Department of Middle East Studies

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

THE 1979 IRANIAN REVOLUTION:

A Thirty-Year Perspective

Haggai Ram

Fall 2008-09

Mondays, 14:00-18:00

Overview:

Nearly 30 years have passed since 1979, the year when a self-styled Islamic Revolution unfolded in Iran. Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm branded this revolution as "one of the central social revolutions of the twentieth century," while social scientist Richard Cottam described it as perhaps "the most popular revolution in the history of mankind." Whatever the case may be, we are now permitted to use the benefit of hindsight to revisit the 1979 revolution. In the first part of the course we will review some of the major studies on the causes of the 1979 revolution and trace the social and economic bases of the rise of the revolutionary movement and political Islam in Iran. We will then move on to situate the revolution in a global context. This will enable us to examine the revolution in comparative perspective as well as to integrate the revolution into the "entangled histories" of modernity of which it is part. The course will conclude with an examination of the cultural dimensions of the post-1979 state in Iran. We will examine post-revolutionary cultural production as a site for state control and oppositional resistance. We will suggest that the Islamic Republic is a "scopic regime," developing a symbolic Islamism as a tool of propaganda and hegemony. At the same time, literature, cinema, and the visual arts have been sites of resistance.

Course Requirements:

  1. Active participation: 20%.
  2. Class presentation: 10%.
  3. Seminar paper: 70%.

Topics and Required Readings:

  1. Shi`ism and Iranian Shi`ism: aSocio-Historical Overview

Readings:

Hamid Dabashi, Authority in Islam from the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 95-120

Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East: an Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 167-180

Class presentation:

David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040-1797(London & New York, Longman, 1988), 94-123

Hamid Algar, “Shi`ism and Iran in the Eighteenth-Century,” in T. Naffad and R. Owen (eds.), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Islamic History(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), 288-302

  1. Nineteenth-Century Iran: Colonialism, Nationalism, Revolution

Readings:

Ervand Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 3-31

Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 50-101

Class presentation:

Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: The New Press, 2007), 32-104

  1. Secularism and Religion at the Turn of the Century

Said Amir Arjomand, “The Ulama’s Traditionalist Opposition to Parliamentarism,” Middle Eastern Studies 17 (1981), pp. 174-190

Class presentation:

Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), chapter 5

  1. Nationalism and Gender at Constitutional Revolution

Readings:

Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Is Our Name Remembered? Writing the History of Iranian Constitutionalism As If Women and Gender Mattered,” Iranian Studies 29, (1-2) (Winter/Spring 1996): 85-109

Class presentation:

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 1-25

  1. The Pahlavi Dynasty: "Great Civilization" and/or Prelude to Revolution?

Readings:

M. Parsa, Social Origins of the Islamic Revolution(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 63-101

Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1-14, 96-128

Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 419-449

Class presentation:

Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: The Free Press, 2007), 105-136

  1. An “Islamic” Revolution?

Readings:

Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic of Iran(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13-39

Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State(London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), chapters 1-2

Class presentation:

Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: The Free Press, 2007), 137-181

  1. Political Mobilization in the Revolution and its Aftermath

Readings:

Anabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Introduction & chapters 1-2

Haggai Ram, “Multiple Iconographies: Political Posters in the Iranian Revolution,” in Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert (eds.), Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution(London, I.B. Tauris, 2002), 89-101

Class presentation:

Haggai Ram, “Mythology of Rage: Representations of the Self and the Other in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” History and Memory 8 (Spring\Summer 1996): 67-87

  1. Memoryand Resistancein the Islamic Republic of Iran

Readings:

Haggai Ram, “The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Postrevolutionary Iran,” Nations and Nationalism 6 (January 2000): 67-90

Class presentation:

Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State(London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), chapter 6

  1. Gender and State in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Divorce Iranian Style, a film by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini,UK, 1998

  1. The United States and Iran before and after 1979

Readings:

Edward Said, Covering Islam(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 75-116

Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 198-234

Class presentation:

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “The International Politics of Secularism: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Alternatives, 29 (2004): 111-138

  1. Israel and Iran before and after 1979

Haggai Ram, "To Banish the 'Levantine Dunghill' from Within: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Israeli Anti-Iran Phobias," International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (May): 249-268

Class presentation:

Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), several excerpts

  1. The Dialectics of Diaspora and Homeland, Part 1: Iranian Jewry

Readings:

Haggai Ram, “Caught between Orientalism and Aryanism, Exile and Homeland: The Jews of Iran in Zionist/Israeli Imagination,” Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity, and Identities 8 (Summer 2008): 83-111

Class presentation:

Ella Shohat, "The Invention of the Mizrahim." Journal of Palestine Studies 29 (Autumn 1999): 5-20

  1. The Dialectics of Diaspora and Homeland, Part 2: Women Writers in Exile

Readings:

Liora Hendelman-Baavur, “Guardians of New Spaces: ‘Home’ and ‘Exile’ in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series, and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad,” Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity, and Identities 8 (Summer 2008): 45-62

Persepolis, a film by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007, France

Class Presentation:

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: A Story of a Childhood, New York, 2003; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Return, New York, 2004

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