The Iranian Scientific Community and its Diaspora after the Islamic Revolution

The Iranian scientific community has gone through several political phases since the Islamic revolution of 1979. In the first moment, the new revolutionary government attempted to Islamize higher education. The second phase commenced at the close of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and the liberalization of the economy. The third phase, the 1997 election of President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, was marked by political liberalization. The presidential election of 2005 and the surprise win of a conservative candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stimulated a third moment, marked by the politics of nuclear and bio-sciences and new set of interactions among a range of different discourses (e.g., national narratives, and the Shari'a) interact in the post-revolutionary context. Most members of the Iranian scientific community perceive this new era as a setback to social reform. In this article, I show the heterogeneity of both Islamic discourses and scientific practices in a new context that I call a new assemblage for the production of scientific knowledge.