Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

After Twenty Years: Introduction to the 2003 edition

After Twenty Years Introduction to the 2003 edition OnbehalfofIran and the new generation and hopein my homeland ... the young generation who struggle for democracy and a better life in Iran. -Samira Makhmalbafaccepting the Cannes Prix du jury 2000for The Blackboard I N AT LEAST THREE WAYS, Iran continues to provide a major example and challenge for building social and political theory: in theories about the media, in theories about revolution and structural social change, and in theories about the relation between education systems and civil society. Throughout the past century, events and movements in Iran have provided some of the most cited examples for social theory. Ever since, at least: the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, the forced modernization under Reza Shah Pahlavi, the nationalist anti-imperialist movement under the Mossadeq government and its repression under the Pahlavi restoration of the 1950-1970s. In the1960s and 1970s Iran was a major exemplar for thinking about theories of modernization. Limits on development due to scarcity of capital were said to be removed because of oil revenues, but at the same time Iran illustrated the distortions these revenues introduced. The enclave treatment ofoil, with revenues going directly to state coffers-thus bypassing more stabilizing revenues produced by the taxation and representation of expanding sectors ofenfranchised citizens in the new economy (the model of reform in nineteenth-century England, for instance)-led to an unstable authoritarian form of government not unlike other oil enclave formations in Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps even the Soviet Union.! In the 1980s Iran became a major exemplar for theories about social revolution. It became a model for examining the changes in the possibilities for social revolution in the late twentieth century as contrasted with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conditions in Europe for the socalled bourgeois and proletarian revolutions theorized by Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, and the many builders of social democracy in Europe. The Iranian revolution was also a model that contrasted with the so-called peasant or Maoist revolutions ofthe mid-twentieth xii Introduction to the 2003 Edition xiii century, shifting attention back again from agrarian to urbanizing, industrializing , and knowledge-based social formations. Above all, Iran continues to occupy a unique place in the Muslim world, a continuing cynosure of attention and focus ofconstant commentary, much ofit misconceived, stereotyped , or simply ill-informed.2 The study on which this book was based originally circulated as The Qum Report, then as Persian Paedeia, before settling into a title amplified by the 1977-1979 revolution, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. It originally had two introductions with two different audiences in mind. One introduction addressed Iranians who had allowed me into their lives at a formative period in my own life, and who thus contributed to my own moral, philosophical, and political sense of self and purpose. The other introduction addressed my fellow Americans, academics, social scientists, and the well-educated, well-traveled, reading publics amid whom I grew up in the professional and bureaucratic classes of Washington, D.C., and in the academies of the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, the Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University. Publishers, being what they are, refused, of course, the very idea of double audiences. The Qum Report had a certain drawing power reflected in its "from the front lines of political conflict" title. First notices came in columns by Joseph Alsop in The New Yorker, and in the unacknowledged background to Bruce Mazlish's psychobiographical article on Ayatullah Khomeyni in New York magazine, which was done in the mode of his earlier path-breaking psychobiographies of nationalist leaders with origins not purely of the nations they came to represent and lead, thus psychologically playing upon powerful ambivalences, erasures, and purifications. My own effort to unpack the rhetoric, political uses, and power of Khomeyni's persona and charisma sought explanation in four Iranian frames of interpretation: biography , persona, politics, and gnosis. This approach insists on the interaction ofmultiple levels ofexplanation or interpretive framing (Fischer 1983). The second title, Persian Paedia, attempted to convey a broader sense of the civilizational and epistemological richness ofa set ofhistorical horizons in dialogue with "the West" (as well as "the East") even before the classical Greek worlds that are often taken to be foundational for Euro-American civilization . But it is, of course, the debate tradition ("dispute," disputation, bahs), highlighted in the third and final title (common to all the scholastic religious traditions, including Judaism...