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This chapter explores the interface between the women’s rights movement and the reform movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It begins with an overview of the nature of democratic rights and institutions in Iran, the ways women have played their citizenship role, and the recent social and political trends that have strengthened democratisation and women’s rights movements. It then analyses the gender emancipatory potential and limitations of the most influential current Islamist reformist strands, and the feminist contribution to Islamic reformism. Finally, recent debates within the feminist movements are described, presenting the two categories of secularist and Islamist feminisms and the emergence of pragmatic feminism.

Since the early 1990s, the issue of the booming young generation has been placed at the top of the public agenda of the Iranian state. During this same period, young people have played a major role in the resistance against official attempts to reshape the cultural and even the physical space of urban areas along monolithic moral guidelines. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the successive Islamization policies of the Iranian state, with a focus on the successive attempts to police moral behavior of young people in public places in the cities. For the past 28 years, the moral police have been in charge of enforcing Islamic codes in urban public space. Their performance is an indication of the effectiveness of officially sanctioned Islamization policies of the Islamic Republic, the Republic of piety.

This chapter attempts to offer a more differentiated understanding of Iran's foreign policy discourse. Iran's foreign policy perspectives offer little doubt that Iranian Islamist leaders of all viewpoints strive for both security and a greater role in regional and global affairs. In addition, revolutionary-inspired Islamic nationalism in the face of what is deemed Western intransigence or bullying is effectively the thread that runs through almost all politically acceptable positions inside Iran. In this sense, revolutionary Islamic ideology envelops the understanding of regional and global geopolitics and Iran's aspirations. It also makes priorities of safeguarding Iran's territorial integrity, preserving the Islamic Republic's security and survival, countering its attempted isolation, and improving its standing in the region and, by implication, the world.

Iranian society has changed considerably since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian youth practice new lifestyles and constitute a distinct generation. This chapter looks at ways to interpret the changes that have occurred among the younger generation, especially young women. This generation does not seem as Islamic as the ideological government had expected it to be. Based on research done in 2005 to 2006 through in-depth interviews with young, urban Iranian women about their private and public lives, this chapter examines whether female youth are becoming less overtly traditional as they claim their own subjectivity. Many Iranian female youth are shaping their identity through negating or accepting conventional and legal sexual discourses mixed with some modern representations. Their presence in the public space has been accepted at the expense of reinforcing certain traditional power relationships.

Commemoration is central to the rituals of devotion and nationalism enacted in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This chapter pertains to Shiʿi networks that have moved beyond national boundaries to create new regional zones of influence. For example, the mosque-shrine complex of Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus, serves local Shiʿi residents as well as the multitude of pilgrims arriving from faraway places. Renovations since 1990 resemble sixteenth-century Safavid architecture, thanks to the patronage of the Iranian. Just as the Islamic Republic is disseminating an aesthetic and religious ideology abroad, at home the architectural typology is reverting to the wide-scale construction of musallās throughout the country. In Tehran the Imam Khomeini Musallā (opened 2013) is a gigantic monument, simultaneously imitating the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq and the great mosques of Isfahan. The first reference is to recent history—namely, the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988, and the second is a marker of the Shiʿi ideology asserted in Iran in the sixteenth century. This temporal collapse marks the mutability of religious experience and the ways in which architectural signification is manipulated.

Chronologically, Chapter Two focuses on the 1980s, but the main theme of the chapter is the development of mutual antipathy between Iran and the United States. This development is traced through an examination of their interactions from the 1953 coup to the Iran-Iraq War. The chapter emphasizes how the experiences of the 1953 coup in Iran, the Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War contributed to the development of a profound and widespread mutual hostility between the two countries that would subsequently come to act as a major constraint on policy-makers on both sides. The chapter also examines the origins of the IRI's nuclear programme and its connection to the emerging conflict with the USA.

This chapter connects the current calls for rights with the often neglected aspects of the Iranian government's “republic,” noting that Imam Khomeini's vision of a so-called pure Islamic government has been dominated by the compromise formation of an Islamic Republic. The assemblage of select readings and sources of Shi'i Islamic jurisprudence to form a juridico-legal authority was one of the most important influences of the state formation of Islamic Republic, which continued to form after thirty years. The productive effects of the Islamic Republic disputed the paths of thinking about the state. It is observed that women are at the forefront of reform. Criticisms of rights discourses have been issued at the forefront of the threat that has now been revised from imperialism to “regime change” or “velvet revolution.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran experienced the first Islamic revolution in the modern times. It has equally developed the most deep-rooted post-Islamist trend in the country. This chapter chronicles the birth, development, and the coming to partial power of a post-Islamist movement. It shows how and why post-Islamism emerged as a critical paradigm to serve as alternative to the Islamist project by rejecting the idea of a religious state, but embracing electoral democracy, notion of civil society, coexistence, and tolerance. Pushed originally by the movements of women, youth, intellectuals and other social groups, post-Islamism manifested itself first in the Reform Movement of the late 1990s, then partly in the government of the Mohammad Khatami, and finally in the Green Movement of the 2009. But it has yet to materialize its objective of democratizing the Islamic Republic within a pious society.

