Post-revolutionary Iran Research Articles

Unveiling Voices and Empowering Narratives: A Comprehensive Exploration of Islamic Feminism in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

This literature paper delves into the intricate layers of Islamic feminism within Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of post-revolutionary Iran, providing a nuanced examination of the lives of Iranian women amid political and social transformations. Through a thorough analysis of female characters, with a focus on Marjane's experiences and those of her counterparts, the paper explores instances of resistance and agency as women navigate societal expectations. The concept of Islamic Feminism is introduced and contextualized, tracing its evolution, key principles, and objectives, while highlighting its role in challenging traditional gender norms within Islamic values. The historical and cultural background of Iran during the depicted period, encompassing the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, sets the stage for feminist discourse.Examining specific scenes and dialogues, the paper identifies and analyses elements in the narrative that reflect Islamic Feminist ideas, illustrating how Satrapi skilfully navigates the intersection of feminism and Islamic culture. Challenges and criticisms surrounding the application of the Islamic Feminism label to Persepolis are addressed, considering perspectives from both proponents and sceptics. The study concludes by discussing the potential impact of Persepolis on readers' understanding of Islamic Feminism and its broader contribution to conversations about feminism within Islamic contexts. Through a comprehensive examination, it highlights the significance of embracing diverse perspectives and employing dynamic approaches to comprehend the complexities of women's experiences within the Islamic context. By integrating ijtihad and pluralist, liberal-rationalist, and contextual approaches, it aims to unveil voices and empower narratives, ultimately fostering gender equality and justice for all. This abstract encapsulates the essence of the findings, offering insights into the multifaceted nature of Islamic feminism as pictured in Persepolis.

The Personal and the Political: Azar Nafisi’s Memoir as a Feminist Lens into Iranian Society

This paper highlights the points that Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books brings out the social and political life of people in Iran. It is a memoir by Azar Nafisi that explores the intersection of literature, personal freedom, and the oppressive political climate in Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a poignant memoir that takes readers on a journey into the heart of post-revolutionary Iran, where Azar Nafisi, a literature professor, forms a secret reading group with her female students. Against the backdrop of a repressive regime, Nafisi uses the works of Western literary classics, particularly Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, to examine the complexities of personal and intellectual freedom. Through the lens of literature, Nafisi explores the lives of her students and delves into the power of literature to challenge societal norms. The narrative weaves together the personal struggles of the women in the group with a broader commentary on the impact of political upheaval on individual lives. Nafisi's courageous exploration of the transformative power of literature serves as a testament to the enduring human spirit and the pursuit of intellectual freedom in the face of adversity.

Styles of ‘religion’, ‘non-religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in post-revolutionary Iran: the ‘ironic’ impact of ‘Islam’ on people’s ‘religiosity’

ABSTRACT By changing the definition of ‘religion’, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has posed serious challenges not only to Iran’s role in the Middle East and its relations with the ‘West’, but also to many social theories, such as differentiation, modernization and secularization. Indeed, there is no shortage of work on how post-revolutionary Iran has ‘Islamized’ its constitution and institutions. However, there is little work on the impact of the ‘Islamization’ process on people’s ‘religiosity’. This article is a response to this vacuum and takes as its central question: What has been the impact of the Iranian revolution on aspects of students’ ‘religiosity’ under the rule of an Islamist state? This question is tackled by drawing on the theoretical approach of ‘social constructionism’ towards ‘religion’, adopting Glock and Stark’s multi-dimensional model of ‘religious commitment’ and using quantitative research methods to examine the styles of ‘religion’ in 2001–02 among the students of a major national, research university: The University of Tabriz. A careful analysis of ‘religious commitment’ among a sample of 365 students provides evidence of the ‘individualization of religion’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘secularization’ rather than collectivism, ‘shari’a’-orientation and the rendition of ‘Islam’ as a political ideology or ‘Islamism’.

