The “problem space” of the historiography of the 1979Iranian Revolution

Abstract

This paper is an examination of the historiography of the 1979 revolution in Iran with the goal of highlighting aspects of the history that are marginalized or remain unwritten. It identifies two dominant strands in the historiography: scholarship produced inside Iran and scholarship produced outside of it, particularly in the United States. Borrowing from David Scott, it argues that the same anti‐colonial “problem space” has shaped both strands, leading to a preference for a positivist historical arc in the historiography over one that highlights historical contingencies. As a result, the messy intermingling of Islamist, socialist, secularist, and Third Worldist ideas in the post‐colonial world that gave birth to the revolution itself is ignored, and events that actually do occur at their intersection are disavowed. The article ends by noting that a focus on the revolution's multi‐layered, contingency‐laden, and transnational roots can re‐position it both as one of the last great successful revolutions of the post‐colonial world and as one of the first to answer the questions and anxieties of its global south ethos in an Islamic form.

Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I

“…The last major Jacobin-style revolution of the last millennium, the 1978-1979 revolution in Iran, marked a turning point in the history of the region. Massmobilizing the population (Kurzman, 2004), it drew on a mix of Marxism, dependency theory, liberation theology, and Arab republicanism (Sohrabi, 2018), fusing them into an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist revolution (Ahouie, 2017), which moved "to create a full-fledged welfare state," (Abrahamian, 2009) while securing space for the market and the private sector domestically, even while bristling at foreign capitalist activity within Iran (Pesaran, 2008). Amidst the mass-mobilizing needs of a state at war and influenced by the legitimating ideology of its revolution, Iran turned to widespread social welfare investments and nationalization of private productive forces, creating a large state-owned industrial sector (Harris, 2017).…”

“Why Do We Need to Know About This?”: U.S. Imperialism, Persepolis, and Knowledge Production on Iran in the Classroom

“…These understandings cannot be separated from how Iran is made visible in the United States through political rhetoric and media representation, nor how durable these representations are in the U.S. public imagination. What remain underacknowledged in the historiography of the Iranian Revolution are the anti-imperialist, internationalist, and socialist underpinnings that contributed to the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Pahlavi monarchy (Abrahamian, 1999; Sohrabi, 2018). It is therefore not surprising that these vantage points are also underexamined in most high school classrooms in the United States.…”

(Dis)Affordances: Publicness and the Question of Absence

“… 2. Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as one of the most visible leaders of various revolutionary movements in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (Sohrabi, 2018). With the inauguration of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini became the highest state authority – the Leader of the Revolution – until his death in 1989. …”