This chapter provides an overview of the Islamic Revolution. It explores the roots of the revolution and the forces that shaped it. In particular, the chapter focuses on the elements of Iran’s national and internal security policies that both helped usher in the Islamic Republic and those that the assumptions the revolution reinforced within Iran’s leadership and populace.

The Introduction lays out the groundwork for the book. It introduces the topic and the author’s argument, provides an overview of the problem at hand, and surveys the existing literature. The book argues that far from a clear and complete break from the past, Iran’s security thinking and policies since the Islamic Revolution have been marked by key elements of continuity. This continuity, Tabatabai posits, is due to the country’s lessons learned from its historical experiences, to include war and peace, as well as diplomatic efforts, which have shaped the contours of Iranian decision-makers’ thinking for generations.

By 1978, with all avenues of secular opposition blocked by the Shah’s dictatorial regime, more and more Iranians had turned to the mosque to voice their growing discontent. The revered Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, operating from exile in Najaf, Iraq, astutely tapped into Shia history of martyrdom and Iranian nationalism to create and intensify anti-royalist militancy among different classes of Iran. He transformed the escalating street protest into a non-violent revolutionary movement demanding the end of monarchy. It succeeded in February 1979. The freshly inaugurated Islamic Republic, endorsed by citizenry in a referendum, was to be built along the lines of Khomeini’s 1971 book, Islamic Government:Rule of the Just Jurisprudent. .Unfamiliarity with this seminal work led Saudi Deputy Prime Minister, Prince Abdullah, to declare, wrongly, that obstacles to manifold cooperation between the Saudi Kingdom and the Islamic Republic had been removed. The new regime in Tehran established the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a special force to protect the revolution, and revolutionary courts. Its constitution provided for a directly elected parliament and president, and Assembly of Experts who chose the just jurisprudent as the Supreme Leader. The regime embarked on Islamizing the state and society.

This chapter argues that patriarchy in Iran remains entrenched. The power to engage, suppress, or recast Iranian women has often reflected on the political strength and viability of the Iranian state in the modern era. If the mandatory unveiling of women in 1936 embodied the secular nationalist objectives of the Reza Shah era (1926–41), the compulsory veiling of women after 1979 demonstrated the political will of the newly instated Islamic Republic. The chapter also discusses how women have embodied the nation's popular will and its silent dissent.

Touching on the guerrilla activity of the 2000s and early 2010s on Iran’s eastern (Baluch) and western (Kurdish) borderlands, the introduction discusses early-twenty-first-century Western, (particularly U.S.) geopolitical views of the Sunni minority issue in the country, and of its possible political and military instrumentation against the Islamic Republic. The author skims through the gradual rediscoveries, by domestic and international research, of the transformation of tribes and tribal might as a political factor in Middle Eastern societies, and of the emergence and progressive politicisation of Sunni identity within a Shia-majority Islamic Republic. The author especially sheds light on the particular political pragmatism that was developed by Tehran and the Sarbazi ulama, since 1979, in their mutual relations.

Persia/Iran has seen several turning points in the development of reproductive policies in the twentieth century. In the early part of the century, modern medicine continued to clash with traditional and religious views on sexuality and reproduction. After World War II, significant progress was made toward increasing Western medical care and spreading it to rural areas to reduce infant mortality. As this ended many decades of concern about underpopulation, the shah inaugurated a reversal in 1967. Introduction of advanced contraception methods, oral and implant, was undertaken with Population Council and UN advice, and abortion was legalized in 1977. After coming to power, the Islamic Republic was strongly pronatalist on religious grounds, but reversed itself after evaluating the results of the 1986 census. The arrival of AIDS the following year also suggested the need for more sex education, but in all these shifts and changes, women’s voices have been notably lacking.

Who owns the commanding heights in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Examining the top 300 firms on the Tehran Stock Exchange, this chapter finds a diverse set of ownership categories existing across economic sectors, associated with public, parastatal, pension, and provincial institutional investors. The main similarity between investors is the form through which ownership took place: the diversified business group. The persistence of the diversified business group is not unique to Iran. Instead, diversified business groups profitably thrive in Turkey and the Gulf emirates, as they do in liberalized economies such as South Korea, Israel, Mexico, and South Africa. As foreign capital comes to Iran, new cleavages will likely appear in the economic commanding heights. Many existing business groups will shrink or change ownership. But the organizational form of the diversified conglomerate will likely persist and remain dominant in Iran’s political economy through the next wave of business restructuring and beyond.

Looking at the Sunni religious networks in Iran, Stéphane Dudoignon shows how Iran is an interface between South Asia and the Gulf monarchies. This process went through the progressive building of a Sunni community of Iran, which is for the first time able to gather Sunnis from various ethno-national backgrounds. A recipient of Sunni influences from South Asia, the Shi‘a Islamic Republic, by coopting some influential Sunni religious leaders, has been able to re-export them to some Gulf monarchies, building for itself an unexpected form of Sunni soft power.