Modern Iran Research Articles

THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION GUARDS CORPS OF IRAN: A STATE WHITHIN A STATE

The article contains an analysis of the reasons and foundations for the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) appearance in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The author sheds light on the process of the IRGC development and its current state. For almost 40 years of its existence, IRGC has transformed from a set of ill-armed and weak organized groups, functioning mainly as the guarding structures, to a unique governmental structure. For now, the set of IRGC`s functions includes such spheres as military, police and gendarme, and religious sphere (which includes “special operations”). IRGC also bears some political and financial-economic functions, among which ensuring internal security of the Islamic regime in the Islamic republic of Iran by struggling with political opposition; suppression of anti-governmental demonstrations; control for the political, civil and nongovernmental organizations, private companies and firms; defense from political aggression from outside; making reconnaissance and counterespionage; prevention the country from the Western ideological and cultural flows; management of the resistance forces “Basij” and civil defense; monitoring the compliance by citizens the Islamic life and moral norms; implementation of the conception of the “Islamic Revolution export”; fighting drug-related business and banditry; participation in the state borders` defense actions (if required); involvement in large-scale governmental economic projects. In military terms, the IRGC has such military troops as land forces, air and naval forces, resistance forces “Basij” and Special Forces “Qods”. The IRGC is a high-class component of the military forces in the Islamic republic of Iran, which includes an Army itself. However, the range of the IRGC commitments is much broader than standard military ones. Thus, nowadays, the IRGC plays a significant role in politics (both internal and external) and fulfils special tasks outside of the IRI. Having large financial and economic assets, the IRGC controls from 25% to 35% of the Iran`s economics. Today the IRGC exists as a corporate union of the military, intelligence, police and gendarme, political, ideological, economic and financial structures of the modern Iran. In fact, the IRGC is a cross-functional mega holding, leading by the Supreme leader and his surroundings. Modern IRGC is the essential foundation for the IRI`s statehood, it is a state within a state.

IMAM’S KHOMEINI CONCEPT OF THE “ISLAMIC STATE”

There took place the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, which main inspirer and spiritual leader was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900/1902–1989). Imam Khomeini proposed the concept of the Islamic state that was realized in the political structure of modern Iran. The article analyzes two aspects associated with this concept: the ground of Islamic rule and the doctrine of "Wilayat al-Faqih" (rule by the [righteous] faqih), and there is also determined their relationship with the previous tradition.

ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКА, МЕСТО И РОЛЬ АВТОМОБИЛЬНОЙ ПРОМЫШЛЕННОСТИ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ СТРУКТУРЕ МАШИНОСТРОЕНИЯ ИРАНА

The article is devoted to the study of the role of automotive industry in modern Iran industry: The features of the evolution of the automotive industry in the country are analyzed, the quantitative assessment of the significance of the automotive industry for the economy is made on the basis of the Leontief model (costs-output), the main trends in the development of the automobile industry, as well as the state’s goals and policy in the development of the automobile industry for the period until 2025 are described. On the basis of what has been done, the essence of the main difficulties in the development of modern automobile industry in Iran is revealed, and ways of overcoming them are suggested.

Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran

Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran

Issues of Formation of the Azerbaijan People, its Language and Culture in Iranian Historiography

The article states that almost half of the population of modern Iran are native speakers of the Turkic language or know the language because the Azerbaijani Turkic language is the means of communication understood by entire population of the historical Azerbaijan territories. It is noted that the Azerbaijan Turkic language is a communication tool for millions of people not only in the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Turkey but also in many countries around the world, where this language has been developed and enriched unlike Iran, where Azerbaijanians, who for centuries have been living in this country and make up more than a third of the population, are deprived of such opportunities. Instead of development and enrichment of the Azerbaijani language, its assimilation takes place in Iran and historians, linguists, representatives of the intelligentsia bear a certain responsibility for this unnatural process.

Iranian Exceptionalism and Twelver Shi‘ism

Homa Katouzian's exceptionally perceptive, influential, and wide-ranging scholarship has been marked by three mutually reinforcing characteristics: a profound and detailed mastery of Iran's multi-civilizational heritage; a comparatively informed focus on the country's distinct historical trajectory; and an existentially grounded pluralist perspective in examining and evaluating the country's major political turning points and actors. These features are already fully displayed in his early magnum opus, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981), whose historical and political conclusions have been underlined time and again by the subsequent and often shocking national and international turns. In the intervening period, Katouzian has developed the cyclical theory of Iran's history as an “aridosolatic,” “pickaxe” or “short-termist” society. Of the important questions that his contributions raise or address, this paper examines the long-term continuity of Twelver/Imami Shi‘ism's trajectory which uniquely in the twentieth century Muslim and other worlds produced the leaders of two great revolutions. The result entails the addition of a still unfolding evolutionary-institutional layer within Katouzian's research program which may enhance its explanatory power and reinforce its political vision.