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran: Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian-American Life Writing

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran: Captivity, Neo-Orientalism, and Resistance in Iranian-American Life Writing

Sociology of Rival Music Genres and Music Consumption in Post-1979 Revolution Iranian Society

This article examines the genesis of and competition among rival music genres in post-revolutionary Iran. Rival genres (pop music, rap music, rock music, traditional music, etc.) are genres that gradually emerged and developed since the 1920s. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural field I point out the important music genres in post-revolutionary Iran that act as a means of expressing conflict over the borders of the field, and why in this field, contrary to Bourdieu’s theory, instead of a bipolar situation, a multi-genre situation prevails. Then, with the data obtained from my previous research and that of others who mostly live in Iran, I try to depict a picture of music consumption based on the rival music genres in the field and show how, contrary to the ideals and slogans of the Islamic Revolution, under the influence of global youth culture, the consumption of popular music has become the dominant consumption.

Social Construction of Population Policies and Problems in Iran Since 1963

: Population has been and continues to be a significant matter of concern and contention in Iran. A range of different claims-makers, with varying dramas, ideologies, resources, rhetorical strategies and schemas have made claims that name and frame the population problem in particular ways to influence policy processes, and the experiences, meanings, and practices of people in everyday life. As a result, since 1967, mainly in post-revolutionary Iran, there has been the rise and fall of contesting narratives of the population as a social problem. Drawing on theoretical insights from social constructionism, we track these debates. In particular, we are interested in how claims-makers use rhetorical strategies and mobilize resources to convince others and to influence policy processes through social problem games and works. In other words, we examine the claims-making activities around the population as a social problem over the last half-century in Iran, showing how an understanding of these activities can enrich our understanding of definitional processes. We also discuss how certain discourses, policies and social constructions of population and family planning have become dominant and have influenced cultural meanings, popular images and the daily life experiences of people, particularly women and their prospects of reproduction and motherhood, for the most part, in the shadow of interpretations of Islamic Sharia law enforced since the 1979 Revolution. Building on the constructionist analysis and interoperation of contesting anti-natalist and pronatalist claims and policies over the last half-century in Iran, this article highlights how images of population problems are constructed socio-culturally with actual impact on individuals’ everyday lives in society, and how people find ways to respond, resist and counter the dominant discourses and policies about family planning, population and reproduction and family. Hence, the contesting claims, definitions and discourses around population have not been merely abstract points of debate, but they have penetrated the emotions, memories, relationships, prospects and practices of people in Iran. The results reveal that there are several existing and emerging dialectics, paradoxes, and uncertainties on population policies and problems at multiple levels, with each of these definitions having key insights and implications for policy-related scientific research (science), the policy process and its outcomes, reproductive prospects and the practices of people (public).

Poverty and Deprivation Problems in Post-Revolutionary Iran

: This article examines both the positive and negative aspects of the performance of various governmental poverty elimination institutions and organizations during forty years of the Islamic Republic (1980–2020). Statistics and data show that after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, primarily due to the subsidy for essential goods and the support system based on cash subsidies, extreme poverty decreased dramatically. However, the persistence of relative poverty in society continues to be noticeable, primarily due, after 2010, to international sanctions–and their economic impact–imposed on Iran over its nuclear program. In general, the negative economic factors have reduced the effect of poverty alleviation plans. In addition, weakness in policy coordination among different institutions and programs of poverty eradication and no political will to eliminate the causes of poverty by turning to a sustainable pattern of development also have contributed increasing poverty.

Secularization of Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran, written by Mahmoud Pargoo

Secularization of Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran, written by Mahmoud Pargoo

A mirror for the crowds: the mediated terrain of political leadership in post-revolutionary Iran

A mirror for the crowds: the mediated terrain of political leadership in post-revolutionary Iran

Religion and punishment in the post-revolutionary Iran from the durkheimian perspective

Religion and punishment in the post-revolutionary Iran from the durkheimian perspective

Post-Revolutionary Iran: Contemporary Society and Cross-Border Security in Confronting International Terrorism

Post-Revolutionary Iran: Contemporary Society and Cross-Border Security in Confronting International Terrorism

A Philosophical Explanation for the Islamization of Philosophy: How Can Mullā Ṣadrā’s Transcendent Philosophy Contribute to the Islamization of Philosophy in Iran?

