Perspective, Spring 2019

PERSPECTIVE

spring 2019 university of california, berkeley

© Abbas Attar/Magnum Photos

FORTY YEARS AGO,

one of the most transformative revolutions of the twentieth century dramatically shifted the trajectory of Iran and the lives of its people. For many of us, affect, ephemera, and memory comprise a sort of archive and serve as evidence of a revolution to which we otherwise have no immediate material relationship. We situate ourselves within the legacy of the Revolution in ways that are multifarious, expansive, and often contingent upon our families’ political orientations and relationships to both the Revolution and the formations of the Iranian state which preceded and followed it. Embedded in this legacy, we understand revolution to be not a singular moment but rather an ongoing project which began long before 1979 and continues to this day.

We do not simply honor the Revolution’s legacy but engage it dynamically and critically in ways that allow for new formations of identity, community, and politics.

We not only evoke the archive but also make entries into it.

EDITOR'S LET TER

Redesigned and reimagined, we present to you the special edition of Perspective Magazine Spring 2019, dedicated to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Forty years later, we examine the Revolution and present aspects of it to you as young Iranian-Americans who grew up hearing and reading about a phenomenon for which we were not physically present, yet one that has been paramount in shaping our identities to this day. This issue is to commemorate all the revolutionaries who fought, sacrificed, fled, and died for the love of Iran.

By touching on the many dimensions that revolution can embody, Perspective holistically explores the political, historical, social, and artistic layers that transcend typical understanding of the Islamic Revolution.

Across time periods, this issue provides you with a narrative that is still being written today. Interviews with loved ones and scholars who were active in the Revolution offer analysis and reflection. Beyond writing, the artistry of Iranians, past and present, established and emerging, immerses you in visual experiences that are both concrete and conceptual. The multifaceted narrative aims to represent the variety of emotions attached to the Revolution.

We hope this issue is educational and challenges the tainted idea of the Revolution fabricated by the West for decades. There is much more to the Revolution that we cannot convey because of our limited scope as young Iranian-Americans, but we see this as our contribution to ensuring such a transformative movement goes unforgotten. Rather than polarizing the Revolution by praising or mourning it, this issue exists for you to remember it.

Saalar Aghili editor-in-chief

CONTENTS

10 14 16

Tehran’s Megaprojects

20

Beyond the Revolution 24

26 28

I Die For You

Internationalist Formations,

Revolutionary Temporalities 34 36

The Sound of Resistance

The Legacy of The Little Black Fish 38

40 44

In Reflection, Forty Years Later

Expanding Archives & Building Disciplines 46

The Revolutionary Clock 48

References

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Appendix

STA FF editor-in-chief

Saalar Aghili assistant editor-in-chief

Bahaar Ahsan

assistant designer

Anahita Ghajarrahimi outreach

Donna Fotoohi finance

Mina Aslan interns

Neda Shahiar outreach Omeed Askary finance Mia Karimabadi design

copy editors

Dorrin Akbari, Negin Amouei, Charlotte Laurence, Azin Mirzaagha staff writers

Ariana Dideban, Nasim Jahangard-Mahboob, Mana Javadi, Nessa Ordukhani, Ali Setayesh, Mina Shahinfar with original artwork by

Hushidar Mortezaie

SPONSOR S

Associated Students of the University of California Center for Middle Eastern Studies Middle Eastern North African Recruitment & Retention Center Middle East Market San Francisco State University Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies Persian Center

© Abbas Attar/Magnum Photos

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“I shall never forget the tears in the eyes of the Shah the day we left Iran. In that deserted runway and in the aircraft, my only thought was whether it was the last time or [whether we] would return.”

farah diba pahlavi

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In desire of that I am, forth from my hand, it come.

I may fix my hand upon a work such that the end of grief may come.

by Ali Setayesh

The plain vision of the heart is not the place of opponents When the demon goeth out, the angel within may come.

T

hese words from the 14th century Persian poet Hafez beautifully showcase the Iranian mindset of the world: the belief that if a deev (demon) leaves, it will be replaced with a fereshteh (angel). The origins of such beliefs date back to 1500 BC during the time of Zoroaster who claimed that “In the beginning, there were two primal spirits, twins spontaneously active; these are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.” Zoroastrianism teaches us that there is a constant and universal fight between Good and Evil and that we should strive to fight for Good. This ideology has planted a revolutionary spirit in Iranian culture. Throughout the years, deevs have come and gone, but the one thing that has not changed is the will to replace them with a fereshteh.

Literature depicted forms of resistance through poetry, but also folklore. In Ferdowsi’s epic narrative, the Shahnameh, a mythical Iran is usurped by a foreign ruler named Zahhak. He embodied a deev so much that snakes lived off both his shoulders and subsisted on human flesh. The personification of evil made Zahhak the epitome of this dichotomy Hafez describes in his poetry and shows how literary elements facilitated such an idea.

The opposing fereshteh came in the form of a blacksmith named Kaveh who symbolized resistance in Iranian folklore and led the uprising against Zahhak. His legacy was so important that one of the main symbols used by Ancient Persian empires, Derafshe Kaviani, was named after Kaveh for his efforts in resistance and Iranian sovereignty. His legacy remains a symbol in modern times as Kaveh and the Derafshe Kaviani are still cited as a symbol of resistance.

Contrary to popular belief, a deev does not always need to be a person or a ruler. In sixth-century Iran, in one of Iran’s first social revolutions, greed becomes the deev. Wealth was accumulated amongst the nobility, while the common people struggled in poverty. Mazdak, a Zoroastrian priest, preaches against such accumulation and calls for it to be divided evenly. The severity of inequality that created the conditions which encouraged Mazdak to speak against greed can be seen. Famines ravaged the country, severely hurting the peasantry. The ruling elite, howev-

er, lived in incredible comfort with harems of over one hundred wives. Mazdak also greatly opposed violence as he believed that violence was the result of greed. Mazdak and his followers are known to be the first real socialists in human history because of their stress on community work and property with benefit for all.

Although Sassanid society’s inequality is what inspired Mazdak, his movement was driven by Zoroastrianism’s commitment to fighting for Good, which is what has made Iranian revolutionaries pioneers. Despite gaining initial momentum and support from the king, Mazdak’s movement was unable to reform the socioeconomic issues of Sassanid society and eventually died out.

One hundred fifty years after Mazdak, Iran experienced a wide range of governmental changes and was introduced to Islam, but the revolutionary spirit remained. The Iranians and non-Arabs in general were unhappy with the Umayyad empire’s discrimination toward them. Even after converting to Islam, non-Arabs were treated as second-class citizens and were required to pay the jizya1 tax. Non-muslims were treated worse; the Umayyads were responsible for killing all Zoroastrian clergy and destroying religious literature and buildings in Eastern Iran in the seventh century. This triggered Iranians to rise against the Umayyads. Once again, there was a deev to replace with a fereshteh. Under the leadership of Abu Muslim Khorasani, the people overthrew the Umayyads, replacing them with the Abbasids in what many scholars consider to be one of the most organized revolutions of the medieval world. Although many issues remained, the revolution was largely successful in lowering prejudice against non-Arabs, giving Iranians a privileged place in the Abbasid court, and redirecting focus to eastern provinces such as Khorasan.

