Download or read book Iran s Troubled Modernity written by Ali Mirsepassi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mirsepassi uses interviews with thirteen individuals to relate the colourful life and times of Ahmad Fardid and his intellectual legacy.
Download or read book Iran s Quiet Revolution written by Ali Mirsepassi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new perspective on Iranian politics and culture in the 1960s-1970s documenting the 'Westoxification' discourses adopted by the Pahlavi State.
Download or read book Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization written by Ali Mirsepassi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.
Download or read book Lost Wisdom written by Abbas Milani and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the essays collected here, Abbas Milani uses an impressive array of cross-disciplinary Western and Iranian theories and texts to investigate the crucial question of modernity in Iran today. He offers a wealth of new insights into the thousand-year-old conflict in Iran between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism. The essays trace the roots of Shiite Islamic fundamentalism and offer illuminating accounts of the work of Iranian intellectuals -- both men and women -- and their artistic movements as they struggle to find a new path toward a genuine modernity in Iran that is congruent with Iran's rich cultural heritage. This book challenges the hitherto accepted theory that modernity and its related concepts of democracy and freedom are Western in essence. It also demonstrates that Iran and the West have more that brings them together than separates them in their search for such modern ideals as rationalism, the rule of law, and democracy.
Download or read book Recasting Iranian Modernity written by Kamran Matin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically deploying the idea of uneven and combined development this book provides a novel non-Eurocentric account of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition. This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is, the book argues, manifest in combined patterns of development, which incorporate both foreign and native forms. It is the tension-prone and unstable nature of these hybrid developmental patterns that mark Iranian modernity, and fuelled the socio-political dynamics of the 1979 revolution and the rise of political Islam. Challenging solely comparative approaches to the Iranian Revolution that explain it away as either a deviation from, or a reaction to, modernity on the grounds of its religious form, this book will be valuable to those interested in an alternative theoretical approach to the Iranian Revolution, modern Iran and political Islam, working in the fields of International Relations, Middle East and Islamic Studies, History, Political Science, Political Sociology, Postcolonialism, and Comparative Politics.
Download or read book God and Juggernaut written by Farzin Vahdat and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Farzin Vahdat has written a trenchant analysis of the intellectual discourse of modernity in Iran. Although there have been several recent studies about Iranian intellectuals, this volume is unique in that it focuses almost entirely on intellectual discourse among the clergy. Vahdat first provides us with a solid foundation for understanding the key Critical Theory concept of subjectivity—especially as expounded in the writings of Jurgen Habermas. Then, he successfully shows how one Western philosophical approach does have universal applicability by demonstrating the concern of Iranian theorists such as Shariati, Motahhari, Khomeini, and Sorush with human subjectivity. By engaging the major theoretical discourses of modernity, the author attempts for the first time in a non-Western context to address some of the central theoretical issues involved in, modernity and Iran's experience of these issues. As such, this study can contribute to a profound understanding of modernity and its development in a Middle Eastern context. This book is an important addition to the growing body of work in Global Studies and Critical Theory as well as on contemporary Iran.
Download or read book Being Modern in Iran written by Fariba Adelkhah and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its 1979 revolution seized the world's attention, the Islamic Republic of Iran has remained a subject of misunderstanding, passion, and polemic. This book--a study of Iran's political culture in the broadest and deepest sense--examines the tremendous changes taking place in Iran today. Most studies of contemporary Iran overemphasize the revolution's radical break with the past and focus exclusively on the Republic's Islamic character as the decisive factor in its social reality. But modernity has not simply been banished and excluded from Iran; nor have the effects of globalization passed it by. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Iran and an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary Iranian politics and culture, anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah investigates modernity in the Islamic Republic of Iran by looking at the growth of individualism, the bureaucracy, commercial forces, and rationalization in post-revolution Iran.
Download or read book Iranian Media written by Gholam Khiabany and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-revolutionary state in Iran has tried to amalgamate ‘Sharia with electricity’ and modernity with what it considers as ‘Islam’. While sympathetic to private capital, through quasi anti-capitalist politics, the state began to restrict market-relations, confiscate major assets of sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie, and nationalize major aspects of Iran’s industry, including its communications system. Since the end of war with Iraq and the start of the process of ‘reconstruction’, market-driven development and economic policies have been key aims of the state.
