Download or read book Iran as Imagined Nation written by Mostafa Vaziri and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Iran as Imagined Nation written by Mostafa Vaziri and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nationalizing Iran written by Afshin Marashi and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on premodern conceptions of sacred kingship. By 1941, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power, his claim to authority as the Shah of Iran was infused with the language of modern nationalism. In short, between roughly 1870 and 1940, Iran's traditional monarchy was forged into a modern nation-state. In Nationalizing Iran, Afshin Marashi explores the changes that made possible this transformation of Iran into a social abstraction in which notions of state, society, and culture converged. He follows Naser al-Din Shah on a tour of Europe in 1873 that led to his importing a new public image of monarchy-an image based on the European late imperial model-relying heavily on the use of public ceremonies, rituals, and festivals to promote loyalty to the monarch. Meanwhile, Iranian intellectuals were reimagining ethnic history to reconcile “authentic” Iranian culture with the demands of modernity. From the reform of public education to the symbolism surrounding grand public ceremonies in honor of long-dead poets, Marashi shows how the state invented and promoted key features of the common culture binding state and society. The ideological thrust of that century would become the source of dramatic contestation in the late twentieth century. Marashi's study of the formative era of Iranian nationalism will be valuable to scholars and students of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, as well as journalists, policy makers, and other close observers of contemporary Iran.
Download or read book Frontier Fictions written by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Frontier Fictions, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The "frontier fictions," or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity. Kashani-Sabet maintains that land-based conceptions of countries existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. While many historians have focused on the concept of the "imagined community" in their explanations of the rise of nationalism, Kashani-Sabet is able to complement this perspective with a very tangible explanation of what connects people to a specific place. Her approach is intended to enrich our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.
Download or read book The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran written by Ali M. Ansari and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of Iranian nationalism in nearly five decades, this sophisticated and challenging book by the distinguished historian Ali M. Ansari explores the idea of nationalism in the creation of modern Iran. It does so by considering the broader developments in national ideologies that took place following the emergence of the European Enlightenment and showing how these ideas were adopted by a non-European state. Ansari charts a course through twentieth-century Iran, analysing the growth of nationalistic ideas and their impact on the state and demonstrating the connections between historiographical and political developments. In so doing, he shows how Iran's different regimes manipulated ideologies of nationalism and collective historical memory to suit their own ends. Drawing on hitherto untapped sources, the book concludes that it was the revolutionary developments and changes that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century that paved the way for later radicalisation.
Download or read book Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity written by Kamran Scot Aghaie and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While recent books have explored Arab and Turkish nationalism, the nuances of Iran have received scant book-length study—until now. Capturing the significant changes in approach that have shaped this specialization, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity shares innovative research and charts new areas of analysis from an array of scholars in the field. Delving into a wide range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives, the essays—all previously unpublished—encompass social history, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and comparative analysis to address such topics as: Ethnicity in the Islamic Republic of Iran Political Islam and religious nationalism The evolution of U.S.-Iranian relations before and after the Cold War Comparing Islamic and secular nationalism(s) in Egypt and Iran The German counterrevolution and its influence on Iranian political alliances The effects of Israel's image as a Euro-American space Sufism Geocultural concepts in Azar's Atashkadeh Interdisciplinary in essence, the essays also draw from sociology, gender studies, and art and architecture. Posing compelling questions while challenging the conventional historiographical traditions, the authors (many of whom represent a new generation of Iranian studies scholars) give voice to a research approach that embraces the modern era's complexity while emphasizing Iranian nationalism's contested, multifaceted, and continuously transformative possibilities.
Download or read book The Republic of Imagination written by Azar Nafisi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
Download or read book Revolutionary Iran written by Michael Axworthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy offers a richly textured and authoritative history of Iran from the 1979 revolution to the present.