Fast forward to the twentieth century and we still see a constant struggle between Good and Evil. In 1906, people sought freedom in the form of a constitution. Now came a revolution where the fereshteh outweighs the deev. People were incredibly optimistic about living in a free society and creating a constitutional government. This was a pivotal moment in Iran’s history as part of the Shi’ite clergy changed their ideal form of government from a monarchy to a democracy when Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Khorasani, the leader of the Najaf seminary at the time, issued a fatwa2 in favor of rebelling against the Shah to form a constitution. This fatwa was considered to be the spark for the Constitutional Revolution, but its impact goes far beyond 1906.

Had this fatwa not been issued and the Shi’ite clergy’s ideal form of government not been changed, Iranian political movements could have had a different trajectory. This fatwa legitimized democracy in Shi’ism and allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to advocate for such a government. It is worth noting that Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Khorasani was opposed to religious scholars engaging in political activities. Rather, he believed that clerics could act as “warning voices” toward political misdoings in society.

Nevertheless, muslims were not the only participants in the Constitutional Revolution. It was a beautiful instance of unity among both Iranian muslims and non-muslims as many prominent leaders were not muslim, such as Yeprem Khan. Azeris, Persians, Lurs, Armenians, and other Iranian ethnic groups all worked together to oppose the Shah and establish a parliament. One way to view this unity is the Zoroastrian principle

of Good constantly fighting Evil, which is embedded in Iranian culture. Despite the groundswell of support for the rebellion, the Constitutional Revolution was largely unsuccessful when Reza Shah took power and established the Pahlavi dynasty. He founded the University of Tehran, showing his fereshteh side, as opposed to when he ordered the killing of protestors at the Goharshad Mosque.

There is no better example of unity among various groups of people than the 1979 Revolution. We see opposition to the Shah from atheist Marxists to Islamists, who worked together with little conflict until the Shah was overthrown. Class, gender, and urban-rural differences did not keep people from supporting the Revolution, and it is this unique heterogeneity that made the Revolution possible against the financially and militarily powerful Shah. As scholar and sociologist Theda Skocpol argues, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the first modern revolution where different social classes were united. She describes this phenomenon as what western socialists have long dreamed of doing.

The Shah had alienated himself from his own people and was living in a utopian future, pursuing a variety of reforms which mostly proved to be unsuccessful and further upset the people.

His mentality did not align with that of his own people, as he had essentially turned into a Westerner. As the Shah read Chateaubriand and Rabelais, Iranians read Ali Shariati and Jalal Ale Ahmad. He exemplified his obsession with the monarchy and ‘secular’ Islamophobia when he switched Iran from the Islamic to the Imperial calendar and celebrated 2,500 years of monarchy with an extravagant event at Persepolis that excluded the common Iranian suffering from drought at the time. This disconnect with his own people and elitism led to the Shah becoming a deev and anything in opposition to him being a fereshteh. This caused many Iranian revolutionaries to be less worried about what was to replace the Shah and primarily focused on overthrowing him.

Although this dualistic mentality of Good always fighting Evil has helped spark many Iranian revolutions, it is also arguably the reason why they have largely been unsuccessful.

The idea that if we replace a deev we will encounter a fereshteh, as Hafez says, is quite problematic in the context of government.

It has caused many Iranian revolutionaries to blindly trust that if they get rid of the deev, they will end up with a fereshteh. Moreover, the very idea that a person can be a fereshteh is dangerous, as this collective mindset has led to a history of championing leaders because within each leader we find elements of both Good and Evil, as seen through the case of Reza Shah. A reinterpretation of how both a deev and fereshteh are embodied within individuals and the political realm calls for a more nuanced approach to how we perceive “good” and “evil” both during, and indeed, after a revolution. Future Iranian reformers should therefore put faith in a system with checks and balances, as the departure of a deev does not necessarily entail the arrival of an ideal fereshteh.

A yearly tax historically levied only on non-Muslims who permanently resided in Muslim lands 2 A ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority 1

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© Bahram Ghajarrahimi

Enghelab Street, Tehran 1978

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Year:

1973

Trial of Khosrow Golsorkhi

“I begin my defense with the words of Imam Hussein, the greatest martyr of the peoples of the Middle East. As a Marxist-Leninist, I searched for social justice for the first time in the teachings of Islam and then I found socialism . . . I begin my words with Islam. In Iran, the true Islam has always fulfilled its duty to the liberation movements . . . Today also the true Islam is carrying its responsibility toward our national liberation movement. There are close similarities between what Marx says, that in a class society, wealth is accumulated in one side and poverty, hunger, and misery on the other, and that the downtrodden is the producer of wealth, and what Imam Ali says, that no palace is built without the misery of thousands. This is why I call Imam Ali the first socialist in world history . . . Being tried today in this courtroom is just another example of Imam Hussein’s life. We are ready to sacrifice our lives on behalf of our country’s disinherited. . . . History is what people reenact is the path of Hussein. As a Marxist I applaud such an Islam, the Islam of Ali, the Islam of Hussein."

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Khosrow Golsorkhi was a journalist and poet known for his rebellious stance against the Pahlavi regime, leading to his arrest in 1973. As one of the first publicly televised trials in Iran, Golsorkhi took the opportunity to present his case for Islamic socialism. His defense was not necessarily for himself, but rather for the people of Iran. The military court ruled his case guilty alongside Keramat Daneshian and both were executed by firing squad in 1974.

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Megaprojects TEHRAN'S

Pahlavi-Era Conceptualizations and Present-Day Realizations

A

fter the Iran-Iraq War, the Islamic Republic’s post-war policy emphasized rebuilding Iran’s western provinces, which precluded human development in Iran’s interior. Economic stagnancy halted urban expansion in Tehran, a city that grew at an exponential rate prior to the Islamic Revolution.

When Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected as the fourth President of the Islamic Republic in 1989, he vowed to rehabilitate Iran’s physical and urban landscape—both in Iran’s war-torn peripheral provinces and larger metropolitan areas.

Initially, Rafsanjani pursued large-scale development projects in Tehran in order to both revitalize the economically depressed capital city and reintroduce Iran to the global economy. Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi, or period of reconstruction, spanned his eight-year presidency from 1989 to 1997, and is often considered his milestone contribution to the Islamic Republic. He contracted private firms to spearhead a variety of urban megaprojects in Tehran, from public parks to high-rise buildings—all of which he oversaw from planning phases to initial construction.