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the potentials of Mullā Şadrā’s philosophy to explain the possibility of the Islamization of philosophy. This contributes to a more general, yet controversial, project in post-revolutionary Iran, namely the Islamization of knowledge, especially in the humanities. If there would be a mechanism through which Islamization of philosophy – as a historical example and as a field of knowledge that provides theoretical grounds of other humanities – can be plausibly explained, then one might think of Islamizing the humanities, as well. One famous explanation in Iran is based on the distinction between contexts of discovery and justification. It explains how a philosopher is permitted to use the Islamic content in the context of discovery – not justification – and how this helps to Islamize philosophy. In this article, we claim a new explanation which is based on Mullā Şadrā’s transcendent philosophy. Such a philosophical explanation not only acknowledges using the Qur’an and authentic narrations in the context of discovery but also necessitates involving revelation as a philosophical criterion in the context of justification and a highly valid epistemic source in producing the new philosophical content. This provides a strong account of the Islamization of philosophy.

A Capitalist Economy without Robust Capitalist Production

In answering the motivating question of this roundtable—How, if at all, has capitalism as an analytical category figured in your work?—I separate my approach from two opposed but equally extreme camps of left-leaning scholars working on postrevolutionary Iran. The first camp underestimates the actuality of capitalism in Iran. It takes as its frame of reference neoliberal capitalism in the context of the Global North and contrasts it to an Iranian political economy lacking both the hallmarks of political liberalism and a robust economy to extrapolate that postrevolutionary Iran is not truly capitalist, without explaining why classic capitalistic class relations are continuously reproduced there. By contrast, the second camp overestimates the reality of capitalism in Iran, claiming that all aspects of collective social and political life are, in fact, now essentially capitalistic. This perspective rejects the relative autonomy of the state, culture, and other aspects of social life and the necessity for historical explanation of social and political complexities. Instead, it considers postrevolutionary Iran a purely capitalistic formation and explains its economy and politics through the logic of capital alone, without acknowledging the real weaknesses of capitalist production found there.

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran

Towards a non-Western model of security assistance: How Iran assists militaries

ABSTRACT With the 1979 revolution, Iran’s Security Assistance (SA) underwent a significant transformation, from fragmented and ideologically-driven support for Islamic movements in the early post-revolutionary stage to making SA the centrepiece of its national security strategy. This article explores Iran' model of SA by addressing the following key questions: How have perceptions of SA and its role in post-revolutionary Iran’s strategic thinking changed? What constitutes key elements of the Iranian SA practice? Is there an ‘Iranian way' of assisting local military partners, and to what extent does it overlap with other states’ similar practices? The paper identifies a two-stage process of evolution, arguing that SA gradually evolved into a strategic tool to build a Tehran-led regional alliance model, boost Iran’s deterrence capability, and counter the US-led collective security architecture. With a hybrid ideological and anti-imperialist rationale at its core, relying on human bonds and personal loyalties, mixing asymmetric operations with sustained force projection, and using a centralized command structure with minimum public exposure, Tehran has introduced a unique model of security assistance. The paper shows how Iran has moved beyond a technical view of SA to gradually shape a holistic model with interwoven messianic, economic, and strategic dimensions.

