World View in Pre-revolutionary Iran
World View in Pre-revolutionary Iran

Author: Claus V. Pedersen

Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9783447045698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 and its transformation into an Islamic revolution has been an object of study the last couple of decades. The book does not attempt to explain the revolution and the theocrasy it resulted in, but takes interest in the modes of thought (world views) that preceded the revolution in order to understand the cultural context in which the revolution happened. However, only a limited part of the Iranian culture is studied, namely the literary part, more precisely, five of the leading shortstory writers, Seyyed Mohammad Al Jamalzadeh, Sadeq Hedayat Sadeq Chubak, Jamal A-le Ahmad, and Hu'ang Gol'hiri. The analyses of the short stories show that the underlying world views are strictly secular. As a contextualisation of the literary works, four Iranian thinkers and ideologists, Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838-1897), Ahmad Kasravi (1890-1946), Seyyed Hoseyn Nasr (b. 1933), and Ali ?hariati (1933-1977) are presented. With Seyyed Hoseyn Nasr as an exception, the study of the world views of these four shows a development towards secular modes of thought.

Reconstructed Lives
Reconstructed Lives

Author: Haleh Esfandiari

Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Published: 1997-07

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780801856198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Iranian women tell in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women's lives, including what they could study and how they must dress and relate to men. Reconstructed Lives presents Iranian women telling in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Through a series of interviews with professional and working women in Iran—doctors, lawyers, writers, professors, secretaries, businesswomen—Haleh Esfandiari gathers dramatic accounts of what has happened to their lives as women in an Islamic society. She and her informants describe the strategies by which women try to and sometimes succeed in subverting the state's agenda. Esfandiari also provides historical background on the women's movement in Iran. She finds evidence in Iran's experience that even women from "traditional" and working classes do not easily surrender rights or access they have gained to education, career opportunities, and a public role.

Revolutionary Iran
Revolutionary Iran

Author: Michael Axworthy

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0199322260

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

Author: Janet Afary

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-07-15

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0226007871

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.

Postrevolutionary Iran
Postrevolutionary Iran

Author: Mehrzad Boroujerdi

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780815635741

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The 1979 revolution fundamentally altered Iran’s political landscape as a generation of inexperienced clerics who did not hail from the ranks of the upper class—and were not tainted by association with the old regime—came to power. The actions and intentions of these truculent new leaders and their lay allies caused major international concern. Meanwhile, Iran’s domestic and foreign policy and its nuclear program have loomed large in daily news coverage. Despite global consternation, however, our knowledge about Iran’s political elite remains skeletal. Nearly four decades after the clergy became the state elite par excellence, there has been no empirical study of the recruitment, composition, and circulation of the Iranian ruling members after 1979. Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook provides the most comprehensive collection of data on political life in postrevolutionary Iran, including coverage of 36 national elections, more than 400 legal and outlawed political organizations, and family ties among the elite. It provides biographical sketches of more than 2,300 political personalities ranging from cabinet ministers and parliament deputies to clerical, judicial, and military leaders, much of this information previously unavailable in English. Providing a cartography of the complex structure of power in postrevolutionary Iran, this volume offers a window not only into the immediate years before and after the Iranian Revolution but also into what has happened during the last four turbulent decades. This volume and the data it contains will be invaluable to policymakers, researchers, and scholars of the Middle East alike.

English in Post-Revolutionary Iran
English in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Author: Maryam Borjian

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2013-02-20

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1847699111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book unravels the story of English, the language of 'the enemies', in post-revolutionary Iran. Drawing on diverse qualitative and quantitative fieldwork data, it examines the nation's English at the two levels of policy and practice to determine the politics, causes, and agents of the two diverging trends of indigenization/localization and internationalization/Anglo-Americanization within Iran's English education. Situating English in the nation's broader social, political, economic, and historical contexts, the volume explores the intersection of the nation's English education with variables such as power, economy, policy, ideology, and information technology over the past three decades. The multidisciplinary insights of the book will be of value to scholars of global English, education policies and reforms and language policy as well as those who are specifically concerned with education in Iran.

Iran and the Surrounding World
Iran and the Surrounding World

Author: Nikki R. Keddie

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0295800240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

These essays examine Iran’s place in the world--its relations and cultural interactions with its immediate neighbors and with empires and superpowers from the beginning of the Safavid period in 1501 to the present day. The book provides important historical background on recent political and social developments in Iran and on its contemporary foreign relations. The topics explored include Iranian influence abroad on political organization, religion, literature, art, and diplomacy, as well as Iran's absorption of foreign influences in these areas. A special focus is the prevailing political culture of Iran throughout its early modern and contemporary periods. The authors combine approaches from history, political science, anthropology, international relations, and culturalstudies. Some essays address Iran’s interactions with various Arab and Turkic ethnicities in the region stretching from India to Egypt. Others examine its relations with the West during the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, women's issues, culture inside Iran during the Islamic Republic, and the Shi`ite theocracy of Iran as compared with other Muslim states.

The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism
The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism

Author: Reza Zia-Ebrahimi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0231541112

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reza Zia-Ebrahimi revisits the work of Fath?ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two Qajar-era intellectuals who founded modern Iranian nationalism. In their efforts to make sense of a difficult historical situation, these thinkers advanced an appealing ideology Zia-Ebrahimi calls "dislocative nationalism," in which pre-Islamic Iran is cast as a golden age, Islam is reinterpreted as an alien religion, and Arabs become implacable others. Dislodging Iran from its empirical reality and tying it to Europe and the Aryan race, this ideology remains the most politically potent form of identity in Iran. Akhundzadeh and Kermani's nationalist reading of Iranian history has been drilled into the minds of Iranians since its adoption by the Pahlavi state in the early twentieth century. Spread through mass schooling, historical narratives, and official statements of support, their ideological perspective has come to define Iranian culture and domestic and foreign policy. Zia-Ebrahimi follows the development of dislocative nationalism through a range of cultural and historical materials, and he captures its incorporation of European ideas about Iranian history, the Aryan race, and a primordial nation. His work emphasizes the agency of Iranian intellectuals in translating European ideas for Iranian audiences, impressing Western conceptions of race onto Iranian identity.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.