Download or read book A Sociological Analysis of the Iranian Revolution written by Mansoor Moaddel and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Social Revolution written by Kevan Harris and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, political observers and pundits have characterized the Islamic Republic of Iran as an ideologically rigid state on the verge of collapse, exclusively connected to a narrow social base. In A Social Revolution, Kevan Harris convincingly demonstrates how they are wrong. Previous studies ignore the forceful consequences of three decades of social change following the 1979 revolution. Today, more people in the country are connected to welfare and social policy institutions than to any other form of state organization. In fact, much of Iran’s current political turbulence is the result of the success of these social welfare programs, which have created newly educated and mobilized social classes advocating for change. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Iran between 2006 and 2011, Harris shows how the revolutionary regime endured though the expansion of health, education, and aid programs that have both embedded the state in everyday life and empowered its challengers. This first serious book on the social policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran opens a new line of inquiry into the study of welfare states in countries where they are often overlooked or ignored.
Download or read book Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution written by Misagh Parsa and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Misagh Parsa develops a structural theory of the causes and outcomes of revolution, applying the theory in particular to Iran. He focuses on the ends and means of various groups of Iranians before, during, and after the revolution. For Parsa, revolution is not a direct result of ideologies, which may be less important than structural factors such as the nature of the state and the economy, as well as each group's interests, capacity for mobilization, autonomy, and solidarity structures. Existing theories of revolution explain earlier revolutions better than the Iranian revolution. In Iran most of the protest was in urban areas, the peasants never played a major role, and power was transferred to the clergy, not to an intelligentsia. In the 1970s, oil revenues increased, the economy developed rapidly but unevenly, and the state's expanded intervention undermined market forces and politicized capital accumulation. Systematic repression of workers, aid to the upper class, and attacks on secular and religious opposition showed that the state was serving the interests of particular groups. When the state tried to check high inflation by imposing price controls on bazaaris (merchants, shopkeepers, artisans), their protests forced the state to introduce reforms, providing an opportunity for industrial workers, white-collar workers, intellectuals, and the clergy to mobilize against the state. Thus, structural features rendered the state vulnerable to challenge and attack. Parsa's thorough explanation of the collective actions of each major group in Iran in the three decades prior to the revolution shows how a coalition of classes and groups, using mosques as safe gathering places and led by a segment of the clergy, brought down the monarch of 1979. In the years since the revolution, the conflicts that existed before the revolution seem to be reemerging, in slightly altered form. The clergy now has control, and the state has become centrally and powerfully involved in the economy of the country.
Download or read book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution written by Janet Afary and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.
Download or read book Reconstructed Lives written by Haleh Esfandiari and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 1997-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iranian women tell in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women's lives, including what they could study and how they must dress and relate to men. Reconstructed Lives presents Iranian women telling in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Through a series of interviews with professional and working women in Iran—doctors, lawyers, writers, professors, secretaries, businesswomen—Haleh Esfandiari gathers dramatic accounts of what has happened to their lives as women in an Islamic society. She and her informants describe the strategies by which women try to and sometimes succeed in subverting the state's agenda. Esfandiari also provides historical background on the women's movement in Iran. She finds evidence in Iran's experience that even women from "traditional" and working classes do not easily surrender rights or access they have gained to education, career opportunities, and a public role.
Download or read book Theology of Discontent written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scores of books and articles have been published, addressing one or another aspect of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Missing from this body of scholarship, however, has been a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and ideological cornerstones of one of the most dramatic revolutions in our time. In this remarkable volume, Hamid Dabashi brings together, in a sustained and engagingly written narrative, the leading revolutionaries who have shaped the ideological disposition of this cataclysmic event. Dabashi has spent over ten years studying the writings, in their original Persian and Arabic, of the most influential Iranian clerics and thinkers.Examining the revolutionary sentiments and ideas of such figures as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Sharicati, Morteza Motahhari, Sayyad Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, and finally the Ayatollah Khomeini, the work also analyzes the larger historical and theoretical implications of any construction of the Islamic Ideology. Carefully located in the social and intellectual context of the four decades preceding the 1979 revolution, Theology of Discontent is the definitive treatment of the ideological foundations of the Islamic Revolution, with particular attention to the larger, more enduring ramifications of this revolution for radical Islamic revivalism in the entire Muslim world.This volume will be of interest to Islamicists, Middle East historians and specialists, as well as scholars and students of liberation theologies, comparative religious revolutions, and mass collective behavior. Bruce Lawrence of Duke University calls this volume a superb and unprecedented study.... In brilliant figural strokes, he arrays EuroAmerican sociological theory as the crucial backdrop of a deeper understanding of contemporary Iranian history.
