Creswell

in City of Beginnings

This epilogue attempts to answer the following question: Was Adonis's journey from nationalism to Islamism, passing by way of Nasserism, socialism, and extreme leftism, a matter of organic and ... More

This epilogue attempts to answer the following question: Was Adonis's journey from nationalism to Islamism, passing by way of Nasserism, socialism, and extreme leftism, a matter of organic and systematic progress (which one might explicate) in his intellectual convictions, his political positions, and his ideological outlook? Or was it merely a matter of his adapting to historical occasions as they arose—a matter of conforming to the strongest cultural and political winds of the moment? It does so by presenting a short but detailed narrative about Adonis's writings on the Iranian and Syrian revolutions. The intent in relating this history is to bring the story of Arabic modernism as close as possible up to the present as well as to investigate its afterlives, its ability to adapt itself to new conjunctions.Less

Khomeini’s Perplexed Pakistani Men: Importing and Debating the Iranian Revolution Since 1979

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

in In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi'ism between Pakistan and the Middle East

This chapter argues that during the early months and years after the Iranian Revolution, Pakistani Shi‘i ‘ulama remained primarily occupied with domestic events. Even ardent supporters of Khomeini ... More

This chapter argues that during the early months and years after the Iranian Revolution, Pakistani Shi‘i ‘ulama remained primarily occupied with domestic events. Even ardent supporters of Khomeini were not sure what his authority should mean for them outside of Iran. Additionally, Pakistan’s Shi‘is at that time were engaged in their own political mobilization against the military dictator Zia ul-Haq (d. 1988). A second step in the reception can be discerned with the rise of the young cleric Sayyid ‘Arif Husayn al-Husayni (d. 1988) to the helm of Pakistan’s most influential Shi‘i organization at the time, the Movement for the Implementation of Ja‘fari Law (TNFJ), in 1984. Husayni clearly and consistently drew on the hallmark themes of the Iranian Revolution. In doing so, however, he was often forced to bend aspects of the revolutionary message, like Muslim unity or the leadership of the clerics (vilayat-i faqih), to his Pakistani context. The chapter also pays attention to the unprecedented embrace of Iranian ideas that is anchored in contemporary Lahore.Less

The Maryamiyya

Mark Sedgwick

in Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

This chapter is the first of two devoted to the later history of Schuon’s Sufi order, originally the Alawiyya. This was renamed the Maryamiyya as a consequence of a series of visions during the 1960s ... More

This chapter is the first of two devoted to the later history of Schuon’s Sufi order, originally the Alawiyya. This was renamed the Maryamiyya as a consequence of a series of visions during the 1960s in which, Schuon believed, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and gave him a universal mission. The chapter covers events from the split with Gu”non in 1950 until Schuon’s last known major vision in 1966, and considers the consequence of these visions for Schuon and for the Maryamiyya. It ends with a discussion of Schuon’s most important follower, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and of Traditionalism in Iran up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, especially the Imperial Iranian Academy of PhilosophyLess

The Long Shadow of the Iranian Revolution

Frederic M. Wehrey

in Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings

This chapter examines the seminal impact of the Iranian Revolution on Persian Gulf societies in general and on Shi'a–Sunni relations in particular in the post-2003 era. A seismic event in Gulf ... More

This chapter examines the seminal impact of the Iranian Revolution on Persian Gulf societies in general and on Shi'a–Sunni relations in particular in the post-2003 era. A seismic event in Gulf political life, the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath continue to weigh heavily on sectarianism, acting as a lens through which domestic actors view regional events such as the Iraq War, the 2006 Lebanon War, and, less explicitly, the Arab uprisings of 2011. Since 2003, Gulf regimes have deployed tactics that bear a striking resemblance to those pursued in the aftermath of the revolution: preemptive reforms to mitigate Shi'a discontent, “sectarian balancing” (co-opting Sunnis to balance the Shi'a), and tacitly encouraging vitriolic anti-Shi'a discourse by Sunni clerics, repression, and censorship. Most significant, however, the revolutionary decade highlighted the importance of domestic institutions as buffers against external ideological influences and as determinants of regime threat perception.Less

The Internationalisms of the Iranian Revolution

Matthew K. Shannon

in Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War

The conclusion studies the groups of U.S.-trained revolutionaries that returned to Iran to contribute to the overthrow of the shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

Ideational Projection after the Iranian Revolution

Lawrence Rubin

in Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics

This chapter examines Egyptian and Saudi relations with Iran before and after Islamists came to power in the Iranian revolution. It argues that Egypt and Saudi Arabia perceived Iran's ideational ... More

