Pahlavi State Research Articles

SHATTERING THE GLASS CEILING Women’s Roles and Images in Iranian Architectural Magazines (1946-2001)

This paper examines the evolution of Iranian architectural magazines, focusing on discernible shifts in the involvement and portrayal of women during three distinct periods spanning from 1946 to 2001. From 1946 to 1969, female contributions to the magazines were markedly scarce initially, with depictions limited to non-progressive representations of women in traditional roles and endorsements directed towards the Queen. Along with the modern cultural initiatives of the Pahlavi state in the 1970s, the magazines transitioned from a prior disregard for female figures to occasionally recognising them as equally capable professionals. In contrast to this shift and the gradual growth in the number of educated and professional women before and after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic embarked on a systematic effort to marginalise women and censor their images from public view. Challenging the post-revolutionary moments of limitation and censorship, few charismatic figures succeeded in redefining their roles and images in architectural magazines, especially after the revivals of 1991 and 1998 that were marked by the publication of two ground-breaking magazines. This study, supported by a comprehensive historical review, employs Theo van Leeuwen’s discourse analysis, revealing the intricate interplay of four discursive strategies in shaping women’s representation in Iranian architectural magazines across the three periods. The text underscores the impact of pre- and post-revolutionary societal and political changes. It highlights how the resilience of Iranian women led to an unprecedented redefinition of female professional roles in the 1990s.

The Visual Narratives of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

This article analyzes a series of documentaries on the 1979 Iranian Revolution broadcast by Iran International and Manoto television channels. While covering the era of the Pahlavi dynasty, especially since the Second World War under Mohammad Reza Shah, the documentaries’ main goal is to present the era as a progressive epoch interrupted by a disastrous revolution. At the same time, they explain the Islamic government as a deviation from the path of progress led by the Pahlavis. By doing so, they dismiss the Pahlavi state as a root cause of the revolution, absolving it of the responsibility for its consequences, i.e. establishing an Islamic government. In contrast, this article highlights state politics as one of the main factors decisively shaping a historical process which culminated in the revolution. This makes the Pahlavi political order central to understand how the events in 1979 and afterwards unfolded.

Buying modernization. Western NGOs and gender politics in Pahlavi Iran

ABSTRACT This article discusses the entanglement of an international women’s NGO, the International Council of Women (ICW), the Pahlavi state and Iranian female elite activists. Beginning in the late 1960s, the Iranian court started financially supporting this western NGO and subsequently its discourse regarding ‘modern women’. By doing so, the Shah strengthened his own image as a modern ruler. The ICW was financially unstable and accepted money from the autocratic regime without any reluctance. The discourse the Shah invested in, ICW’s discourse, was adopted by Iranian elite activists, whose activities were supported and controlled by the state. This study shows that this three-sided collaboration enforced a notion of modernity that failed to take class inequalities into consideration, thereby ignoring subaltern women.

Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space and the Trans-Iranian Railway by Mikiya Koyagi