Today, residents of Tehran attribute the construction of these projects to Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi, but in fact, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi laid the foundations of three of these landmark projects: Imam Khomeini International Airport in 1968, the Tehran Metro in 1975, and the Milad Tower in 1976. Nonetheless, Islamic Republic sources, like the Iranian Students’ News Agency, defend Rafsanjani’s single-handed conception of these endeavors during the late 1980s, and while hardliners critique Rafsanjani’s ostensibly garish megaprojects, the Shah is indeed responsible for their resplendent designs. Moreover, Rafsanjani’s administration reworked the Shah’s plans for a central tower, metro system, and new international airport in order to achieve

three overarching objectives that both regimes possess in common: nationalism, urban cosmopolitanism, and international interconnectivity, respectively.

The Shah implemented social reform through the White Revolution during the tail-end of his reign. For one, a 1975 New York Times article cites the Shah’s plans for the Milad Tower’s precedent, the Shahestan Pahlavi project, “to be adorned with boulevards, parks, ministries, banks, auditoriums, hotels, embassies and other buildings . . . to give Teheran a splendor it conspicuously lacks.”

After the Revolution, the Islamic Republic shrouded this elite-serving nationalism in a newfound Islamic fervor, and the Shah’s megaprojects thusly molded to fit these new regulations. For one, the Shahestan Pahlavi project, whose ostentatious architecture was associated with the “virtually all-powerful Shah,” transformed into the Milad Tower, which today modestly exhibits minimalistic Islamic designs.

A pattern of inverted triangles adorn the tower’s head structure, which, while seemingly basic, highlights post-Revolution architects’ preference for Islamic design as opposed to the Shah’s initially empire-centric themes.

The Shahestan Pahlavi project and the Milad Tower both promote Iranian chauvinism, but their leanings—from ancient Iranian to Islamic fundamentalist—materialize differently in the particularities of building designs. The architectural forms of the Shah’s plans and Rafsanjani-era products obscure evident links between both regimes’ underlying ideologies. Nonetheless, both regimes’ planned for the construction of a telecommunication tower to showcase Iran’s burgeoning regional relevance and modernity, even though their analogous intentions have been concealed under the veneer of distinct architectural perspectives.

Moreover, urban cosmopoli16

tanism, or the aspiration of a connected Tehran metropolis, motivated the Shah to contract European urban planning firms to draft initial proposals for a Tehran-wide streetcar system. French development firm SOFRETU provided rolling stock and broke ground on the project in 1978, but the ensuing revolution prevented the project’s completion. Over a decade later, firms contracted by the Islamic Republic commenced construction on the metro system under Rafsanjani’s Doran Sazandegi. As of February 2019, the Tehran Metro consists of 8 network lines and carries 2 million passengers a day, a volume that rivals those of its European and North American counterparts.

While the Islamic Republic’s urban policy is frequently entwined with conservative, often monotonous, designs, the Tehran Metro boasts sleek, ultramodern trains built by Austrian and Chinese manufacturing companies; this investment in train parts reflects the Islamic Republic’s underlying desire to renovate Tehran’s infrastructure and westernize a sprawling city that previously lacked a centralized urban core. The use of foreign rolling stock by both the Shah and the Islamic Republic underscores both regime’s common purpose in introducing—or reintroducing, in the case of the Islamic Republic—Tehran to global trade, while simultaneously broadening the city’s regional potential with a stateof-the-art transportation network. It was thus the Shah’s initial conceptualization of the Tehran Metro that sowed the seeds of cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Republic, despite the latter’s perceived opposition to change.

Lastly, the Shah’s idealization of the Aryamehr Airport materialized as Imam Khomeini International Airport in 2004, which ultimately served to replace the deteriorating Mehrabad Airport. In 1968, the International Civil Aviation

Organization (ICAO) suggested the construction of this additional airport in order to sustain Iran’s burgeoning population, and the Shah interpreted this as an opportunity to expand Iran’s international connections. However, the inception of the Iran-Iraq War closed Tehran off from the West, and it was only during Rafsanjani’s post-war administration that demand for air travel among a burgeoning Iranian elite necessitated rapid construction of a new airport.

In response to the Obama-era nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic has encouraged the expansion of Imam Khomeini International Airport as a stopover point between Central Asia and Western Europe. Despite President Trump’s discontinuation of the nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic has prioritized global connections and has further broadened the airport’s capabilities since its 2004 inception. Rafsanjani-era growth policy surrounding Imam Khomeini Airport, along with present-day desires for regional prowess, corroborate the Shah’s initial conception of Aryamehr Airport and accentuate both regimes’ fascination with international recognition and infrastructure modernization.

The Shah strove to achieve self-aggrandizement and a pre-Islamic predilection through his urban projects, but Rafsanjani heightened patriotism by providing post-Revolution Iranians with an avenue with which to interact with public space—regardless of the Islamic Republic’s social restrictions. While the Islamic Revolution is often considered a rupture in Iran’s economic growth and development, it has in fact served as a mere shift in the physical attributes of the built landscape. Moreover, Tehran’s megaprojects act as one of few threads of continuity between the Shah and the Islamic Republic. Not only did the Islamic Republic rehash the Shah’s initial conceptualizations, but also both regimes have utilized urban development as a means of progressing their regional policy objectives; these are encapsulated as nationalism, urban cosmopolitanism, and international connectivity.

The urban landscape is an unexpected setting in which Tehrani residents, upon overlooking the physical designs of commercial centers, may observe simi-

larities between the regimes’ underlying goals. The Shah’s initial conceptions of Tehran’s megaprojects have been largely erased from twentieth-century historiography, yet his ideals successfully transcended the bounds of the Revolution by coming to fruition twenty years after they were initially conceived. While the Islamic Republic and the Pahlavi Dynasty by no means exude common political interests, their desire to promote Iran as a sophisticated, urbane state is strikingly concordant.

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Mostafa Chamran (March 8, 1932 – June 20, 1981) was a physicist-turned-politician and revolutionary known for sacrificing his stable life in academia at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, for one of military and political activities in Iran and around the world. From Egypt to Lebanon, Chamran trained in guerilla warfare and participated in Islamic liberation movements, eventually returning to Iran as a revolutionary and becoming a politician in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament. When the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980, he was a commander for the newly founded government and killed on the frontlines in Khuzestan. His legacy lives on as a symbol of martyrdom through monuments and murals around the Middle East. Khomeini remembered Chamran as a “proud commander of Islam.”

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Beyond the Revolution

by Nessa Ordukhani

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W

hen we first walk into the restaurant, it is almost completely empty. Vaguely Mediterranean music plays softly in the background as mosaic tables stand empty, more like artwork than furniture. We sit down in the dim lighting as I try to quell my anxieties about the interview that is to come; I am concerned that the conversation is going to be a difficult one. Even forty years after the Iranian Revolution, I still cannot imagine it being an easy topic to discuss for someone who lived through it, but my mom is smiling like she always does.

