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Marking the birth of democratic politics in Iran, the Constitutional Revolution remains a source of inspiration for Iranian progressives. And because the revolution drew upon the support of Western progressives, it has also led some Iranians to reassess their relationship with their Western peers. Not the least of the virtues of Mansour Bonakdarian's erudite and original study Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 is that it challenges some of the fashionable postcolonial assumptions about Iranian history, particularly the notion that the British of a century ago were uniformly Orientalists bent on establishing imperial hegemony over Iran. Without in any way minimizing the brutality and destructiveness of imperialism, Bonakdarian argues that Iran's democratic experiment was fostered--and not merely undermined--by engagement with the West. His Occident is populated not only by British diplomat Lord George Curzon, who orchestrated the 1907 convention, but also by W.E.B. Du Bois and other participants in the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London, as well as Irish MPs who identified with Iran's struggle for self-determination and freedom. The Constitutional Revolution had many British supporters, at the head of whom stood the remarkable Cambridge Orientalist Edward G. Browne. Iran's supporters in Britain included radical MPs in the Liberal Party, Labour MPs, Irish Nationalist MPs and socialist members of the Persia Committee, which worked closely with Iranian democrats. The socialist and liberal press, including the Manchester Guardian, also sided with the Iranian revolutionaries. These groups maintained that Iran and other nations of the East had the right to determine their own destiny. For a time, their pressure stayed the hands of Britain and Russia.
After the Constitutional Revolution, Iran's modernization continued but under starkly different conditions. (The best overview of this process in English remains Nikki Keddie's Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, published in 1981 and updated in 2006.) Brought to power with British support in the early 1920s, Reza Shah Pahlavi imposed a new form of authoritarian nationalism, in contrast with the Constitutional Revolution's democratic nationalism. Even as he crushed the left and muzzled political life, he also secularized the legal and educational systems, integrated women and minorities into civil society, and decreased the powers of the clerical establishment. After the Allies replaced him with his young son Muhammad Reza Shah in 1941, the struggle for democracy resumed, with the formation of new political parties like the pro-Soviet Communist Party (Tudeh) and Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh's National Front. The immensely popular Mossadegh, who had earlier taken part in the Constitutional Revolution, became prime minister in 1951.
As prime minister, Mossadegh achieved two cherished goals of Iranian democrats: wresting control over Iran's oil from foreign interests and limiting the authority of the shah. Studies like Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, edited by Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, and Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men have chronicled how the United States and Britain calumniated Mossadegh as a Communist sympathizer, using their intelligence services to orchestrate his overthrow and restore the shah to absolute power. Democratic political parties and trade unions were then crushed by the SAVAK, a brutal secret police force trained by the CIA and Israel's Mossad. Over time, the religious opposition filled the political vacuum.
Muhammad Reza Shah enacted land reform and women's suffrage through the top-down White Revolution of 1963. It unleashed fierce clerical hostility against the shah, with nationalists and leftists divided in their response. Soon to be designated an ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini led antigovernment protests against the White Revolution that combined opposition to women's suffrage and land reform with anti-imperialist and antimonarchist rhetoric. In the 1970s, younger intellectuals like the lay theologian Ali Shariati, author of Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, wove Shiism and anti-imperialism into a political theology that won over many leftists and nationalists. For his part, Khomeini resurrected an obscure religious principle known as velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist or cleric) and began to advocate the replacement of the monarchy by an Islamist state, to be led by a supreme religious leader.
As Richard and Dabashi remind us, the revolutionary left played a role in the opposition to the shah. Although the Tudeh had been eviscerated by the SAVAK, a new generation of socialists influenced by Maoism engaged in small-scale guerrilla warfare. In admiring language perfumed with nostalgia, Dabashi celebrates the mid-1970s, with its secular revolutionary intelligentsia, as a period of "cosmopolitan worldliness." That it was, indeed; but for all their sophistication and creativity, the Iranian leftist intellectuals of the 1970s failed to grasp the dangers of Islamism, ignoring or overlooking its racist, sexist and theocratic aspects in the name of the struggle against the shah and Western imperialism. During the 1978-79 revolution, Khomeini promised a break with Western imperialism--both cultural and political--and a new type of politics that would be superior to both liberal democracy and statist socialism. Instead, as Said Amir Arjomand has shown in The Turban for the Crown, Khomeini established a theocracy that had some parallels to fascism and immediately targeted leftists, feminists, gay men and Kurds. Bahaism was proscribed, and other religious minorities were reduced to second-class status.