Download or read book The State and Social Revolution in Iran written by Farrokh Moshiri and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1985 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. version of the author's thesis (M.A.--University of Kansas)
Download or read book The Political Economy of Iran written by Farhad Gohardani and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study entails a theoretical reading of the Iranian modern history and follows an interdisciplinary agenda at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics, and politics and intends to offer a novel framework for the analysis of socio-economic development in Iran in the modern era. A brief review of Iranian modern history from the Constitutional Revolution to the Oil Nationalization Movement, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the recent Reformist and Green Movements demonstrates that Iranian people travelled full circle. This historical experience of socio-economic development revolving around the bitter question of “Why are we backward?” and its manifestation in perpetual socio-political instability and violence is the subject matter of this study. Michel Foucault’s conceived relation between the production of truth and production of wealth captures the essence of hypothesis offered in this study. Foucault (1980: 93–94) maintains that “In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth; indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place.” Based on a hybrid methodology combining hermeneutics of understanding and hermeneutics of suspicion, this monograph proposes that the failure to produce wealth has had particular roots in the failure in the production of truth and trust. At the heart of the proposed theoretical model is the following formula: the Iranian subject’s confused preference structure culminates in the formation of unstable coalitions which in turn leads to institutional failure, creating a chaotic social order and a turbulent history as experienced by the Iranian nation in the modern era. As such, the society oscillates between the chaotic states of socio-political anarchy emanating from irreconcilable differences between and within social assemblages and their affiliated hybrid forms of regimes of truth in the springs of freedom and repressive states of order in the winters of discontent. Each time, after the experience of chaos, the order is restored based on the emergence of a final arbiter (Iranian leviathan) as the evolved coping strategy for achieving conflict resolution. This highly volatile truth cycle produces the experience of socio-economic backwardness and violence. The explanatory power of the theoretical framework offered in the study exploring the relation between the production of truth, trust, and wealth is demonstrated via providing historical examples from strong events of Iranian modern history. The significant policy implications of the model are explored. This monograph will appeal to researchers, scholars, graduate students, policy makers and anyone interested in the Middle Eastern politics, Iran, development studies and political economy.
Download or read book Revolution in Iran written by Parviz Daneshvar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutions are watershed events that attempt to transform the existing political order and replace it with a new but better one. Yet the hallmark of most revolutions has been violence, war and dictatorship. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been no exception. This book offers a critical analysis of the Iranian Revolution. It focuses on the upheavals that led to the fall of the Shah. It provides the reader with an appreciation for the interplay of forces in the making of the 1979 revolution and the emergence of the Islamic regime.
Download or read book The Islamic Revolution of Iran a Sociological Study written by Center for cultural and international studies and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Iran written by Morris Mehrdad Mottale and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book fulfills a need for a concise, comprehensive work on the Iranian Islamic Revolution, an event that has often been placed in the classificatory context of the greater and lesser revolutions of the 20th century. The Iranian revolution in the late 20th century has acquired a special significance because of the rise of the so-called Islamic fundamentalism. The Iranian experience was the first political experiment to reflect this phenomenon and it is crucial for students of the subject to understand the details of Khomeini's experiment. The revolution in Iran foreshadowed the clash between modernity and tradition that has now engulfed North Africa and the Middle East. The phenomenon of Khomeini challenges many of the assumptions that have underlined theories and models of progress and development in the Western and non-Western world. Iran: The Political Sociology of the Islamic Revolution brings this critical topic skillfully to the forefront.
Download or read book An Analysis of Hamid Dabashi s Theology of Discontent written by Magdalena C. Delgado and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamid Dabashi’s 1997 work Theology of Discontent reveals a creative thinker capable not only of understanding how an argument is built, but also of redefining old issues in new ways. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–9 was front-page news in the West, and in some ways remains so today. Though it was an uprising against authoritarian royal rule, with a coalition of modernisers and Islamists, the revolution saw the birth of a new Islamic Republic that seemed to reject pro-Western democracy. Dabashi wanted to analyze the real reasons for this change, while examining how Islamic ideologies contributed to the revolution and the republic that followed. Theology of Discontent examines different Islamic thinkers, analyzing how views with seemingly little in common contributed to the modern Iranian belief system. Beyond its insightful analytical dissection of these eight thinkers, Theology of Discontent also shows Dabashi’s creative thinking skills. Reframing the debates about Iran’s relationship with the West, he traced the ways in which Iranian identity formed in reactive opposition to Western ideas. In many ways, Dabashi suggested, Iran was trapped in a cycle of deliberately asserting its difference from the West, a process that was fundamental to the development of its own unique brand of revolutionary Islamism.