Post-Revolutionary Iran: Contemporary Society and Cross-Border Security in Confronting International Terrorism

Post-Revolutionary Iran: Contemporary Society and Cross-Border Security in Confronting International Terrorism

Military Ideology and Foreign Policy: A Constructivist Examination of the IRGC'S Ideological Influence

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) pervades most aspects of life in post-revolutionary Iran. Ostensibly the regime’s security organisation, the IRGC’s political clout and economic heft enable it to extend its influence beyond security and into foreign policy. This study employs a constructivist perspective, casting light on the key elements of the IRGC’s identity, notably its religious discourse. In doing so, it develops our understanding of how the organisation’s beliefs and values affect the foreign policy agenda of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This article draws on IRGC press statements, ideological training materials and its constitutive charter in conjunction with an analysis of the organisation's behaviour to delineate an image of an organisation staunchly loyal to the total imperium of the ‘House of Leader’, and which buttresses the regime with its militant, violent and religiously hardline outlook. Working to promote rather than define Ayatollah Khamenei’s system of Islamic governance, the IRGC’s role is closer to that of enforcer and implementer than of autonomous agent of foreign policy. This article contributes to the wider literature on constructivist idealism by highlighting the importance of ideas as relational and performative elements of foreign policy.

Representations of Veiling in the Visual Culture of Iran’s Islamic Republic : On Shirin Neshat’s and Jafar Panahi’s Filmic Works

This article explores multifaceted associations between gender politics and veiling in Post-revolutionary Iran. It centers on how contemporary Iranian visual art explores the ambivalence of hijab and its significance operated in various dichotomies, such as the public/the private, the feminine/the masculine, and the visible/the invisible. To address the social, political, and psychological dimensions of women’s experiences in contemporary Iran based on gendersegregation rules in the revolutionary government’s nation-building strategies, I attend to the spatial metaphor of hijab and its transgendered appropriation in the films of Shirin Neshat and Jafar Panahi. I begin with reading Neshat’s two-channel video installations which invite viewers to witness the tensions between the genders through multi-sensory encounters with veiled women in public spaces. Then, I analyze Panahi’s Offside (2006), a film about Iranian girls whose masculine veils empower them to enter the male-only public arena. Through these case studies, this article argues that the visualization of veiling underscores the ambivalence about the nation-state mode of Islam and the vulnerability of ‘Iranianness’ reliant on the revolutionary regime’s gender policy.

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran

During more than the last four decades, Iran has been one of the main interest areas not only in global political and strategic agenda but also in the cultural sphere as well. Most of those interests focus on analyzing the domestic and economic situation in addition to the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic. However, one observes a lack of studies analyzing the Iranian diaspora and their culture, lifestyles, and feelings in a comparative way. One such book was published a couple of months ago and authored by Hossein Nazari, an assistant professor from the University of Tehran: Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran. In his book, Nazari elaborates on a very interesting and less-studied phenomenon: which individual or socio-cultural factors and motivations drive the Iranian-American diaspora women toward authoring “memoirs” discussing the situation in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran?

ELT as necessary evil: resisting Western cultural dominance inforeign language policy in the context of Iran

ABSTRACT English language teaching has always been treated as a socio-cultural issue in post-revolutionary Iran. Fueled by anti-imperialist sentiment, the political authorities diagnosed Western influence as the major ailment of the society. Having to accommodate for the undeniable virtue of learning English for international communication, educationalists prescribed limited, censured doses of culture-free, localized English input to bring up a new generation immune to the Western values. The analysis of the educational goals in Iranian macro educational documents and their realization in teaching materials reveals an organized effort to resist and undo the influence of neoliberal education and provide an alternative rooted in national-religious heritage of the country. To examine whether this localized version can survive amid neoliberal forces in education and compete with its imported goods, the present article attempts to provide a bird’s eye view about the interplay of policy, culture, and political ideology in the curriculum through content analysis of the Iranian macro official documents and their manifestations in local ELT textbooks, supplemented by the researcher’s perspectives as an insider with prolonged engagement in this educational system. Hopefully, careful scrutiny of Iranian ELT program in its wider socio-cultural context contains lessons about avertable errors when proposing alternatives to neoliberal education.