Squares as tools for urban transformation: Foundations for designing the Iranian public squares

The very concept of Public Square as microcosms of urban life and social relations has been transformed dramatically, especially in modern Iran. This article investigates the most dominant foundations, abstract ideas, ideologies and power relations that influenced the Iranian Public Squares’ designing. By considering the changing foundations for ideology and power relations, and their impact on urban form, this research follows the history and development of Iranian urbanism. Building on these foundations, it focuses on the transitional history and urban evolution of Iranian public squares through the Politico-religious and modern foundations till the contemporary era. Since the source of power has shifted to a wider mass of people in contemporary era, it can be concluded that designers should consider the social foundations at the time of redevelopment; in other words, the squares needed to be designed for people.

Kishwar Rizvi. The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: Architecture, Religion and Power in Early Modern Iran

Avec cet ouvrage, publication de sa these soutenue en 2000, Kishwar Rizvi propose une etude complete du sanctuaire de Sayḫ Ṣafī al-Dīn a Ardabīl et de sa progressive transformation en complexe dynastique sous les Safavides. L’ouvrage est illustre de nombreuses figures en noir et blanc ainsi que de 23 planches couleurs reunies en un cahier central. Deux appendices tres utiles le completent : le premier offre une traduction partielle du Ṣarīḥ al-milk, registre terrien redige par ‘Abdī beg Sīrāz...

Quietness beyond Political Power: Politics of Taking Sanctuary (Bast Neshini) in the Shi‘ite Shrines of Iran

“The politic” and “the religious” have had many relations with each other in Iranian history and in some cases “the religious” has been defined in a situation beyond the extent of the political power. A case in point is the right of taking sanctuary in Shi‘ite shrines. Throughout Iran's history, subjects could take refuge in Shi‘ite shrines and some other places related to religious and non-religious authorities. Persecution was delayed or the individual was forgiven, though sometimes they were sentenced when exiting the shrine. By referring to religious texts that have reinforced that tradition, this article seeks to trace continuities between early Islam and modern Iran. It focuses on sanctuary taking and sit-ins at shrines and tombs, and on the interplay between those actions and political power, and discusses the changing mobility and dynamisms of those actions at different periods of Iranian history.

The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monazereh, Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theater of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monazereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal1 identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogues rather than dialectics. The monazereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.

Occidentalism and Historiography in Modern Iran: Fereydun Adamiyat, One of Twentieth-Century Iran's Foremost Historians, and His Assessment of the Rise of National Socialism in Germany and the Fall of the Weimar Republic

Turning away from the stance initially adopted by scholars of Iran who had been inspired by Said's Orientalism-thesis, a line of academic enquiry that one might call “Iranian occidentalism”, i.e. the study of Iranian perceptions—or perhaps, (re)constructions—of the West, has been gathering considerable momentum in the last decade or so. While work has been done on several different facets of this “Iranian occidentalism”—e.g. its manifestations in travelogues, poetry and prose literature, the arts, or academic philosophy—no attention has so far been paid by scholars to the question, how, if at all, historians working in Iran have studied the history of the Occident in their academic writings. This essay addresses this question and breaks new ground by analysing the rare instance of one of twentieth-century Iran's most venerated historians—the “father of modern Iranian history”, Fereydun Adamiyat (1920–2008)—writing on a completely non-Iran related, major topic within modern European history—the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the fall of the Weimar Republic. This analysis begins by explaining Adamiyat's account of the destruction of Germany's democracy in the 1930s in its unexpected context—a book on social democratic thought in Iran at the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911) published in Tehran for the first time in 1975. It then proceeds to assess Adamiyat's account of the triumph of National Socialism in 1930s Germany in terms of its merits as a contribution to scholarship, before enquiring into the potential of a present-day political agenda on the part of Adamiyat, who chose to write on this particular topic at a specific time, during the mid-1970s, when Iran seemed to have reached a level of stability and (sudden) wealth that could not have been more different from the troubled final years of the Weimar Republic. In so doing, this essay does not only open up an entirely new chapter in the study of Iranian occidentalism, but also makes an original contribution to another burgeoning field, the study of the development of history as an academic discipline and as a politically contested body of knowledge in twentieth-century Iran.

