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U.S. relations with Iran have been fraught for decades, but under the Trump Administration tensions are rising to startling levels. Medea Benjamin, one of the best-known 21st century activists, offers the incredible history of how a probable alliance became a bitter antagonism in this accessible and fascinating story. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution brought a full-scale theocracy to the 80 million inhabitants of the Middle East's second largest country, with. The rule of the ayatollahs opened the door to Islamic fundamentalism. In the decades since, bitter relations have persisted between the U.S. and Iran. Yet how is it that Iran has become the primary target of American antagonism over nations like Saudi Arabia, whose appalling human rights violations fail to depose it as one of America's closest allies in the Middle East? In the first general-audience book on the subject, Medea Benjamin elucidates the mystery behind this complex relationship, recounting the country's history from the pre-colonial period to its emergence as the one nation Democrats and Republicans alike can unite in denouncing. Benjamin has traveled several times to Iran, and uses her firsthand experiences with politicians, activists, and everyday citizens to provide a deeper understanding of the complexities of Iranian society. Tackling common misconceptions about Iran's system of government, its religiosity, and its citizens' way of life, Benjamin makes short work of the inflammatory rhetoric surrounding U.S.-Iranian relations, and presents a realistic and hopeful case for the two nations' future.
TV crews and foreign correspondents come and go, but former BBC correspondent Jane Howard made her home in Iran for five years, raising her two young children there. Her experience took her beyond the headlines and horror stories and into the lives of everyday Iranian women. Her brilliantly observed report, takes readers from dinner in a presidential palace to tea in a nomad's tent. From women working in rice paddies and tea plantations to highly educated women in Tehran who have been banned from working in their professions. The image of Iranian women is still one of anonymous ranks of revolutionary marchers, clad in black. But underneath their black chadors or drab raincoats, they not only wear jeans, T-shirts and Lycra leggings, but they also work outside the home, drive, play sports and even become politicians. While many women haven't regained the Western-style freedom they lost in the revolution of 1979, others have won rights they never had before. Practically every girl has access to primary education now, and even remote villages have clean drinking water, a paved road and a school. Yet Islamic law continues to impose many inequities and constraints. In cash terms, for example, a woman's life is worth half that of a man's, and in the courtroom, two women have to give evidence to equal one man's testimony. This is a fascinating story of struggle and change, vividly documenting what it means to be a woman in Iran.
Manijeh Moradian revises conventional histories of Iranian migration to the United States as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of pro-Shah Iranians from the Islamic Republic and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s.
The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general. As one Iranian recalls, The future was up in the air. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to think the unthinkable, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.
These essays examine Iran’s place in the world--its relations and cultural interactions with its immediate neighbors and with empires and superpowers from the beginning of the Safavid period in 1501 to the present day. The book provides important historical background on recent political and social developments in Iran and on its contemporary foreign relations. The topics explored include Iranian influence abroad on political organization, religion, literature, art, and diplomacy, as well as Iran's absorption of foreign influences in these areas. A special focus is the prevailing political culture of Iran throughout its early modern and contemporary periods. The authors combine approaches from history, political science, anthropology, international relations, and culturalstudies. Some essays address Iran’s interactions with various Arab and Turkic ethnicities in the region stretching from India to Egypt. Others examine its relations with the West during the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, women's issues, culture inside Iran during the Islamic Republic, and the Shi`ite theocracy of Iran as compared with other Muslim states.
Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.
Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, but in three years, they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen and started two secret house churches. In 2009, they were finally arrested and held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured and executions are commonplace. In the face of ruthless interrogations, persecution, and a death sentence, Maryam and Marziyeh chose to take the radical—and dangerous—step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them. In Captive in Iran, two courageous Iranian women recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to shine His light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything and showing love to those in despair.
The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open. Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts. In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.
In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.
In this book, Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr look at the political history of Iran in the modern era, and offer an in-depth analysis of the prospects for democracy to flourish there. After having produced the only successful Islamist challenge to the state, a revolution, and an Islamic Republic, Iran is now poised to produce a genuine and indigenous democratic movement in the Muslim world. Democracy in Iran is neither a sudden development nor a western import, and Gheissari and Nasr seek to understand why democracy failed to grow roots and lost ground to an autocratic Iranian state.