Almost every day, my mom can be found hunched over her phone, typing rapidly with a childlike smile across her face.

Without asking, I know she is texting her friends from Pahlavi University High School in Shiraz. These friends only spent one year of high school together before the Revolution turned their worlds upside down, but Pahlavi University High School left an indelible mark on them. It was a very unique school; after testing some seven thousand students throughout the country, one hundred twenty were admitted to this pioneer school in which boys and girls were allowed to learn together and enjoy access to special laboratories without having to wear uniforms. While this is commonplace in the United States, it was practically unheard of in Iran. Their time at this institute gave the students the ability to grow and create bonds with one another; they were connected by their shared experiences and the revolution that shaped their lives. Their story illustrates the remarkable ability of beauty to flourish in even the darkest of times.

When the Revolution grew throughout the nation, my mother and her friends never imagined how it would change their lives. Suddenly, Pahlavi University High School became Shiraz University High School, boys and girls were separated, and the administration was replaced by adults who, in my mother’s words, “made it their mission to make [their] lives miserable.

It was the best time of our lives in the best school that Iran had to offer at that time, in my opinion. It was amazing. And then all of a sudden, it was all stopped. They put a stop to it. We were separated.” With the new faculty, students who once thrived in this incredible learning environment were suddenly treated like delinquents, punished for the simplest of acts. It was “as if we were bad seeds just because we went to that school. We were never good enough people for the administration.” During those first few years following the Revolution, some of my mother’s classmates were killed and some fled, including my mother who left the country in 1983. Today, Pahlavi University High School no longer exists; it is nothing more than a distant memory.

However, despite their separation of over thirty years, through the powers of social media, these classmates were finally able to reconnect in 2015 through a group chat of 105 people. As my mom and I sit in the restaurant and I ask her about this group chat, her eyes take on a slight air of nostalgia and she says, “With this group chat, it was like we were the same age we were when we were torn apart.” The group has become a way for its members to remain connected to their past, their old friends, and the rest of the world. For many, it’s almost like a source of therapy. In the group chat they “discuss books, poetry, physics, and politics,” and to my mom, “it is some strange bond.”

As she sips her bitter Turkish coffee in the restaurant with me, forty years later, she still cannot help but emphasize

this inseparable bond that connects her to the other members of the group chat. Every time they FaceTime or talk on the phone, I hear giddy squeals and shouts of excitement. Jokes are thrown back and forth in a rapport that is, above all else, comfortable and loving. Admiration clings to each of my mother’s words as she describes how “despite all the difficulties that the Revolution created for our group, feeling like we were ripped from the very beginning of the life that we thought we were going to have, every one of us has really made something of our lives, somehow contributing to society in a positive way.” She speaks passionately about how the group encourages one another, the way they discuss, argue, and laugh. She recalls that with members on all but two continents, the group chat is a space where, “If you really want to talk something out with someone, or have somebody listen to what you have to say, there’s always somebody awake somewhere in the world.”

Nowadays, the group rarely talks about the Revolution.

When they have their international reunions, they stay in the present, conversing about current topics and events. In fact, I

“With this group chat, it was like we were the same age we were when we were torn apart.”

have been privileged enough to attend two of their reunions, and both times all they spoke of was joy and love as they shared hugs and kisses. In their eyes, I see glimmers of gratitude that they are able to visit one another and see each other face to face. It is easy to see that their friendship is strong and that they are as close as ever. They no longer dwell on the bad and have moved on with their lives, to bigger and better things.

When my mother looks back on the Revolution, she thinks of it as a destructive force where the “government had done everything in its power not to allow basic human rights and not to allow happiness.” In the wake of this despotism, though, my mother is proud to say that when she looks at her friends in Iran, the ones who have fought tooth and nail to achieve what they now have, she glows with a defiant awe and a fierce respect.

Somehow, out of the social turmoil of the Iranian Revolution, something emerged and grew, an unkillable weed in the midst of war, an incredible bond of camaraderie. As my mom finishes off the last of her coffee, a thoughtful look flits across her face. “If it weren't for the Revolution, most of us who are outside the country now would still be in Iran, and maybe such an amazing group would not have existed. Not because we wouldn’t have come out of the country, but because that longing would not have existed. That longing to want to be together.”

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© Abbas Attar/Magnum Photos

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“Shi’ites do not accept the path chosen by history. They deny the leaders who ruled the muslims throughout history and deceived the majority of the people through their succession to the Prophet, and then by their supposed support of Islam and fight against paganism. Shi’ites turn their backs on the opulent mosques and magnificent palaces of the Caliphs of Islam and turn to the lonely, mud house of Fatima. Shi’ites, who represent the oppressed, justice-seeking class in the Caliphate system, find in this house whatever and whoever they have been seeking.”

dr. ali shariati

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MANDATE OR CHOICE

BY MINA SHAHINFAR

The image of Iranian women has been politicized through the conventions of unveiling and re-veiling. Political regimes have been instrumental in constructing female images corresponding to their political ideologies. They have used the image of an ideal Iranian woman to symbolize the essence of the entire country. In constructing this image, the Pahlavi regimes and Islamic Republic have employed legal measures and physical force to impose their political will. These impositions, in response, have established a unique motive in Iranian women—the plea to draw on the hijab as a political metaphor in order to challenge those regimes.

I

remember stepping foot into the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran and instantly experiencing the sweet feeling of affinity. Amidst my own thoughts whirled the surrounding voices of passengers and security staff conversing in Farsi. I eagerly scanned the crowd of families waiting behind the glass wall until I spotted my grandmother in the corner, standing gracefully with her long, black chador, holding a bouquet of white lilies for our arrival. Her green eyes, barely visible beneath the cloth, sparkled with tears as her gaze held mine. I was 14 years old that evening in July when I decided to officially observe the hijab.

How lucky was I to embark on this new religious com-

24

mitment in the country that shaped my backbone, endlessly gifted me with solace and kinship, and embodied every tradition and practice I held dear. Traveling to Iran filled me with the utmost serenity every time. And this time—wearing my headscarf proudly and permanently—I was eager to step outside and unabashedly partake in daily Iranian customs.

As I walked along the busy streets of Valiasr and Tajrish near my grandparents’ home, my eyes wandered furiously in awe of my surroundings, which stimulate my reflection that Iranian women are bold. They are classy, confident, and valiant in their management of ambition and restriction. The typical young college student walks chin held high with her fashionable, streetstyle cloak and matching scarf, styling her hair so her luscious bangs freely flow from underneath as she nods her head. I felt immensely empowered walking alongside those who shared my attire. I am reminded of another part of me, a part that is connected to these powerful women living their lives, a part that feels at ease in this authentic, culturally rich atmosphere.

