Iran: A People Interrupted
By Hamid Dabashi
The New Press, 2007
311 pages: $26.95, hardcover
In his introduction, Hamid Dabashi promises that by the end of his book the reader “will know more about Iran than the U.S. Department of State, the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation and five other neocon think tanks – not to mention the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Islamic Culture in the Islamic Republic of Iran – alput together.”
I mention them all because – at least regarding those in the U.S. – the “pundits” who parade as Middle East experts on nightly TV more often than not spring from these high sounding bureaucracies. There is no doubt that Dabashi keeps his promise about telling us more than all the “experts” will probably ever know. If only there were a required reading list for those responsible for foreign policy in this country.
Iran: A People Interrupted is encyclopedic in nature. hough by the time I finished the book, I didn't feel as if I knew everything there was to know about Iran, I was confident that I could find the answers to most questions about Persian culture and history over the last two centuries.
This is not a book for intellectual sissies. Forty-six pages of notes refer the reader to further sources on the Iranian poets, writers, filmmakers, historians, artists, architects, philosophers, clerics, critics and scholars who are referenced in the text.
Dabashi's academic style can be off-putting at times, while at others the beauty of his prose takes the breath away. Some paragraphs read like music. Others like legal treatises.
Always Dabashi impresses with his wide scope of his knowledge. I found myself making many notes about poets, writers, revolutionaries (especially women) and others who I want to look up in the future.
Early chapters cover “The Dawn of Colonial Modernity”, beginning in 1815 and continuing through the Constitutional Revolution in the early 20th century. The history becomes more personal and lively as it enters the era of the Pahlavi dynasty, which began in 1921, especially when we arrive at the modern history that every Iranian knows so well and few Americans ever learned.
“The CIA-sponsored coup of 1953 (a forerunner of what the United States did later throughout Latin America) became the most traumatic event in modern history, a trauma from which the people have yet to recover,” Dabashi says.
On a trip to Iran at the end of 2005, I found it to be a rarity if this subject did not come up in conversations with Iranians. No American who travels in Iran comes away without knowing the name of Muhammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister who nationalized Iranian oil and was thus overthrown by the Americans and British.
The history of the U.S. relationship with Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and last Pahlavi monarch, and all its ramifications are covered by Dabashi. And of course, the book details the 1979 revolution. A revolution that was stolen from its passionate backers and resulted in today’s Islamic Republic, what Dabashi calls a “medieval theocracy masquerading as a revolutionary regime.”
Dabashi scoffs at intellectuals who describe the Iranian conflict as tradition versus modernity. He focuses on the struggle between two types of modernity, one colonial and the other anti-colonial; one influenced by the West and the other a cosmopolitan culture that respects and nourishes variety, a “dialectical culmination” of political and ideological forces that can be found in Iranian history to its present society.
Dabashi ends this richly textured cultural and political history with one hope: “…The anticolonial modernity I propose here embraces as much the disenfranchised and racialized minorities within the so-called Metropolitan West as much as it does the rest of the world – and thus the only way that Americans can help promote democracy in Iran or anywhere else in the world is by first and foremost restoring and safeguarding it in their own country.