Asia Inside Out: Changing Times ed. by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Purdue

Reviewed by: Asia Inside Out: Changing Times ed. by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Purdue On-Cho Ng Asia Inside Out: Changing Times. Edited by eric tagliacozzo, helen f. siu, and peter c. purdue. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 336 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Since the publication of Ray Huang’s classic 1981 work, 1587: A Year of No Significance, many years that were putatively insignificant have been found to be quite historically significant after all. Huang’s ironic rhetorical pronouncement is of course a reminder of just what the enterprise of history is all about. Instead of focusing on cataclysmic moments of momentous changes, history should be seen as a seamless temporo-spatial web of continuous developments, wherein apparently tiny segments and units of time serve as windows to much broader vistas. The edited volume under review is animated by this very spirit of appreciating and savoring microscopic moments as narrative and analytic sites on which understandings of macroscopic historical imports can be reached. By delving into small moments—in most cases single, individual years—the contributors together re-limn a big picture of Asia as an intricately connected geographical entity in an effort to “redefine conventional understandings of the vast land and sea regions stretching from the Middle East and South, across the seas of Southeast Asia, and up the East Asian coast to China, Korea, and Japan” (p. 1). Their goal is to break free from the straightjacketing conceptions of Asian territories as spatial pockets having disparate and separate histories, [End Page 146] defined in terms of some taken-for-granted state boundaries, linguistic commonalities, religious associations, cultural affinities, and so on. Such criteria of self-contained regions elide much of the internal diversity of an area as well as its external interconnectivity to other lands. To accomplish the task of reconceptualizing Asia by revealing its interregional interaction and international nexus at different historical junctures, each of the contributors probes deeply into the events and occurrences of a year or a decade in one small area so as to throw into sharp relief the larger englobing historical forces, from the sixteenth century all the way to the twenty-first. Heidi Walcher’s essay, “1501 in Tabriz: From Tribal Takeover to Imperial Trading Circuit?” challenges the historiographic convention of accepting the year of 1501 as the founding date of modern Iran by highlighting the continuities with former regimes and locating the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in the larger contexts of Central Asian histories, thereby showing the complexities of the geopolitics of a place and regime that was situated in the vast interstice between Europe and China. Victor Lieberman’s chapter, “1555: Four Imperial Revivals,” is a wide-ranging comparative study of four Asian states, arguing that the mid-sixteenth century was the crucial time during which Burma, Russia, Japan, and India embarked on substantial transformation and revealing the many similar factors that enabled each of them to become an enduring empire. Peter C. Purdue’s “1557: A Year of Some Significance” begins with the year when Ming China awarded the Portuguese a foothold in Macau and then promptly weaves this event into a larger fabric of roughly concurrent happenings: the surrender of Chinese pirate-merchants to a Ming official, the rise of an overseas Chinese enclave in Southeast Asia, and the negotiations to end the Mongol incursions into the northwest—and offers in the process an integrated story that shows the importance of the relations between the Ming Empire and its borderlands, which were in many ways governed by the forces generated by global economic exchanges and the imperial imperatives of Portugal and Spain. With Nancy Um’s piece, “1636 and 1726: Yemen after the First Ottoman Era,” the volume brings us to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Um examines the global coffee trade in terms of Yemen’s strategic location, and the Yemenese imams’ efforts to navigate the stormy commercial seas traveled by European, Middle Eastern, and Asian traders, as these local leaders catered to the economic needs of the Ottomans while responding to the contingencies of the transactions and transfers of the global commodity of coffee. Charles Wheeler’s “An Offshore...

Poverty and Perseverance: The Jesuit Mission of Isfahan and Shamakhi in Late Safavid Iran

This essay considers the presence and activities of the Jesuits in early modern Iran, a topic that, to date, has received little attention in English-language scholarship. It examines their motives for wanting to establish a permanent mission in Safavid territory in the mid-seventeenth century—a desire to bring Iran’s Gregorian Armenians under papal jurisdiction and, in part, their search for an overland route to India and China free from Portuguese influence—and discusses these in the context of Iranian concerns and interests. The study’s particular focus is the role of French and Polish Jesuits in the establishment of a mission in Isfahan and the subsequent creation of an outpost in Shamakhi, located in the Safavid-held part of the Caucasus, on the trade route between Iran and Russia. It concludes by evaluating their (meager) accomplishments despite perseverance in the face of poverty and loneliness.