This chapter examines Egyptian and Saudi relations with Iran before and after Islamists came to power in the Iranian revolution. It argues that Egypt and Saudi Arabia perceived Iran's ideational power projection as a national security threat. The ideational security dilemma between Iran and its former allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, destabilized relations. In response to this situation, Egypt and Saudi Arabia pursued ideational balancing strategies. The first part of the chapter highlights the theme that, particularly in the 1970s, Egyptian and Saudi relations with Iran improved despite the fact that Iran's power projection capabilities increased. The second part will examine how Iran and Saudi Arabia perceived the Iranian ideational threat and what their formers’ response, ideational balancing, can tell us about the ideational threat they faced. The concluding section will briefly mention how Syria, which we might have expected to fear Iran, did not.Less

Revolution, Nostalgia, and Memory in Diasporic Iranian Memoirs

Nima Naghibi

in Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora

The chapter discusses the prominent place of the 1979 revolution in these narratives, and argues that the experience of the revolution was both formative and destructive: formative because it ... More

The chapter discusses the prominent place of the 1979 revolution in these narratives, and argues that the experience of the revolution was both formative and destructive: formative because it occurred in their childhood or early adolescence, and destructive because it destroyed their known worlds. These narratives convey a nostalgia for an idealized time: pre-revolutionary Iran, and an idealized period in the authors’ lives: childhood. The second half of this chapter examines mediated nostalgia and memory for pre-revolutionary Iran.Less

Revolutionary Cinema and the Logic of Reform

Blake Atwood

in Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic

Establishes reform as a cinematic category, the inheritor of revolutionary cinema in certain state-controlled cinemas. It surveys the contentious position of film in revolutionary discourse in Iran ... More

Establishes reform as a cinematic category, the inheritor of revolutionary cinema in certain state-controlled cinemas. It surveys the contentious position of film in revolutionary discourse in Iran and connects "reform cinema" to the scholarship on Third Cinema and Post-Third Cinema aesthetics. This chapter also establishes Mohammad Khatami's professional career as an organizing scheme for the book and discusses the tenets most important to his political platform.Less

Toy Guns and the Real Dead in Iran

Jamal J. Elias

in Alef Is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies

This chapter follows the pattern of the previous two: it begins with a brief history of education and religion in modern Iran in order to situate the discussion of representations of childhood in the ... More

This chapter follows the pattern of the previous two: it begins with a brief history of education and religion in modern Iran in order to situate the discussion of representations of childhood in the society. It brings together poster arts and children’s books that are each the focus of the two previous chapters, and adds other visual materials, especially postage stamps. In the case of Iran, the focus is on materials produced by official and parastatal entities as part of a conscious policy of opinion molding and propaganda. Visual materials commemorating the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Basij volunteer soldiers serve as subjects to advanced theories presented in the previous chapters. In particular, this chapter moves forward the discussion of gender and sacrifice, demonstrating how male and female opportunities for offering the gift of sacrifice occur in different forms and at different ages.Less

Iran and Revolutionary Thinking

Michael Graziano

in Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA

Chapter 7 investigates the Iranian Revolution as a major interpretive challenge for the CIA’s religious approach to intelligence. Popular American understandings of Islam in the early Cold War shaped ... More

Chapter 7 investigates the Iranian Revolution as a major interpretive challenge for the CIA’s religious approach to intelligence. Popular American understandings of Islam in the early Cold War shaped the CIA’s late-1970s assessment that Muslim actors were unlikely to pose a serious threat to the Shah of Iran. In the religious approach to intelligence, religious individuals, ideas, and institutions were largely assumed to be anti-Communist and pro-US by default. By the mid-twentieth century, much of Western scholarship agreed, deeming religion naturally anti-Communist. Equipped with this intellectual framework, the CIA underestimated the complex motivations of Iranian Muslim actors during the Iranian Revolution because they misunderstood what it meant to be “religious.” Before Ayatollah Khomeini became the face of the Iranian Revolution, US observers struggled to imagine a coordinated effort by religious actors to overthrow the shah. Instead, they presumed that any such effort would be irreligious—and thus, by definition, would have been organized by the United States’ atheist foes in the Kremlin. The CIA’s failure to anticipate the 1979 Iranian Revolution revealed the analytical shortcomings of its overly generalized religious approach and its relationship to American understandings of the world religions paradigm.Less

The Law of the Household: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian Revolution

Melinda Cooper

in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism

The chapter by Cooper argues that Foucault’s engagement with the early phases of the Iranian Revolution sheds a great deal of light on his understanding of neoliberalism as a new normative order of ... More

The chapter by Cooper argues that Foucault’s engagement with the early phases of the Iranian Revolution sheds a great deal of light on his understanding of neoliberalism as a new normative order of the household (oiko-nomia). On Cooper’s reading, Foucault’s fascination with the ideology of the Iranian Revolution betrays his intention to recover the “ancient” understanding of the nomos of the household in order to offset Becker’s neoliberal “new household economics” that threatens to destroy all sexual discipline, all substantive sexual normative order, by turning every individual into the entrepreneur of his or her own body and sexuality.Less

Revolution and Invasions

David M. Wight

in Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988

This chapter studies how Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini regularly returned to Iranian grievances about the US petrodollar economy, US-led globalization, and US imperialism to inspire his political base. ... More