Although some Iranian leftists briefly defended women's rights during the March 1979 demonstrations against the new regime's policy of compulsory veiling, their myopia on gender, human rights and democracy left them ideologically defenseless against Iran's Islamist rulers once the latter adopted a strongly anti-imperialist program. In books like Haideh Moghissi's Populism and Feminism in Iran, feminists who participated in the revolution have grappled with the left's failure to confront Islamism's repressive features. The new generation of Iranian intellectuals, for whom Islamism's authoritarian face is only too familiar, has been equally critical.
As Richard shows, the Western left responded to the 1978-79 revolution in sharply divergent ways. Some preferred to look past the Iranian Revolution's religious dimension, viewing the events as an essentially nationalist insurgency. Michel Foucault stood out for recognizing the novelty of the revolution, particularly the significance of religion, but, Richard writes, he was "fooled by the romanticism" of a revolution that sought to undermine Western modernity through a "political spirituality." The most sober appraisal on the left came from Richard's mentor, the late Maxime Rodinson, a renowned French Marxist scholar of Islam and author of the definitive biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Rodinson warned that Khomeini's anti-imperialism concealed an authoritarian "moral" agenda that would curtail individual freedom and women's rights. This assessment has held up far better than Foucault's, but the Islamic Republic also proved to be more resilient and adaptable than its critics predicted.
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During the first months after the revolution, Khomeini's grip on power was tenuous, but the vastly popular seizure of American hostages in November 1979 strengthened his position. Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion of Iran, undertaken with Western encouragement and underwritten by the Arab Gulf states, galvanized patriotic sentiment to the benefit of the new regime. During this long war, which lasted until 1988, Khomeini accused his critics of treason and increased the pace of repression. A variety of new paramilitary groups aided the regime in carrying out a "cultural revolution" to "cleanse" the universities of secular and leftist students and faculty members. This harsh early period is the subject of Azar Nafisi's poignant memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.
The Islamic Revolution broke with the national, political, legal and social ethos of the Constitutional Revolution, though not entirely with its modern institutional apparatus, such as the Parliament, the media and the military, which it harnessed to its agenda. Islamist women attained leadership posts in the state, were recruited for the war effort and joined women's paramilitary organizations that enforced the state's rules of morality on other, more secular women.
After Khomeini's death in 1989, Ali Khamenei emerged as the new Supreme Leader, with Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as the new president. At this juncture, some disillusioned founders of the Islamic Republic slowly began to question the system, occasionally making common cause with more secular dissidents. The so-called New Religious Thinkers (now andishan-e dini) focused on the project of democratizing Shiite Islam, and their ideas gradually gave rise to a new civil society movement (nehzat-e jame'eh-ye madani), which helped elect President Khatami in 1997 and has continued to conduct a highly sophisticated debate about Islam, modernity and democracy. Some of the New Religious Thinkers, such as theologian Abdolkarim Soroush, have called for a re-examination of the tenets of Islam where they clash with religious tolerance. Others, such as cleric Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, have joined more secular human rights activists like Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and journalist Akbar Ganji in calling on the government to ratify the United Nations Convention on Human Rights. But the Khatami administration was cautious and sought only to moderate the Islamist regime. In the summer of 1999, large-scale student demonstrations were crushed by hard-liners after Khatami refused to support them.