Years have passed since my first trip to Iran as a hijabi. Since then, I have made several trips back to visit. Now, as I wander out and about my second home in Tehran, I begin to feel ironically foreign. I have lived a completely different life, where I’ve chosen what I want to wear in public. Nearly every value I hold dear has been a choice. Iranian women are required by law to wear a headscarf in public. This reality is difficult to understand for somebody like me, whose life has been characterized by the beauty of choice.

Later, I had a conversation with my cousin from Tehran, who was the same age as me. She was shocked when I told her that I pray five times a day, fast during the month of Ramadan, and wear a headscarf in America. She couldn’t understand why anyone would engage Islamic requirements when it wasn’t part of the law. I saw at that moment the difference between two cultures; I observe hijab because I choose to do so, while her freedom is tied to rejection of compulsory observation.

The concept of modest clothing has undoubtedly changed over time. The enforced wearing of the hijab has been one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the Islamic Republic and, as such, is one of its most consequential issues. Three specific instances illustrate well the hijab’s political use throughout modern history—the forced unveiling under Reza Shah, the 1979 Revolution, and the creation of the Islamic Republic.

Decades before the Revolution took place, Reza Shah of the Pahlavi Dynasty marked his rise to power by a turn from old customs toward western ways of thought. Hijab was considered to represent the exact opposite: archaic, backward, and unnecessary. In 1936, he banned all forms of veils in public spaces as part of a modernization effort—directly stripping a Muslim woman’s ability to express her sincerely held religious beliefs. This strict policy effectively forced many women to remain in their homes and abandon their jobs for years, since they could not bear to be uncovered. Expectedly, compulsory unveiling led to the social isolation and marginalization of women who chose hijab on their own and refused to unveil. Veiled women, specifically those of a lower income who were more more likely to hold traditional views, were not allowed to work, even if they were educated. The image of hijab morphed with backwardness as forms of attire in

public determined a woman’s beliefs, education, and social class.

Four decades later, an era marked by revolutionary fervor promised excitement, hope, and possibility. In the 1970s, many Iranians turned to religion for a new social paradigm.

During the Revolution, publicly wearing a hijab became a symbol of protest against the monarchy. Many women took up the headscarf to honor their identities as muslim women. Others, followers of the religion or not, simply used hijab to differentiate themselves from the West in dissent of the Shah’s push toward a more westernized Iran. Hijab—what was for so long a stigmatized symbol of seclusion and backwardness—now embodied resistance.

After the Revolution, the Islamic government was born and within a year passed the compulsory hijab law for women in 1980. Enforcement of hijab signified the definitive, vengeful shutdown of the Pahlavi dynasty as well as the commencement of a new regime with completely different ideologies and statutes. Although Iranian citizens are subject to broader laws on matters such as divorce and inheritance, the hijab embodies a highly public symbol of the rules imposed by Iran’s clerical leaders. Many Iranians today resent such restrictions—and this is not simply secularism at play. Religious individuals share the same dissatisfaction with certain Islamic laws governing personal conduct and reject compulsory hijab, crackdowns, and punishments. While the requirements have remained firmly in place, Iranian women have been pushing the boundaries of hijab for years. Coats have gotten shorter and more fitted, while Iranian women today flaunt their colorful headscarves and chic, tailored manteaus. But how far back do you push your scarf? Though many try to dress in a way that conforms to the status quo without compromising their personal tastes, many women raise the issue of personal security, which forms an important factor in their fashion choices.

It is important to note that the struggle against the compulsory hijab is about a woman regaining control over her own expression, not a question about the validity of the hijab itself. A woman’s right to choose how to dress is a concept backed by both bareheaded women and by women who proudly wear the fullbody chador. I find it interesting when others view my faithful choice to practice hijab through this tainted image of political undertones. And I don’t blame them. Citizens of Iran must submit to the laws set forth by a theocratic system. Iranian women specifically, by doing so, advertise the country’s Islamic essence to the rest of the world. Religion merges with politics externally in the form of hijab—but what about the individual? The personal path which muslim women may take toward observing the hijab is probably one of the most beautiful, transformational, and introspective experiences I have ever lived. The reasons why I wear hijab have changed as I have, but one thing that remains constant is that I am doing it for myself—to liberate myself from the shackles of the status quo and to feel connected to a purpose much greater than the mundane. Such inclinations begin as an internal desire which can manifest itself externally as a conscious lifestyle. When hijab becomes law, its entire meaning and purpose is confined to a mere cloth around the head. And just like that, political aim supersedes any possibility for personal motivation to develop.

25

INTERNATIONALIST

FO R M AT I ON S, REVOLUTIONARY

TEMPORALITIES Bahaar Ahsan in conversation with Manijeh Nasrabadi Manijeh Nasrabadi is a writer, educator, and activist based in New York City.

even at the level of just how they felt being here, they could not align themselves with that project of supporting the dictatorship and the plans for capitalist modernization that would maintain mass poverty in Iran. Instead, they really came to identify very strongly with various liberation movements around the world including opposition movements in Iran. Some people had family connections directly to Iranian opposition groups and some people didn’t, but they had the opportunity to experience the organizing that was going on right here in the U.S. against racism and imperialism. The 1960s and 1970s were a time when many young Americans from different backgrounds were questioning all of the received knowledge about what kind of nation the U.S. was and what its role in the world was really about. Especially around Vietnam and other sites of U.S. imperial intervention there was mass opposition, as well as, of course, the Black civil rights insurgency and Black Power. In this climate of the growth of a new left in the U.S., a new Iranian left is also emerging in Iran and in diaspora as a kind of transnational phenomenon.

Across Europe and all of the places that Iranian foreign students were studying, you could find Confederation of Iranian Students chapters where people were organizing. The Confederation of Iranian Students was a broad umbrella group, it did not have explicit left or revolutionary politics. It was supposed to represent all Iranian foreign students, sort of like a student union. But over time, under the influence of the kind of foment of student opposition and Third World liberation movements globally, the confederation itself became more and more a left-wing, anti-imperialist formation. It had different parties and factions within it that didn’t always agree about the details, but they did agree when it came to questions of being against imperialism and being internationalist.

A

s a point of entry into this conversation, can you introduce yourself and this forthcoming book? Feel free to give any sort of overview you want to about the Iranian Students Association and the Confederation of Iranian Students and that history and maybe what your points of entry into that are, or what kinds of inquiry you’re interested in this project.

