Correcting Western views of Iran

Hamid Dabashi
Iran: A People Interrupted
The New Press, 2007
240 pages $27

Review by KEITH ROSENTHAL

IN LIGHT of recent U.S. belligerence toward Iran, the new book by Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted, is extremely important. Other recent books, like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle, have consciously or unconsciously lent themselves to the U.S. case against Iran, but Dabashi’s book paints a useful picture of the centuries-old fight of the Iranian people against tyranny—in both its foreign and domestic forms.

Aiming to “set the record straight,” Dabashi admits, “I have a bone to pick with [those] who have distorted the history of my people in order to belittle them and thus destroy their will to resist the regional domination of a predatory empire.” Against the depiction of Iranians as a conformist and inherently conservative people, Dabashi claims that “the story of modern Iran is one of defiance and rebellion,” and reveals the continued role that Western imperial powers have played in thwarting the Iranians’ aspirations for freedom.

One other goal of Dabashi’s is to criticize the idea that “Western civilization” is, and has always been, locked in a conflict with “lesser civilizations.” This racist view, termed “Orientalism” by Edward Said, the late historian and friend of Dabashi, purported to pit “Western modernity” against “tribal traditionalism,” a polarity exemplified by Samuel Huntington’s 1993 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Dabashi points out that the lines of demarcation between Iran and the “West” are not so rigid. For instance, he notes that some of the earliest American intellectuals, like Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau were influenced by the works of the thirteenth century Persian poet, Sa’di. Likewise, Iranians fighting against domestic and colonial tyranny in the twentieth century were influenced by the words and actions of George Orwell, Malcolm X, Arthur Miller, Jack London, and Che Guevara.

His book weaves Iranian literature, traditional and modern poetry, cinema, personal accounts, and political commentary together to illustrate the lush, organic expression of a people in struggle faced with both colonial intervention and internal tyranny.

Iran: A People Interrupted can serve as a primer on Iranian literature and culture at times, but it is also most useful with its clear and colorful depiction of a “people’s history” of Iran.

Starting in the late-1700s, and lasting until the end of World War II, Iran was a British colonial possession, with occasional “co-ownership” shared with Russia, and was ruled by a quisling Qajar monarchy, headed by the shah. By the mid-1800s, a series of peasant rebellions broke out. The rebellions reached a height in the early 1900s, when an armed revolt of merchants and peasants against the monarchy, the feudal landlords, and the colonial powers, resulted in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.

This new monarchy reigned uninterrupted in Iran until the 1950s. In 1951, a nationalist, Muhammad Mosaddeq, was elected prime minister. He moved to limit the power of the shah and to nationalize the country’s oil, in particular targeting the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The U.S. used the opportunity to increase its presence in the region. Using British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated a coup to remove Mosaddeq and bring back the shah, who had fled the country. The restored regime inflicted terror against the nationalists, socialists, and militant Islamists of Iran. The shah turned the country into a U.S. military base, secured a position of Iran in the global economy as an oil-exporter to the world powers, and attacked workers’ living standards.

In 1979, anger at the shah and his Western patrons exploded in an immense revolutionary movement that ultimately led to the end of the shah’s reign. Today, we see this revolution as the beginning of the Islamic Republic, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, but as Dabashi explains,

the brutal Islamization of the revolution…cannot be read backward in order to give the course of the revolutionary movement an entirely Islamic disposition. This was a national liberation movement that arose from a multiplicity of economic, social, and ideological sources and aspirations.