The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran

The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran

Author: Charles Kurzman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005-09-06

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780674039834

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The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, The future was up in the air. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.


Foucault in Iran

Foucault in Iran

Author: Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-08-08

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1452950563

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Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies.


Unthinkable

Unthinkable

Author: Kenneth Pollack

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-09-30

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1476733937

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Examines Iran's current nuclear potential while charting America's future course of action, recounting the prolonged clash between both nations to outline options for American policymakers.


Ghosts of Revolution

Ghosts of Revolution

Author: Shahla Talebi

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2011-01-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0804775818

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"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."


Revolutionary Iran

Revolutionary Iran

Author: Michael Axworthy

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0199322260

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In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy offers a richly textured and authoritative history of Iran from the 1979 revolution to the present.


Staging a Revolution

Staging a Revolution

Author: Peter J. Chelkowski

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13:

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The first book to examine this colossal political event through the images that set it in motion. With previously unpublished historical sources and essays by Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi.


A Social Revolution

A Social Revolution

Author: Kevan Harris

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0520280814

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For decades, political observers and pundits have characterized the Islamic Republic of Iran as an ideologically rigid state on the verge of collapse, exclusively connected to a narrow social base. In A Social Revolution, Kevan Harris convincingly demonstrates how they are wrong. Previous studies ignore the forceful consequences of three decades of social change following the 1979 revolution. Today, more people in the country are connected to welfare and social policy institutions than to any other form of state organization. In fact, much of Iran’s current political turbulence is the result of the success of these social welfare programs, which have created newly educated and mobilized social classes advocating for change. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Iran between 2006 and 2011, Harris shows how the revolutionary regime endured though the expansion of health, education, and aid programs that have both embedded the state in everyday life and empowered its challengers. This first serious book on the social policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran opens a new line of inquiry into the study of welfare states in countries where they are often overlooked or ignored.


44 Days

44 Days

Author: David Burnett

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1426205139

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Burnett was one of the few Westerners to stay and document the sudden fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978. "44 Days" re-creates the coup that led to a long hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter's political demise, and an enmity still blazing after 30 years.


Tehran Rising

Tehran Rising

Author: Ilan Berman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780742549050

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Iran is the most significant current threat to the United States, the Middle East, and the West. As the evidence demonstrating this threat mounts, one thing remains clear to Ilan Berman: 'Washington is woefully unprepared to deal with this mounting peril.' Berman's approach is hard-hitting, provocative, alarmist, and unflinchingly critical. But he takes the indictment of Iran one step further providing what has been missing so far in the foreign policy discourse regarding Iran_both within the U.S. government and outside it_policy prescriptions designed to contain Iran's strategic ambitions.