Download or read book Days of God written by James Buchan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A myth-busting insider’s account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that destroyed US influence in the country and transformed the politics of the Middle East and the world. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was one of the seminal events of our time. It inaugurated more than thirty years of war in the Middle East and fostered an Islamic radicalism that shapes foreign policy in the United States and Europe to this day. Drawing on his lifetime of engagement with Iran, James Buchan explains the history that gave rise to the Revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters displaced the Shah with little difficulty. Mystifyingly to outsiders, the people of Iran turned their backs on a successful Westernized government for an amateurish religious regime. Buchan dispels myths about the Iranian Revolution and instead assesses the historical forces to which it responded. He puts the extremism of the Islamic regime in perspective: a truly radical revolution, it can be compared to the French or Russian Revolutions. Using recently declassified diplomatic papers and Persian-language news reports, diaries, memoirs, interviews, and theological tracts, Buchan illuminates both Khomeini and the Shah. His writing is always clear, dispassionate, and informative. The Iranian Revolution was a turning point in modern history, and James Buchan’s Days of God is, as London’s Independent put it, “a compelling, beautifully written history” of that event.
Download or read book Imagining Iran written by Majid Sharifi and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thematically, this book problematizes Iranian official nationalism. It reviews how every modern Iranian regime since the constitutional revolution of the 1905-06 has failed to legitimize its official identity, resulting in the fall of five different regimes. The book details how the collapse of each regime resulted in the interruption of the official meaning of being Iranian, as well as the meanings of its enemies. What remained the same was how every Iranian regime represented itself as the agent of a particular national desire defined in terms of making Iran to become sovereign, developed, democratic, and constitutional. Nonetheless, no regime was able to convince a great majority of the people that it achieved what it represented. This book makes three specific contributions. The first contribution is pedagogical. By focusing on the dynamics of regime changes, it provides a heuristic model for identifying challenges that all Iranian regimes have faced. Moreover, the book is a comprehensive review of the disruptive, oppressive, and bloody nature of the rise and fall of different regimes. The second contribution is theoretical. Rather than examining the behavior of various Iranian regimes in isolation from their international context, the book examines how each regime got to understand itself in relations to its imperial others. By examining the governmental rationality of each regime, the book offers a better theoretical framework for understanding political development not only in Iran, but also in all other Middle Eastern and South Asian states. Finally, the third contribution of this book is its critical approach to the main body of the literature on Iran, modernity, development, democracy, and constitutionalism.
Download or read book Re imagining the Nation written by Timothy Scott Gutierrez and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal and collective identities are transformed by processes of dispersion from a homeland. I argue that the meanings dispersed individuals attach to experiences and events and the ways that they imagine personal and national identity are re-narrated and re-imagined in the new social contexts of societies of settlement. In the cases of migrants and dispersed individuals that maintain antagonistic relationships with their homeland regimes, I further argue that processes of identity formation are complicated by the additional challenges of articulating and representing a collective identity that creates distance from stigmatizing associations with the homeland regime. This research uses multiple qualitative methods to compare the identity narratives of first-generation Iranians in Los Angeles and Toronto engaged with local Iranian communities. Because most dispersed Iranians in North America left Iran in the aftermath of a revolution and continue to express hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, they provide an ideal case for this research. My findings indicate that Iranians in both cities are neither selectively assimilating nor retaining identities unaltered by experiences of dispersion. Instead, interview participants expressed strong attachments to the Iranian nation and distance from the Iranian state. This suggests the formation of new identity narratives synthesized from pre-dispersion class and political backgrounds and post-dispersion social contexts. In Los Angeles, the dominance of pre-revolutionary elites and hostile social contexts of reception have encouraged the formation of a hegemonic identity narrative emphasizing secular and pre-Islamic dimensions of Iranian culture. In contrast, the diverse sociopolitical backgrounds of Iranians in Toronto and a social context in which Iranian nationality is less tarnished have produced a pluralist atmosphere in which dissimilar identities exist without a dominant narrative. In both cities there was a shared narrative of distance from the Islamic dimensions of Iranian cultural identity which stems, in part, from continuing antagonistic relationships with the Islamic Republic of Iran. These findings indicate that a narrative approach can usefully reframe the study of personal and collective identities among dispersed groups to reveal both continuities with pre-existing positionalities as well as responsiveness to changing social contexts. Furthermore, a comparative approach focuses attention on the role of social contexts in the shaping of divergent identities within a single national-origin group. Finally, this research provides a framework for analyzing the unique positionality of dispersed groups with hostile relationships to their homeland states seeking to articulate alternative visions of collective national identity.