Download or read book The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran written by Charles Kurzman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, The future was up in the air. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.
Download or read book A Century of Revolution written by John Foran and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Iranian Revolution at Forty written by Suzanne Maloney and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Iran—and the world around it—have changed in the four decades since a revolutionary theocracy took power Iran's 1979 revolution is one of the most important events of the late twentieth century. The overthrow of the Western-leaning Shah and the emergence of a unique religious government reshaped Iran, dramatically shifted the balance of power in the Middle East and generated serious challenges to the global geopolitical order—challenges that continue to this day. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that same year and the ensuing hostage crisis resulted in an acrimonious breach between America and Iran that remains unresolved to this day. The revolution also precipitated a calamitous war between Iran and Iraq and an expansion of the U.S. military's role in maintaining security in and around the Persian Gulf. Forty years after the revolution, more than two dozen experts look back on the rise of the Islamic Republic and explore what the startling events of 1979 continue to mean for the volatile Middle East as well as the rest of the world. The authors explore the events of the revolution itself; whether its promises have been kept or broken; the impact of clerical rule on ordinary Iranians, especially women; the continuing antagonism with the United States; and the repercussions not only for Iran's immediate neighborhood but also for the broader Middle East. Complete with a helpful timeline and suggestions for further reading, this book helps put the Iranian revolution in historical and geopolitical perspective, both for experts who have long studied the Middle East and for curious readers interested in fallout from the intense turmoil of four decades ago.
Download or read book Revolutionary Iran written by Masoud Kamali and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1998, Revolutionary Iran investigates two major political transformations in the modern history of Iran: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09 and the Islamic Revolution 1976-79 and their relation to the modernization of Iran in this century. It addresses a core question: Why did the clergy not take political power in the Constitutional Revolution when Iran was a traditional society and they played a key leadership role in the revolution; yet they succeeded in the more modern Iran of 1979. Characterization of socio-economic relationships between the two major influential groups of civil society in Iran and their role in political transformation is considered central for answering such a question. The book deals with revolution in terms of relationships between civil society and state; which, it is argued, are central to analysing and understanding modern movements in Iran and other Islamic countries. The major contribution of the book can be summarized as follows: It identifies a socio-political division of power and influence between state and civil society during a long period of Iran’s Islamic history as the key theoretical basis for understanding modern transformations of Iranian society. Such a division has, so far, been largely ignored. It explores the clergy and bazaris as the social basis of civil society in Iran, and challenges Gellner’s viewpoint that an Islamic civil society is an impossibility. It argues that the modernization of religion and the creation of modern political theories by the clergy were both crucial means for defeating a modern authoritarian state and seizing political power. It identifies the main social group without whom the Islamic Revolution of Iran would not have achieved political victory, i.e., the dispossessed. It presents a theoretical basis for analysing and understanding new Islamic movements in the Islamic world.
Download or read book Insurgency Through Culture and Religion written by M. M. Salehi and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1988-10-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his case study of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Salehi discusses the role of culture and religion in a modern society. The author examines Shi'ism as a vehicle of political activism and dissent and provides an insider's view of events leading to the 1979 Iranian revolution. . . . The author suggests that modernization theory and single-factor causes of revolution be examined in a holistic manner. . . . Salehi explains that this approach neither ignores nor discounts the significance of facts. The book provides an interesting perspective on the psychological undercurrents of life in an oppressive society. A rich source of information on the Islamic revolution. Choice The Iranian middle class played a historical role in steering Iran into the revolution of 1978. This volume traces the ideological content of the revolution, as well as the cultural and political outlooks that forced mass support in different segments of the Iranian middle class. Salehi asserts that potential existed in Iranian society for the outbreak of revolution long before 1978. He addresses the basic question of why the revolution of 1978-79 triumphed with the Shiia clergymen playing a leading role--and ties together the psychological, cultural, and religious roots of the resolution with class theory. The author's analysis of personalities, events, religion, class theory, and cultural theory should serve as the model not only in the study of Iran, but can extend to the analyses of other internal uprisings in the Middle East.
