Iran's Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State by Ali Mirsepassi (review)

Iran's Quiet Revolution by Ali Mirsepassi is a systematic analysis of Iran's public intellectual history that demonstrates how, in the decades preceding the Islamic Revolution of 1979, different political groups with sharply contrasting agendas embraced the politics of "spirituality." The ruling elites and intellectuals in Iran navigated the opposing forces of modernity and tradition in order to maintain the status quo instead of changing it. Those cultural elites who held critical views of modernization lamented its inherent contradictions even as they owed much of their intellectual growth, often including Western education, to it. The resulting "quiet transformation" was a convergence of anti-modern ideas, values, and ideologies during the 1960s and 1970s that rendered the urban middle class—religious and secular—a key faction of the opposition to the modernist state created by the Pahlavi dynasty (p. 11).

The shah's regime used an anti-modern ideology in its cultural and nativist forms to disparage the secular left and liberal nationalist forces, as well as to marginalize resistance, while at the same time maintaining close political and economic relations with the United States and other Western powers. Ironically, almost all the ruling elites, including the shah himself, were educated in the West and held secular views, and yet they were vigorously anti-Western (p. 203). The Pahlavi regime's state-sponsored theory of gharbzadegi ("Westoxification") attempted to co-opt aspects of leftist and religious discourses that posed serious challenges to its authority. Ultimately, these competing and conflicting tracks undermined Iran's legacy of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and eventually came back to haunt the shah's regime and its cultural functionaries.

The circulation of Bonyad—a monthly journal sponsored by the Princess Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation—was designed to shift the focus away from political discourses and toward cultural debates, while also embracing Iran's past traditions and their spiritual narratives. The regime's discourse, including encouraging broad opposition to gharbzadegi, was deployed to demonstrate the supremacy of ancient Iranian cultural traditions (pp. 31–32).

The evolution of the intelligentsia and their embrace of eclectic, and at times conflicting ideologies, such as gharbzadegi, spelled disaster for the often secular and modernist leanings of such cultural elites and the very way of life they espoused. Their works, particularly under the rubric of the "return" to the "village," were heavily influenced by romantic and "pastoral" antimodern sentiments (pp. 66-67). The fascination of these intellectuals with the Iranian counter-enlightenment helped pave the way for the 1979 Revolution (pp. 81–83).

The so-called Iranian New Wave of cinema and art portrayed narratives celebrating rural village realities that these artists themselves had never experienced and that had been destroyed by the Pahlavi regime. These cinematic narratives, which sought to influence a "national imagination," gained much traction in the public arena by highlighting cultural anxieties associated with modernization, while constructing binaries of purity/impurity, spirituality/materialism, and the rural community versus the selfish urban individual (p. 107).

Mirsepassi goes on to contextualize opposing views among Iran's cultural elites. The debate between left-leaning novelist Reza Daneshvar and Kamran Diba, the architect and founder of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, merits particular attention (pp. 140-144). Diba's ideological intrigue with religious modernity served to underline his elitist and aristocratic proclivities, concealing his populistic inclinations behind the spread of the gharbzadegi ideology (p. 151).

Mirsepassi next turns to a critical analysis of how "Mohammad Reza Shah legitimized his rule through the national construction of a mythic history" (p. 161). Mohammad Reza Shah's self-description as a modern "spiritual" man who adopted a postmodern reconstruction of Iran's history by engaging the discourse of opposing gharbzadegi and spiritual Islam had devastating consequences for his political survival (pp. 167–68). Mirsepassi could have done well to explain yet another problematic aspect of the shah's rule: given that the shah regained the throne via a coup engineered...