Iran in Motion is an important contribution to the history of railway construction and its wider socio-political impact in a non-colonial context. At a related level, the volume also adds to our understanding of the diverse impetus behind railway building in the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, the history of railway building and its wider influence is largely a nineteenth-century story. But by focusing on the twentieth century, this book shows how the technology transfer related to railway construction and operation was adapted in Iran and was deployed to suit the changing needs of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran.The book has seven chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction sets out the analytical and methodological parameters of the book, including a “roadmap” with handy chapter summaries. The first two chapters underline how different visions—those of the late-imperial British and Iranian state in the early decades of the twentieth century—coalesced in imagining railways as a solution for creating a nation and national space. Chapter 3 develops this theme by illustrating how the Pahlavi state produced through imagery and actual construction a railway network (or the beginnings of one) that was expected to engender “national territorial space” (16). The fourth chapter focuses mainly on the construction of the trans-Iranian network, and the remaining three chapters analyze the ways in which the commencement of railway operation “produced new mobilities and new subjectivities” (16).The book’s scope is ambitious. At one level, it tells the story of the planning, building, and operation of the Trans-Iranian railways; at another, it tells what happens after railways become operational. Did it create a new nation space underpinned by diverse mobilities? Given this wide scope, the book methodologically straddles two distinct disciplinary boundaries, history and mobility studies. This interdisciplinarity, most notably evident in the conceptualization of the chapters, is largely successful. The flavor of the book, however, is primarily unembellished history. Though this approach is not necessarily a drawback, the volume, which explicitly claims to tell the history of Trans-Iranian railway as “stories of mobilities that the project facilitated” (14), does not draw substantially from the theoretical and analytical framework developed by mobility studies. Moreover, despite its use of traditional historical methodologies, the book’s empirical evidence is thin, as is clearly evident in the range of petitions and travelogues that it examines (Chapters 4–7). The copious newspapers, contemporary magazines, and similar other printed sources that document elite sensibilities cannot compensate for the striking dearth of empirical evidence about how railways affected non-elite mobilities and attitudes. Admittedly, mining archives for non-elite engagement is a daunting task, but the few petitions and other sources about railway workers, the traveling public, and the like are too sparse to justify Koyagi’s claim to cover “all sorts” (14).Nonetheless, the book theorizes and interprets its evidence well, showing that railway-induced mobilities were both diverse and instantiated in ways not intended by the Pahlavi state. The main achievement of the book is its ability to underline the wide and varied effect of technology transfer on different groups and individuals. Nowhere is this effect more obvious than in how people in contemporary Iran envisage their railways as a vehicle for pilgrimage and as an extension of the nation’s religious basis, beyond what it was projected to be when built under the Pahlavi regime. Overall, the volume adds to the expanding literature on technology transfer and its socio-cultural afterlife in Asia and beyond.

Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway

Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway

“Rich Fields in Persia”: Parsi Capital and the Origins of Economic Development in Pahlavi Iran, 1925–1941

AbstractThis article investigates the history of economic relations between Iran and the Parsi community of India during the Reza Shah period. Encouraged by the policies of the new Pahlavi state, Parsi entrepreneurs began a serious effort to investigate the possibilities of economic investment in Iran. The article details three Parsi economic missions that were conducted in Iran during this period, and analyzes their assessments of Iran's potential for development in fields such as energy, textile manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and modern transportation systems. As the article argues, while these Parsi-led initiatives were part of a larger history of renewed engagement between Parsis and Iranians, for a variety of political and economic reasons, by the outbreak of World War II few of the Parsi plans for investment in Iran had come to fruition. While remaining largely forestalled in the interwar period, the article also suggests that Parsi economic assessments foreshadowed many of the planning strategies carried out in Iran's post–World War II history of economic development.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi and the Spirit of Bandung: A Decolonial Reimagination of Development in Mid-Twentieth Century Iran

Sixty years after the original publication of Gharbzadegi (1962) by dissident Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the controversial book remains an important marker in the formation of the mid- and late-twentieth century perceptions of Iranian intellectuals about the relationship between their country’s past, present, and future. Building on the recent scholarship which considers Gharbzadegi as an alternative vision of the future rather than a nostalgic call for a return to the past, this article situates the book’s piercing critique of the Pahlavi state’s modernization and development agenda in a decolonial register. This is done through a reading of Gharbzadegi against the background, on the one hand, of the 1955 Bandung Conference at which representatives from various Asian and African nations gathered to discuss the futures of their countries after colonialism, and on the other hand, of the local experiences of semi-coloniality and dependent development. This reading helps to foreground an alternative conception of modernity in Gharbzadegi, and a decolonial vision in the book of development through delinking from Eurocentric designs. Reading it against the background of the Bandung Conference further helps to situate Gharbzadegi’s engagements with the Islamic tradition in the wider context of a postcolonial turn to religion. The article thus argues that Al-e Ahmad’s turn to Islam reflects a postcolonial sentiment that in developing alternatives to Europe’s colonial modernity the peoples of the Third World ought to reengage with the ways of life and modes of knowledge and norm production which were dismissed and suppressed by the dominating colonial structures and knowledge systems.