Sure, I’ll start just by saying that I am working on this book, the tentative title is Neither Washington Nor Tehran: Iranian Internationalism in the United States. The title itself maybe gives you a sense of where some of my interests lie. It’s a play on the slogan “Neither Washington, Nor Moscow” which was the slogan raised during the Cold War by independent socialists in different parts of the world who wanted to signal that they were critical of both sides of the Cold War. They were imagining and organizing for a different kind of world that was neither western capitalism nor a kind of state capitalism along the Soviet model. So I’m picking up that slogan. I’m saying neither Washington nor Tehran because I’m trying to invoke this history of internationalism, rather than nationalism or identifying with one’s own government, and also to mark out the fact that there was a large population of Iranians in the U.S. in the ‘60s and ‘70s during the Cold War who were critical of the U.S.-Shah alliance.

There were tens of thousands of Iranian foreign students who came here and they were supposed to get their western degrees and go back home to Iran. The idea was they would essentially be a new techno-professional bureaucratic class who was going to actually do the modernization that the Shah was invested in following U.S. development models. So these students were sent here to be a part of that project and a minority of them, but a significant one of several thousand, refused to go along with it. For a variety of different reasons, they could not align themselves,

Thank you for all of that. I’m actually curious to take a step back and talk about how you are entering this project. I know you’ve talked about, and in reading some of your other work I’ve seen, that you’re engaging certain kinds of feminist schol28

arship, particularly queer and Black feminist scholarship.

Specifically, I’m curious about what sorts of scholarly legacies and lineages you situate your work within and how that is engaging this project. Where are there moments of incongruity?

Where are these frameworks proving to be really generative?

olutionary affects, in other words the visceral, embodied set of sensations that remained from various encounters with state repression and resistance. Those revolutionary affects help to orient people toward a set of politics and ideas circulating among student and radical organizations at the time. But affect is always shot through with histories of oppression and with power relations. For many women in the Confederation, it really felt extremely liberating that you could be valued as a comrade and an activist, not for your role as reproducer of the citizens of the nation. In fact, marriage and reproduction were strongly discouraged. Women were supposed to put the struggle for freedom before anything else. You were not supposed to get your degree and get married and have a career and follow that linear trajectory of bourgeois normative development. You were supposed to throw all of that away and be prepared for probably a very short life. If you were a “serious” revolutionary, you were preparing to go back to Iran and join the underground opposition to the Shah and most likely be arrested and tortured and possibly killed. This sort of revolutionary temporality, this short-term way of living for a future you don’t expect to see, was really a break from a normative developmental reproductive idea about how life should unfold to shore up the status quo. Within that revolutionary temporality, people were making all sorts of decisions about what to do and what was important. I think for a lot of women it was really exciting not to just have your future limited to wife and mother but that you in fact were part of a global, revolutionary conjuncture and that your worth and your value was tied up with your participation in that movement. That made new spaces for women to be in the world in ways that they could not have imagined. I think there was something really exciting and liberating and wonderful about that for women.

At the same time, though, when you actually dig a little deeper, the grounds on which women were incorporated into the movement were also loaded with all sorts of problems. Should I say more about that?

I do come at this history from a queer feminist perspective. By that I mean that I’m interested in looking critically at what is widely understood to be a highpoint of Third World internationalism and solidarity. There’s a whole body of literature on Afro-Asian connections that jumps off from the 1955 Afro-Asia Conference in Bandung, Indonesia and that whole promise of decolonization and the tremendous hope that decolonizing peoples had that they could support one another economically and politically and chart an independent course from the two world powers. There’s a lot of scholarship that’s been done going back and looking at that, most of it very celebratory, as a kind of antidote to our current moment where we’re told that capitalism won the Cold War and there is no alternative to neoliberalism. I am interested in both recuperating the role of Iranians in that era of Third Worldism, but also looking quite critically at the gender and sexual politics not just of the Iranian left, but also the internationalist and anti-imperialist left more broadly. The Confederation and the leftists within it provide an example or a way of getting into the lived experience of what it was like to be an Iranian revolutionary in the United States. I’m drawing on feminist and queer theories, with an emphasis on embodied experience, on affect, on emotion, on the ways that politics and political subjects are constituted through everyday practices. I interviewed over thirty people who were active in the student movement, and I also looked at a lot of archives. I wanted to understand what it was like to be an Iranian foreign student leftist activist in the U.S. at the time. What did you do? What were the other movements that you felt an affective or emotional attachment to? What was the basis of that attachment? Why were Iranians supportive of Black Power movements and Palestinian liberation? Why did they express solidarity with such a tremendous number of different liberation organizations and causes?

How do we explain that? I’m really drawing on people’s personal narratives of how they came to be political, how they became revolutionaries, how they saw themselves in the world in relation to U.S. society and Iranian society.

I’m particularly interested in what the experience of women was in the Confederation and how this organization of young people far away from home, in the U.S. at a time when many college campuses had a sort of sexual revolution going on and women’s liberation movements were beginning, how is this organization affected by all of that? What were the practices around gender performance, gender roles, and expectations?

What were people’s dating lives, sex lives, romantic lives like?

What I found—and I’m glad you asked me about incongruities— because what I found was that it’s possible to have nonnormative modes of gender and sexuality without them actually being queer or feminist. Just because something is nonnormative, doesn’t mean it’s progressive or is challenging gender hierarchy.

So you have this revolutionary subjectivity that I’m tracking. I’m looking at the role of affect, and what I call rev-

Yes, definitely.

So, you could be a respected member of the movement and valued for your participation but only if you conformed to a new set of revolutionary norms about gender and sexuality.

Women were supposed to basically hide all aspects of themselves that could be construed as sexual or feminine. Cutting their hair short, no makeup, wearing loose baggy clothes, sort of maintaining a caricature of a proletariat uniform in a way— jeans and a t-shirt sort of became the revolutionary uniform. But it was important because jeans and a t-shirt were about hiding the female form. Underlying this is a set of ideas that are deeply problematic. One is that women are inherently sex objects and always being sexualized and therefore the female body itself is distracting and threatening to the cohesion of a movement and to the ability of people to do serious revolutionary work. So anything connected to the feminine is degraded and suspect in this way of looking. Anything feminine is considered bourgeois— and of course the Shah promoted a certain kind of westernized bourgeois femininity, so part of this was an anti-imperialist gesture saying we’re not going to wear miniskirts and make up and 29

try to look like women in the West. We’re rejecting that kind of cultural imperialism. But underneath it was the naturalization of the denigration of anything feminine and the notion that female sexuality was a problem that had to be kept under wraps.

In some Confederation chapters—and this varied from place to place—there emerged practices of policing of women’s body and dress and gender performance, often through peer pressure and verbal admonishments. This is something that the feminist scholar Anne McClintock has talked about as a kind of “designated agency.” It’s the sense that women can have agency and be revolutionaries and be respected at the invitation of and on the terms set by men, in ways that are contingent upon them conforming to certain expectations and needs and roles set by men.