This chapter studies how Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini regularly returned to Iranian grievances about the US petrodollar economy, US-led globalization, and US imperialism to inspire his political base. The Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iranian tensions with the United States also spurred a second oil shock from 1979 to 1981, eventually tripling the cost of oil. Yet while the Iranian Revolution constituted the greatest challenge to the US petrodollar order in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to date, Khomeinism inadvertently reinforced and expanded petrodollar interdependence between the United States and the remaining Gulf monarchies. Despite concerns about the viability of its regime, the Carter administration determined the loss of an allied Saudi Arabia had to be prevented at all costs, or else the vital interests of the United States would be imperiled. To preserve this and other Arab alliances, the United States doubled down on petrodollar interdependence, particularly in the realm of arms, as the Carter administration abandoned the goal of arms transfer restraint and instead embarked on a surge of weapons sales to the MENA to improve the security of allied governments and reassure client regimes of the United States' commitment to them.Less

Homophobia as a Tool of Statecraft: Iran and Its Queers

Katarzyna Korycki and Abouzar Nasirzadeh

in Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression

This chapter demonstrates how the Iranian state, far from being the pawn of Western machinations, has varied its stance toward homosexuality in pursuit of its objectives—namely modernization, ... More

This chapter demonstrates how the Iranian state, far from being the pawn of Western machinations, has varied its stance toward homosexuality in pursuit of its objectives—namely modernization, consolidation, and most recently, deliberalization. In doing so, it has refashioned family and gender relations, positioned itself concerning the imperial appetites of the West, and centralized and expanded its power. To trace how this happened, the chapter anchors the story around three moments in which anti-homosexual rhetoric and practice have been deployed. First is the modernization moment lasting from the early nineteenth century to the onset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Second is the Islamic nation-state consolidation moment following the revolution. Third is the conservative backlash following the attempted liberalization of 1997 and persisting until today.Less

Longing for the State: Dialectics of the Local and the Transnational in Sunni-Shiʿi Sectarianism

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

in In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi'ism between Pakistan and the Middle East

This chapter studies the changing discourses of sectarianism since the 1970s. During this decade, anti-Shi‘i rhetoric was the prerogative of Ahl-i Hadis scholars with close ties to Saudi Arabia. The ... More

This chapter studies the changing discourses of sectarianism since the 1970s. During this decade, anti-Shi‘i rhetoric was the prerogative of Ahl-i Hadis scholars with close ties to Saudi Arabia. The polemics of the famous agitator Ihsan Ilahi Zahir (d. 1987) were centered on doctrinal points. The chapter contends, however, that for the ‘ulama of Pakistan’s most virulent anti-Shi‘i group, the Sipah-i Sahabah-i Pakistan (Army of the Companions of the Prophet; SSP), the Iranian Revolution constituted a threatening attempt at world domination and subversion of the fundamentals of Islamic politics. Even though these Deobandi scholars—in the vein of Zahir—still highlighted doctrinal incompatibilities between “real” and Shi‘i Islam, the Shi‘is were now primarily framed as a political problem: they blocked Pakistan from being molded into its true form: namely, that of a Sunni state with aspirations to global leadership. In formulating their answer to Khomeini, these sectarian Sunni ‘ulama attempted to reclaim the caliphate as a divinely sanctioned office that strikingly resembled and transcended Iran’s model of government.Less

Thinking the Unthinkable: The Revolutionary Movement in Iran

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

in Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment

The chapter draws a detailed picture of how the revolutionary movements in Iran began and the contingencies within which it unfolded. It highlights its religious character and shows how that ... More

The chapter draws a detailed picture of how the revolutionary movements in Iran began and the contingencies within which it unfolded. It highlights its religious character and shows how that characteristic manifested itself in the revolution’s symbolic expressions and rhythm.Less

The Coup That Never Was: January 1979

Hazem Kandil

in The Power Triangle: Military, Security, and Politics in Regime Change

This chapter examines the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy and Muhammad Reza and enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to assume power. It is widely believed that the Iranian ... More

This chapter examines the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy and Muhammad Reza and enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to assume power. It is widely believed that the Iranian revolution was sparked by an exceptionally motivated population that successfully challenged the Shah's repressive regime and his U.S. ally. In reality, the Imperial Armed Forces was only impressive on paper; the security apparatus was in shambles; and Washington had doubts about the Shah's reliability. The chapter first recounts the events constituting the Iranian revolution before explaining the reasons for Muhammad Reza's downfall and Khomeini's ascension, noting in particular the role played by Shi'ism in the revolution. It then discusses the limitations of the military and security under the Shah, arguing that the armed forces never crystalized into a coherent institution with well-defined corporate interests. It also considers how the Pahlavi regime and America responded to the popular demonstrations that culminated in the revolution and concludes with an assessment of the impact of the revolution on geopolitics, with particular emphasis on Iranian-American relations.Less