Ali Mirsepassi. Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State.

Iran’s intellectual encounter with modernity in the twentieth century and turn to Islamism around the Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) have animated vigorous scholarly debates, to which Ali Mirsepassi has made stimulating and provocative contributions. In four previous monographs, starting with ­Intellectual ­Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: ­Negotiating ­Modernity in Iran (2000) to Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid (2017), he has developed a singular argument: the prerevolutionary ­“anti-modern” and ­“anti-Western” discourse of “authenticity” and ­“nativism” among Iranian intellectuals was largely influenced by the German ­philosopher Martin ­Heidegger, and these works paved the way for the ­Islamist turn of the Iranian Revolution. Iran’s Quiet Revolution further develops this argument with a crucial twist: “anti-Western nativism” was not only cultivated and popularized by oppositional intellectuals but also by state elites and institutions. While the Pahlavi state pursued “a Western and modernist model in economic and...

Tribes and Smugglers in Iran's Eastern Borderlands, 1921–41

AbstractBased primarily on British consular reports, this article studies transborder movement in Iran's eastern borderlands during the two decades following the rise of Reza Khan in 1921. It discusses two kinds of transborder movements: tribal exodus and smuggling. By examining the contexts of these transborder movements, this article explores the desire of the new state to assert sovereignty as it appeared in the borderlands and demonstrates that, rather than simply closing the borders, the Pahlavi state attempted to control the flows of people and goods, with dual effects. It introduced new constraints to mobility and as well fostered the development of borderland networks that enabled diffused transborder movement, making it harder for the authorities to control.

The Tudeh Party of Iran and the land reform initiatives of the Pahlavi state, 1958–1964

This article seeks to explore the reaction and attitude of the Tudeh Party of Iran to the land reform initiatives enacted by the Pahlavi state between 1958 and 1964. This article will in particular describe how the party analysed the various stages of the land reform programme through both its lively media operation and internal party documents. Based on a close reading of this material, this article will also focus on how the exiled party’s attitude with regards to the Pahlavi state and other contemporary political actors affected its opinion of the rise to prominence of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini in the midst of the land reform programme. The article will hence conclude by offering a new account of the Tudeh’s initial attitude to Khomeini’s initiatives from the 15 Khurdad uprising to the cleric’s exile and gauge the extent to which the same was informed by the previous analysis of the land reform initiatives.

Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, by Ali Mirsepassi

Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, by Ali Mirsepassi

‘The school is the link between the Jewish community and the surrounding milieu’: education and the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s

ABSTRACT This article offers a thematic examination of the significant role education played among the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. I focus on the work of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Franco-Jewish philanthropic organization which established its first school in Iran in 1898. The Alliance – which viewed Iranian Jews as backwards and degenerate – aimed to modernize them via Western education. In this article, I demonstrate that the Alliance’s work in Iran helped the Jews move up the socio-economic ladder and provided them with opportunities to integrate into the broader non-Jewish Iranian milieu. By exploring the disputes that arose between the Alliance and local Iranian Jews, I also show that Iran’s Jews did not always accept the Alliance’s paternalistic attitudes. To discuss the overall impact of education on Iranian Jews, I situate the history of Jewish education in Iran within the Pahlavi state’s nationalizing campaigns.

The Keur Farah Pahlavi Project and Iranian-Senegalese Relations in the 1970s

Addressing the scarcity of scholarly literature on Iran’s involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa during the Pahlavi period, this paper demonstrates that throughout the 1970s, as the shah’s international standing rose and Iran’s economy grew, so too did Iran’s political and economic relationships with several African countries, especially Senegal. The article will explore a number of factors that stimulated this relationship, most significantly Senegal’s strategic and symbolic importance, and the personal friendships that developed between the countries’ leaders. The ultimate manifestation of this bilateral relationship was the Keur Farah Pahlavi project; a joint Iranian–Senegalese city to be constructed in Senegal. By exploring this project, the paper aims to demonstrate the strategies through which the Pahlavi state sought to expand its influence worldwide.