And some women may embrace those. It’s not as if it was simply an oppressive arrangement, as I said. But this sort of designated agency means that women can then be disinvited by men at any time. It means that their role in the movement is contingent to them adhering to rigid kinds of roles and expectations that are understood to best serve the needs of the revolution.

beard is at the front of the rally and he kicks through the glass of the door that had been locked to keep students out, and he breaks through the door and leads hundreds of students into the building. They’re chanting, “Hell no, no suspensions!” and they stage an occupation that prompts Summerskill to shut the entire campus down. This is one of the moments in which the struggle is escalating. I ended up interviewing three other Iranian students who were active in that strike, some were San Francisco State students and some were at nearby community colleges, one of whom had gone to jail the day of the strike itself when over 400 students were arrested. Going to jail for these Iranian students meant risking deportation, and if you were deported back to Iran at that time, you were almost definitely on the SAVAK list; they knew all the ISA members. So risking arrest, deportation—you were really risking your life. I was really curious why these Iranians were willing to take such risks to fight for a set of demands that had nothing to do with them. In other words, the demands of the San Francisco State strike for changes in the curriculum, in the racial demographics of the faculty and the student body, were about addressing systematic discrimination against racialized minorities in the U.S. Iranian students did not have those demands. They were not U.S. citizens, they did not see themselves as a racialized minority. They were foreigners who expected to return home. They were not seeking greater representation or inclusion or to have their history reflected in the curriculum. They didn’t have any of those demands because they just weren’t relevant to their lives. So, why were they involved in the strike? They were also very involved at UC Berkeley in all the protests against the war, in the student strike there, in organizing the alternative classes that happened during the strike. They were very involved in the People’s Park protests. They were part of all of these struggles. In my in-depth interviews with former Confederation members, when I ask them “Why did you participate?

What was at stake for you?” For example, going on police patrols with the Black Panthers, or going to rallies to free Huey Newton and mobilizing in solidarity with Angela Davis and Bobby Seale when they were in jail, what was motivating this activity? Person after person would start describing to me experiences they’d had as young people back in Iran of injustice, of encounters with the Shah’s police state, of friends and relatives who had been tortured, of witnessing tanks in the street during moments of crackdown and martial law. People just started talking about these early affective experiences that stayed with them. In most cases it took many years to put into words and to articulate these affective encounters through a set of political ideas and organization practices. The interviews became this really interesting kind of affective history that traveled with these students to the U.S. So when they saw Black students standing up against racism, even though these Iranians really didn’t know anything about racism in America—they didn’t have a deep historical knowledge, they didn’t have a firsthand experience—but it resonated with them at a level of affect, at the level of a feeling about having been oppressed and wanting to resist. I ended up really having to think a lot beyond just the notion of identity, and I do think identity matters, but if we look only at identity [it only offers us so much]. Iranians did not join the Third World Liberation Front, which was a brilliant innovation as a coalition of different iden-

To pivot a bit, I’m curious if you could elaborate on the ISA’s engagement with other organizing bodies. I’m especially interested in local histories to the Bay Area—in engagements with the Third World Liberation Front and other movements of that political moment.

Yeah! So I have a chapter of the book that’s really focused on a kind of cross-pollination or different forms of solidarity between the Confederation of Iranian Students and other groups. They were incredibly active in what they called their Northern California branch based in the Bay Area. I have a chapter that opens with a discussion of the role of Iranian foreign student activists in the San Francisco State Third World Strike.

It was really interesting to me because I didn’t know they’d been involved until I was interviewing somebody who had a memory of somebody else, this person said “You know Khosrow Kalantari was actually one of the leaders of the strike. I actually remember he threw this chair threw a window and led a building occupation.” And it happened that in the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archives there’s local news footage that actually shows that scene. It was an amazing moment as a researcher—to hear an anecdote in an interview and then verify it in the archives.

That almost never happens. Sure enough, there was an event that had taken place actually a year before the strike but was part of a set of actions that led toward the strike. There’s this incredible footage of a rally of students protesting outside of the main administration building, this is when Summerskill is still president although shortly before he leaves, and students were protesting the unjust suspensions of several Black students who had an altercation with the editors of a student newspaper over the newspaper’s racist cartoons and editorials. So these Black students had been suspended without a hearing, without due process. At the same time, a group of white students in an unrelated incident were not suspended or had their due process. So there was a clear disparity in how Black and white students were being treated by the administration and there was a rally protesting these suspensions. Sure enough, this Iranian guy with long hair and a 30

tity-based groups, but Iranians didn’t fit within that schema, so they didn’t join that but they joined the movement. They understood which side they were on because they felt it, they got it at a sort of gut level, and they wanted to stand with those students.

immigrants, rather than pursuing that path, my hope is that the experience of being racialized pushes more and more Iranian-Americans to identify as people of color, or whatever terms people use because those change over time, whatever political terms are most useful for saying “we need to be part of opposing all forms of racism towards all racialized groups including ourselves rather than trying to align with whiteness.” My hope is that this history of Iranian student activism in the ‘60s and ‘70s gives us a picture of something outside of what has been dominant in the diaspora, the sort of Persian nationalist or Persian imperial identity, you know, this notion of the Aryan and all of this stuff, and you’ve written about this too, Bahaar. My hope is that we have an historical precedent which shows that it’s really possible to orient oneself differently in this country and to dispense with the Aryan mythology and to embrace new forms and new ways of thinking about the role and place and presence of Iranians in the U.S. that is aligned against white supremacy and can seek out meaningful coalitions against racism and Islamophobia. I am hoping that with this research I can make accessible to Iranian-Americans not just an antiracist politics, which can emerge out of our lived experience here, but also a legacy of internationalism and anti-imperialism. That consciousness, the connection between U.S. empire abroad and racism at home—we have to be able to put that back together but do it differently this time, with queer feminist politics that places gender and sexual liberation at the heart of our movements.

I know you’re really interested in thinking through what kinds of possibilities these histories present for progressive and queer and feminist and leftist Iranians in this moment.

I’m curious what you’re thinking through around that. Specifically I’m wondering: what does forging a sort of coalitional antiracist politics look like now in a moment where many of us were born in the United States and experienced race and nation in a particular way, and how does that coalitional politic look differently because of that?

You’re right! I think we’re in a really different moment.

I think for those of us who have grown up and been formed in that post-revolutionary moment, in the aftermath of 1979, we do have an experience, as you said, of being racialized citizens in this country. So we actually do have, although the history and the specificity of it are distinct and matter, we do have something in common with other racialized minority citizen groups in this country. It’s certainly my hope that more and more of my generation and your generation will understand that we need to be part of antiracist coalitions. Rather than the effort to align with whiteness that can become a compelling strategy for a lot of Asian 31

© Abbas Attar/Magnum Photos

32

“We shall export our revolution to the whole world.

Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

ayatollah ruhollah khomeini

the sound of

RESISTANCE: STEREO TULL

34

involving traditional instruments alongside more modern ones such as piano and violin. While the government heavily supported these developments beyond classical Persian music, prior to the late 1950s the music industry was still dominated by traditional singers, who had little knowledge of western music.