Jean-Daniel Lafond and Fred Reed's Conversations in Tehran offers a wealth of interesting interviews with members of the reform movement. Cleric Mohsen Kadivar believes that he and other reformists broke new ground in their criticisms of Khomeini's concept of clerical rule, showing that it had no basis in the Koran or the traditions of the Prophet. Reformists also called for religious reform along modern lines. Ali Paya, a reformist philosopher, thinks that the reformists succeeded in changing the public conversation and even "transformed the mindset of an entire generation" by popularizing phrases like "public sphere," "human rights," "rule of law" and "democracy." Others are less sanguine about the future. Javad Tabatabai, a former professor of philosophy, thinks that Iranian intellectuals have always tried to create an untenable amalgam between Islam and Western thought. And an economics professor notes that the economy was "Khatami's Achilles' heel"--Khatami and his reformist allies lost, in his view, because they failed to address the public's basic needs.
In his new book, Dabashi echoes some of these criticisms of the reform movement. He also reminds readers that many reformists played a role in the intellectual repression of the 1980s, especially at Tehran University. Yet Dabashi refuses to recognize the contribution that reformist theologians like Soroush, Kadivar and Shabestari have made to a more tolerant and democratic Iranian society. Dabashi also casts aspersions on Ganji's hunger strike outside the UN in 2006 in protest of repression inside Iran, arguing that "people like Ganji" are becoming "very natural bedfellows of the U.S. neocons."
In Dabashi's view, Ganji and other dissidents should have been "placing the Iranian situation within the larger geopolitics of the region," at a time when Israel had attacked Lebanon and the United States was threatening Iran. Never mind that Ganji denounced the invasion of Lebanon, or that he opposes strongly not only US military action against Iran but also its so-called democracy funding, or that Ganji enjoys considerable prestige among students and dissidents inside Iran because of his defiant behavior in the regime's courts and his hunger strikes at Evin Prison. Apparently, the timing of his protest was just wrong. That, unfortunately, has too often been the attitude of progressives toward Iranian oppositionists from the onset of the revolution, when the feminists were the first to come onto the streets against the new theocracy, in their demonstration of March 8, 1979.
Dabashi is staunchly critical of the Iranian state's racism, narrow nationalism and anti-Semitism. But while he styles himself as a feminist, he is surprisingly dismissive of contemporary Iranian feminists, who are often treated in his book as misguided at best and, at worst, fellow travelers of the Bush Administration. "Services" rendered to "the US imperial design" are attributed to Azar Nafisi, while the young Iranian-American feminist writer Roya Hakakian also comes under attack. Shirin Ebadi is accused of getting dangerously close to the neocons because she made the "unfortunate choice" of working with another liberal feminist, Azadeh Moaveni, the translator and co-author of the Nobel laureate's 2006 memoir, Iran Awakening. These are risible charges, since all of these feminists have opposed US intervention in Iran and have denounced US policies in the region. (For a feminist response to Dabashi, see Firoozeh Papan-Matin's forthcoming article in The Common Review, "Reading (and Misreading) Lolita in Tehran.") The main sin of the Iranian dissidents and feminists Dabashi assails seems to be their decision to devote more attention to human rights in Iran than to the critique of American imperialism.
Dabashi's discussion of Iranian studies is equally coarse. Take, for instance, his intemperate denunciations of the Columbia University-based Encyclopedia Iranica--an exemplary work of documentation that has paid special attention to Iran's religious and ethnic minorities and has substantial entries on feminists, homosexuality, slavery and numerous other subjects that cannot be discussed as openly inside Iran today--and of the flagship journal of the field, Iranian Studies--currently edited by Homa Katouzian, a leading historian of the Mossadegh era. The scholarship of the Encyclopedia Iranica and Iranian Studies, indeed of the entire field of Iranian studies, he opines, is "a direct descendent of old-fashioned Orientalism...now mostly inhabited by native scholars, a nativist disposition, and cast in entirely domesticated and (ultra) nationalistic terms." This kind of rhetorical overkill permeates Dabashi's book and is especially regrettable coming from the author of such nuanced studies as Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
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The Iranian Impasse
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