Things Unheard: Popular Silence and the Popular Voice in Revolutionary Iran

This article examines contestation over the popular voice in revolutionary Iran. It reconstructs a perceptual politics of sound centered upon the impossibility of hearing universal silence in the oratory of Ali Shariati, the “ideologue” of the 1979 Revolution that culminated with the overthrow of the Pahlavi State. As such, it demonstrates the emergence of a collectivity that shared a silence independent of the state, applying Shariati’s perceptual politics of sound to listen to the cry, Allah-u Akbar or “God is Great.” The article argues that during legitimation crises, political subjects are constituted through different experiences of shared silences.

Infrastructures of Empire and Sovereignty: The Port of Basra in Interwar Iraq

This article traces the legal and political-economic disputes surrounding the construction of the Basra port in the era of World War I and the Mandate. Although the port was nominally an Iraqi institution, British colonial authorities vested it with a jurisdictional reach that actually extended beyond its own physical boundaries. It grew to encompass local municipalities, multinational corporations, and central state authorities on either side of the porous river border between southern Iraq and Iran. While this anomalous spatio-political arrangement facilitated British colonial extraction in Iraq and a wider imperial project in the Gulf, it also repeatedly broke down amid competing claims to space and sovereignty by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Pahlavi state. The history of these conflicts helps bring together the often siloed historiographies of Iraq and the Gulf, and position both in larger scholarly debates on the political geography of borderlands, infrastructure, and empire.

CINEMATIC GOVERNMENTALITY: CINEMA AND EDUCATION IN MODERN IRAN, 1900S–1930S

AbstractMuch of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.

Middle Class Urbanism: The Socio-Spatial Transformation of Tehran, 1921–41

Most of the available literature on Tehran between the two world wars deals with the morphological transformation of the city and the role of the Pahlavi state in accomplishing massive urban projects. In contrast, this article focuses on the reciprocal relationship between the sociality and spatiality of the city. It demonstrates how the consolidation of the discourse of modernity resulted in the development of social and political desires for the production of new forms of social life and spaces. The article argues that the formation of the modern middle class and its alignment with the Pahlavi state’s reform projects contributed to a twofold process: first, the decline of the traditional forms of social life and spaces and, second, the production and prevalence of alternative forms. This process resulted in the establishment of social dichotomies with vast spatial manifestations and polarized the city both socially and spatially.

The Kurdish Resurrection Society (1942-1945)

The Kurdish Resurrection Society ( known as Komeley Jiyanewey Kurd) was the first political society that was founded after August and September 1941 and following the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran. This society arose from traditional and modern strata of urban Kurdish petty bourgeois in Mahabad. The present study aims at discussing the following questions applying a descriptive-analytical approach and using the historical resources and studies: 1. What is the role of the new social and historical structure of the Iranian Kurdistan in forming the Kurdish Resurrection Society? 2. How did the nationalism discourses of the modern absolutist Pahlavi state result in evolving the ideology of Kurdish Resurrection Society (KRS)? The evolution of KRS among the traditional and modern strata was the result of the changes and developments occurred in the structure of social forces in Iranian Kurdistan. These changes took place in the aftermath of modernization-related plans of the modern absolutist Pahlavi state in renewing the social structure and cultural assimilation of this era. This policy provoked a new form of collectivism based upon linguistic and ethnic minorities. In other words, while weakening and isolating the forces of the previous order, modernization paved the social and political ways needed for the emergence of new urban Kurdish forces. The Kurdish leaders and elites, affected by the nationalistic discourse of the modern absolutist Pahlavi state, attempted to provide a new definition of their ethnic identity. Thus, the nationalism discourse of the modern absolutist state led to the emergence of a particularistic nationalism discourse of KRS among the Kurds.