Download or read book Iran written by Hamid Dabashi and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Torture And Modernity written by Darius M Rejali and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the practice of torture presuppose about human beings and human society? How does one explain a society in which institutional torture persists despite massive changes in government and class structure? What, indeed, are the social foundations of modern torture? In Culture and Modernity, Darius M. Rejali investigates torture in Iran in order to understand and critically reconsider the politics and psychology of modern torture. In a world in which one out of every three governments uses torture, Rejali points to a common past, one shared by Iranians and non-Iranians alike, that supports this practice.“My aim,” Rejali writes, “is to use the study of torture, and of punishment more generally, to unearth deep and important assumptions about society, history, politics, and the ‘good life' that I believe underpin the life of a torturer.”Exploring the four principle explanations of modern torture—those offered by human rights activists, modernization theorists, state terrorist theorists such as Noam Chomsky, and post-structuralists, especially Michel Foucault—Rejali asks, “Do the accounts of political violence that we have developed over the past century have any real… explanatory or even moral significance… in today's world, or are they just consolations in the face of events we cannot fully understand?” His answers lead him to reconsider how Middle Eastern and European history are written and move him to question cherished assumptions about state formation, modernization, and postmodernism. Torture and Modernity is a deeply unsettling book—it contains not only graphic verbal passages, but an extensive photographic essay—yet it is intended to serve as a guide to rethinking current attitudes and reshaping political policies. How people are punished necessarily invokes conceptions of what human beings are and what they might become. A work such as this offers an understanding of what it means to “become modern,” and it is only when this notion of modernity is made manifest and analyzed that one can firmly grasp the prospects for a world without torture.
Download or read book Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought written by Ali Mirsepassi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the life and thought of the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid and the development of political philosophy in post-revolutionary Iran.
Download or read book Democracy in Modern Iran written by Ali Mirsepassi and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New perspectives on Iran's relationship to democracy Can Islamic societies embrace democracy? In Democracy in Modern Iran, Ali Mirsepassi maintains that it is possible, demonstrating that Islam is not inherently hostile to the idea of democracy. Rather, he provides new perspective on how such a political and social transformation could take place, arguing that the key to understanding the integration of Islam and democracy lies in concrete social institutions rather than pre-conceived ideas, the every day experiences rather than abstract theories. Mirsepassi, an Iranian native, provides a rare inside look into the country, offering a deep understanding of how Islamic countries like Iran and Iraq can and will embrace democracy. Democracy in Modern Iran challenges readers to think about Islam and democracy critically and in a far more nuanced way than is done in black-and-white dichotomies of Islam vs. Democracy, or Iran vs. the West. This essential volume contributes important insights to current discussions, creating a more complex conception of modernity in the Eastern world and, with it, Mirsepassi offers to a broad Western audience a more accurate, less clichéd vision of Iran’s political reality.
Download or read book Towards a Modern Iran written by Elie Kedourie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1980. The events which took place in Iran during the time of original publication took the world by surprise. A little reflection however will suggest that they were not inexplicable prodigies. They constitute rather a manifestation, albeit sudden and astonishing, of a social, intellectual and political crisis in the throes of which Iran has found itself. The eleven studies included in this book are devoted to the examination of one or other aspect of this crisis and aim to clarify the origins and character of the crisis.
Download or read book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ written by Hooman Majd and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including a new preface that discusses the Iranian mood during and after the June 2009 presidential election and subsequent protests, this is an intimate look at a paradoxical country from a uniquely qualified journalist. The grandson of an eminent ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat, Hooman Majd offers perspective on Iran's complex and misunderstood culture through an insightful tour of Iranian culture, introducing fascinating characters from all walks of life, including zealous government officials, tough female cab drivers, and open-minded, reformist ayatollahs. It's an Iran that will surprise readers and challenge Western stereotypes. A Los Angeles Times and Economist Best Book of the Year With a New Preface
Download or read book Burying the Beloved written by Amy Motlagh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of "the real." It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.
Download or read book Modern Iran in Perspective written by Ali Pirzadeh and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights fundamental, but often neglected, issues important for a better understanding of present-day Iran. It underlines the idea that the most effective means for a nation to meet challenges and practices of the modern era lies with the fundamental values and norms that resonate with its inhabitants. This book is meant to be a companion to the author’s published book Iran Revisited: Exploring the Historical Roots of Culture, Economics, and Society that expands upon that book’s ideas, without repeating its theoretical reasoning. Its goal is to offer a better understanding of the current and evolving situations in Iran. In this regard, the author tried to clarify his position through a host of suggestions, most notably, the need to consider social rights as the bare minimum but extremely imperative criteria in our contemporary discourse for the betterment of our society. These rights, he argues, are the most fundamental tenets of any community that strives to succeed and flourish. In this context, the underlying discussion rests on the following claim: the most persisting problems in Iran are the outcomes of the gradual regression of the people’ mindset that persistently overlooked their heritage and value system in favor of imitating ideas that were/are neither compatible with their culture and history, nor applicable to the country’s socioeconomic conditions. The author, therefore, presumed that these predicaments are self-inflicted: they were neither caused by a specific state, nor belong to a historical period, or individual(s); they cannot be characterized by political or economic terminologies, but are firmly rooted in people inability to recognize that the most vital principle in developing and propelling a nation forward is the existence of a unified people.
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.