Download or read book Going to Tehran written by Flynt Leverett and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening argument for a new approach to Iran, from two of America's most informed and influential Middle East experts Less than a decade after Washington endorsed a fraudulent case for invading Iraq, similarly misinformed and politically motivated claims are pushing America toward war with Iran. Today the stakes are even higher: such a war could break the back of America's strained superpower status. Challenging the daily clamor of U.S. saber rattling, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett argue that America should renounce thirty years of failed strategy and engage with Iran—just as Nixon revolutionized U.S. foreign policy by going to Beijing and realigning relations with China. Former analysts in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, the Leveretts offer a uniquely informed account of Iran as it actually is today, not as many have caricatured it or wished it to be. They show that Iran's political order is not on the verge of collapse, that most Iranians still support the Islamic Republic, and that Iran's regional influence makes it critical to progress in the Middle East. Drawing on years of research and access to high-level officials, Going to Tehran explains how Iran sees the world and why its approach to foreign policy is hardly the irrational behavior of a rogue nation. A bold call for new thinking, the Leveretts' indispensable work makes it clear that America must "go to Tehran" if it is to avert strategic catastrophe.
Download or read book The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism written by Reza Zia-Ebrahimi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reza Zia-Ebrahimi revisits the work of Fath?ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two Qajar-era intellectuals who founded modern Iranian nationalism. In their efforts to make sense of a difficult historical situation, these thinkers advanced an appealing ideology Zia-Ebrahimi calls "dislocative nationalism," in which pre-Islamic Iran is cast as a golden age, Islam is reinterpreted as an alien religion, and Arabs become implacable others. Dislodging Iran from its empirical reality and tying it to Europe and the Aryan race, this ideology remains the most politically potent form of identity in Iran. Akhundzadeh and Kermani's nationalist reading of Iranian history has been drilled into the minds of Iranians since its adoption by the Pahlavi state in the early twentieth century. Spread through mass schooling, historical narratives, and official statements of support, their ideological perspective has come to define Iranian culture and domestic and foreign policy. Zia-Ebrahimi follows the development of dislocative nationalism through a range of cultural and historical materials, and he captures its incorporation of European ideas about Iranian history, the Aryan race, and a primordial nation. His work emphasizes the agency of Iranian intellectuals in translating European ideas for Iranian audiences, impressing Western conceptions of race onto Iranian identity.
Download or read book Ethnic Identity and the State in Iran written by A. Saleh and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Islamic Republic has employed various strategies to mitigate the worst excesses of inter-ethnic tension while still securing a Shi'a dominated "Persian hegemony," the systematic neglect of ethnic groups by both the Islamic Republic and its predecessor regime has resulted in the politicization of ethnic identity in Iran.
Download or read book Children of Paradise written by Laura Secor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drama that shaped today’s Iran, from the Revolution to the present day. In 1979, seemingly overnight—moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world—Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East and have acted upon their beliefs with urgency and passion, frequently staking their lives for them. With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. Essential reading at this moment when the fates of our countries have never been more entwined, Children of Paradise will stand as a classic of political reporting; an indelible portrait of a nation and its people striving for change.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Pleasure written by Rudi Matthee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient times to the present day, Iranian social, political, and economic life has been dramatically influenced by psychoactive agents. This book looks at the stimulants that, as put by a longtime resident of seventeenth-century Iran, Raphaël du Mans, provided Iranians with damagh, gave them a "kick," got them into a good mood. By tracing their historical trajectory and the role they played in early modern Iranian society (1500-1900), Rudi Matthee takes a major step in extending contemporary debates on the role of drugs and stimulants in shaping the modern West. At once panoramic and richly detailed, The Pursuit of Pleasure examines both the intoxicants known since ancient times--wine and opiates--and the stimulants introduced later--tobacco, coffee, and tea--from multiple angles. It brings together production, commerce, and consumption to reveal the forces behind the spread and popularity of these consumables, showing how Iranians adapted them to their own needs and tastes and integrated them into their everyday lives. Matthee further employs psychoactive substances as a portal for a set of broader issues in Iranian history--most notably, the tension between religious and secular leadership. Faced with reality, Iran's Shi`i ulama turned a blind eye to drug use as long as it stayed indoors and did not threaten the social order. Much of this flexibility remains visible underneath the uncompromising exterior of the current Islamic Republic.
Download or read book Psycho nationalism written by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psycho-nationalism focuses on the history of the use of Iranian identity under the Shah, as well as by the governments since the 1979 Iranian revolution, to offer an exploration into the psychological and political roots of national identity and how these are often utilised by governments.