The Modern Woman Vis-À-Vis The Modern House: The Hallmarks Of Modern Nationhood Through The 1920s-1940s Iran

In the early twentieth century, with the establishment of the Nation Building program by the first Pahlavi state in Iran, the architecture of the modern house became a controversial issue. Modern house, being a nest for the modern nuclear family, was propagated by the state as the hallmark of the modern and progressive nationhood. Moreover, the state defined a new role and social position for the modern woman who -similar to the modern house- was introduced as the symbol of national modernization. This paper focuses on the ways in which the state tried to modernize both women and houses and introduced them as the hallmarks of its success through the establishment of the Nation Building program. In this regard, the substance and output of two decrees by the first Pahlavi state in the 1920s-40s will be compared: to modernize women and to modernize houses. Keywords : Modern Woman, Modern House, Modern Nationhood, Nation Building program, Iran

A Stage for the Revolution: Muharram and the Paradigm of Karbala in the context of Khomeini's Struggle with the Shah

29 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XL, No.2, WINTER 2017 A Stage for the Revolution: Muharram and the Paradigm of Karbala in the context of Khomeini’s Struggle with the Shah Javier Gil Guerrero* Introduction An important part of Iran’s Islamic revolution was the role that religious rituals and Persian folklore played in the social upheaval. Khomeini successfully conjured the spirits of the past in order to bring change to the present. This paper describes how Khomeini made use of (and reinterpreted) the slaughter at Karbala (680) in order to mobilize the population. Throughout this process Khomeini not only helped to revive old traditions, but he also reactivated old concepts like “martyrdom” while instilling new meaning to them.1 The objective of this paper is to put the Khomeini’s use of Muharram (the commemoration of Hussein’s death at Karbala) in perspective and examine the nuances that he added to the story and the rituals that had emanated from it. ThroughtheuseofMuharram,Khomeini“presentedtherevolutionarymovement against the regime as a morality play […] where heroes and villains could be easily identified.”2 The study locates Khomeini’s refashioning of Karbala within the context of the Iranian revolution and the Pahlavi state, including the struggle for the ideological orientation of Shia Islam, the attempts to monopolize the Karbala commemorations by the Iranian authorities and the repeated use of those ceremonies for political motivations. The contention of this study is that through his approach to the story of *Javier Gil Guerrero is a professor of Middle Eastern History at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria. He has recently published a book on the Iranian revolution, The Carter Administration & the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) as well as several papers on Iran and the Persian Gulf in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and the Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos. He regularly writes on Islam in the Spanish press. 1 Elisabeth Jane Yarbakhsha, “Green martyrdom and the Iranian state,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Volume 28, Issue 1, 2014. 2 Jahangir Amuzegar, The Dynamics of the Iranian Revolution: The Pahlavi’s Triumph and Tragedy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 31. 30 Hussein, Khomeini transformed the traditional image of the Imam from a passive and abused victim of injustice to a revolutionary martyr who fought to death against tyranny and oppression. Hussein became the prototype of a permanent revolutionary in a particular “Liberation Theology” of Islam.3 Khomeini’s innovative portrayal of Hussein reinterpreted one of the cultural pillars of Shia Islam in order to advance an “activist” approach to religion instead of the “quietist” one. The Karbala commemorations were thus dressed to fit a message of confrontation against the Shah in which the revolution was the only possible way for Shiites irrespective of its chances of success. The core of this paper is the description of Khomeini’s use of Muharram during his two clashes with the regime of the Shah in 1963 and 1978. The account is preceded by a brief overview of the historical events that inspired the mourning rituals of Muharram and their significance in Iranian culture and history. The aim is to contextualize the shifting interpretation of the ceremonies in the 1960s and 1970s through the particular beliefs and customs of Persian folklore and Shia Islam. Hussein, Karbala and Muharram The commemorations of Muharram revolve around the tragic end of Imam Hussein’s life in the year 680. Grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of the first Shia imam (and fourth Sunni Caliph), Ali. The slaughter of Hussein and the division concerning Prophet Muhammad’s rightful heirs constitutes the epicentre of the divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The Shiites believe that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali had been designated leader of the Muslim community by the Prophet himself on his deathbed. It was a designation of divine inspiration, not a personal choice:Ali had been named heir to Muhammad’s leadership by God. The Sunnis, on the other hand, ignoredAli’s claim (accusing him of falsifying the story) and proceeded to accept the ruling of the elders of Medina...