Louis Kahn’s Silent Space of Critique in Tehran, 1973–74

Locating modernity’s unfinished project in the historical matrix of Iran, Louis Kahn’s Silent Space of Critique in Tehran, 1973–74 examines Louis Kahn’s master plan for a new civic center in Tehran. The 1970s witnessed a period of contention between political and cultural visions of modernity in Iran: as the shah’s state fabricated progress through a series of development plans, the queen’s reformist second court sponsored cultural and preservationist projects. This strife over modernity in Iran was reflected in Kahn’s design as form, space, and program. Shima Mohajeri shows that Kahn’s layout for a modern public space in Tehran concerned the development of an ethical attitude toward architectural modernity in a non-Western context as well as constituted a silent resistance to Iran’s sociopolitical reality and its spaces of representation.

The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’: Domestic Narratives of Patriarchy, Masculinity and Modernity in Iran, 1880–1980

The Bureaucrat, the <i>Mulla</i> and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’: Domestic Narratives of Patriarchy, Masculinity and Modernity in Iran, 1880–1980

The map of translation studies in modern Iran: an empirical investigation

Translation Studies research trends and methods have often been neglected in modern society of Iran. A considerable number of Iranian translation students, professors, and researchers conduct research programs on different aspects of this nascent discipline. However, they are mostly faced with difficulties in terms of selecting a suitable topic. This might be due to the fact that such researchers are not sufficiently informed of the gaps existing between the main branches and sub-branches of Translation Studies (henceforth TS) in their country. In this regard, this study aimed at investigating the orientations and tendencies of such researchers with special reference to their topic selections. First, a data bank of 400 M.A. theses abstracts in TS was established. These were among the theses defended between 2002 and 2012 in six Iranian universities including both State and Islamic Azad Universities branches. The study was then divided into two sections. As for the first part, we compared 120 theses abstracts to Holmes map of TS. The second part, however, was concerned with the keywords used in the theses abstracts. To include a wide variety of areas, the 12 main areas of researching translation proposed by Williams and Chesterman were considered as well. The results of the study revealed that there was a statistically significant difference among the 21 branches of TS map introduced by Holmes. The results also suggested that out of the main 12 areas of research in translation, 6 areas remained relatively untouched in modern society of Iran, remarkably corresponding to other Asian areas such as mainland China and Taiwan. Finally, some reasons for the current situation were discussed, especially in light of personal communication with some of the well-known TS scholars and theorists around the world (e.g., Larson, Chesterman, Munday, and Schaeffer), and the trends were then compared to the global ones. Some suggestions were also made for the future trends of TS in Iran.

Die Basis der Erzählung. Das historische Detail in der persischen Historiographie des 16. Jahrhunderts

Abstract Since the very beginnings of modern Middle Eastern Studies, chronicles have formed one of its most intensively used genres of sources. This is especially true for the Iranian World, which has left particularly few textual remains. Whereas the respective approaches to pre-modern Persian chronicles changed substantially within the last one and a half centuries of research, the approach to one aspect of these texts has remained comparably stable: the historical detail, the most bitsy information these texts contain, forming the very basis of the normative narrative of the chroniclers’ patron’s rule. While the end of the age of scientism is debated more than ever, the handling of the historical detail has stayed remarkably untouched – it is still presumed true all too often. Subject of this article are the chronicles written at the courts of Herat and Qazvin within the first decades of the 16th century under early Safavid rule. The study deals with the question of how stable these historical details really are, since the texts actually differ considerably in detail with respect to their stylising descriptions of one and the same historical event. In my view, these details are not stable, but, quite the contrary, surrounded by an aura of coincidence, which has to be taken into account when writing the political history of early modern Iran.

Drugs and Revolution in Iran: Islamic Devotion, Revolutionary Zeal and Republican Means

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited” and their trafficking, consumption and “promotion” were against the rules of Islam and could not take place in the Islamic Republic. This ruling, although informal in nature, sanctioned a swift re-direction of Iran's previous approach to narcotic drugs, both in terms of production and consumption. As had happened in 1955, Iran seemed ready to go back to a policy of total prohibition and eradication of opiates, this time under the banner of Islam rather than that of the international drug control regime. Drugs and the politics surrounding them have been a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of the history of modern Iran that have changed the nature of the state bolstering its capacity of social intervention, while hindering its legitimacy, in the Pahlavi, as in the republican, era. By moving on “from the analysis of the state to a concern with the actualities of social subordination”, this article attempts to interpret how social subordination and state coercion were practiced and defied in the making of punishment and welfare in the social body of Iran.

Government, Civil Society and Welfare Policies in Modern Iran

Government, Civil Society and Welfare Policies in Modern Iran

Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iranby Afsaneh Najmabadi

<i>Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran</i>by Afsaneh Najmabadi