After the Revolution and the instant crackdown of western music, roles changed. The state, which once supported this relationship between Iran and the rest of the world, now opposed it. But a fervent youth eagerly accepted the new music as a necessary change to the stagnant daily life of such oppressive times.

This is where the work of people like Kamran Mellat is pivotal.

He kept that connection between Iran and the rest of the world alive in the darkest of times, never letting the burning flames of music die off as a result of a dictatorship. In fact, because the government was so heavily opposed to such actions, the spread and incorporation of western music grew more influential than ever before. It allowed for unprecedented degrees of experimentation, giving musicians the opportunity to play what they want, with few restrictions. Stereo Tull and similar institutions inspired a new generation of musicians in the modern era allowing new Iranian bands to break barriers and expand beyond traditional music ever since the Revolution. Arash Sobhani, the lead singer of the band “Kiosk,” was one of Mellat’s customers and says that the cassettes he listened to all those years ago were his first real exposure to American rock, something that can clearly be seen in his music. His band’s newest album Stereo Tull Presents is dedicated to the life and work of Mellat.

M

usic “is no different from opium.” It “stupefies persons listening to it and makes their brain inactive and frivolous.”

With this radical perspective on an integral part of Iranian culture, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini completely banned music from Iranian radio and television in July 1979, only six months after the Revolution. In these oppressive times, the mesmerizing sound of the tar and soothing hum of the ney were silenced as well. The emancipating outlet that music offered was being completely cut off to a young generation of Iranians who sought out any form of freedom—or so it may have seemed.

Kamran Mellat, a lifelong fan of rock music, could not stand what was happening to what he loved most. Mellat adamantly believed that Iran should be able to seek experiences just as the rest of the world does, so for the next 10 years, he risked his life to ensure that everyone can have the ability to listen to the music they want, free from the government’s control. Establishing the underground agency called “Stereo Tull,” he began importing western records with the help of flight attendants and would then distribute the music through self-made cassettes.

Whether it be the latest Bowie single or an older Chuck Berry album, Mellat would only take a few days to acquire any requests spanning periods and genres in a time when there was no Internet, satellite, or computers readily available. The infamous symbol of his cassettes became ubiquitous among an oppressed youth who saw music as a commodity free from the filtration of the state. Through music, Kamran opened a door to the outside world and “kept alive a city where the morale of the people was shattered in every respect.” With such a pivotal role in maintaining a positive atmosphere, western music became rather influential to the youth of this time, and Mellat’s work ensured that the connection between two sides of the world is not lost.

But western music was not always so disdained in Iran's history. In fact, the institution of Stereo Tull can be seen as a continuation of the long-accepted interconnectedness of western music and Iran’s culture. However, after the Revolution, due to the government’s push against any form of advancement beyond traditional norms, attempts to incorporate foreign music into Iran’s culture as a form of resistance gained a more pronounced role—contrary to the detrimental image that westernization usually has. To understand the effects of the West in the realm of music post-Revolution, it is important to revisit a time when such influences were actually state-sponsored. This is exemplified under the reign of Naser al’ Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty.

The first Farsi music theory books, French instructors at the local Dar ul-Funun (schools), and the emergence of European-style concerts are just a few of the examples that signify the growing influence of western music at this time. Even during the Shah’s birthday and the holiday of Eid-e-Ghorban, Bach was played.

Such a widespread expansion of western music also followed through the Pahlavi dynasty with the introduction of concerts

As more time passed working in the underground organization, the pressure on Mellat mounted. His family was telling him to let go of his work, and the police were increasing their efforts to find the mysterious man behind all the Stereo Tull cassettes; at some point, they even began an official investigation titled “Michael Jackson,” dedicated to stopping the distribution of the music. Through all this, Kamran would not give up.

Knowing how important his work was in the times following the Revolution, he saw his work as his duty to his fellow citizens. For ten years, no one ever revealed the identity of the mystery man, but eventually, one of his associates gave in and told authorities.

The police broke into Kamran’s parents’ house and arrested his sister, forcing him out of hiding. He spent the next three years in prison, and Stereo Tull became a part of history.

While circulation of Stereo Tull came to a halt, the influences of the organization still live on. Beyond the fact that it was a clear and outright resistance against oppression and censorship, Mellat kept the impactful, intertwined relationship to western music alive. It is a relationship that spans decades and has been a catalyst in expanding the beautiful, ever-growing music scene in Iran. Changing dynamics between Iran and the West continue to push boundaries to produce music from which everyone can benefit. Who knows what would have happened to the landscape of music if the government were successful in breaking that relationship? On the other hand, we know that Kamran certainly succeeded in his endeavors—he really did keep Tehran alive.

35

THE LEGACY OF

The Little Black Fish

by Ariana Dideban

I

n the 1960s, all Iranian children were required to read the same formulaic textbooks distributed by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture. The textbooks evoked a spirit of uniformity and reinforced the notion that life in Iran at the time was “perfect.” In contrast, the children’s picture book titled Mahi Siyah Kuchulu, also known as The Little Black Fish

by Samad Behrangi, revolted against the notion that Iranians should be satisfied with their political and social environment.

The story follows a young fish embarking on a journey to explore where the end of the stream will take him. He faces aggressive criticism from his mother, neighbors, and community, but ultimately leaves home to discover the truth. Throughout the story, there is a theme of wanting more from life. While swimming down the stream, the little black fish learns new things and experiences life in a different way. He interacts with various animals, swims in the sun, and does somersaults. Many species that interact with him are either influenced by or scared of his powerful words and ideologies. For example, when the little black fish encounters a frog family, the mother frog suddenly becomes worried that the little black fish will lead her children astray with his compelling words. In the face of danger, the little black fish still exhibits fearlessness and bravery. While the little black fish accomplishes his goal of reaching the end of the stream, and thereby discovering the ocean, he is climatically killed by a heron when he martyrs himself to save a smaller fish in danger. His legacy lies less in his death, however, and more in his impact on the entire animal community, because he encourages other young fish to question practices that were seen as “rational.”

This picture book is not only a charming story about the adventures of a little fish but also a political allegory. What makes this children’s book unique is the fact that it has a broader message and analyzes mature themes like oppression, human confinement, injustice, and freedom. It points out the social and political issues prevalent in Iran under the Shah’s regime. As a result, the Shah’s government banned the distribution of the book. During the time preceding the Revolution, Iran’s political climate was fraught with surveillance, a secret

police (SAVAK), and a lack of representation in government.

The author of the novel, Samad Behrangi, was a young teacher with leftist beliefs. Behrangi was critical of the content and methodologies taught in the textbooks distributed at schools. He believed that the educational system was outdated and needed to be restructured to encourage free thought and the development of original ideas. Behrangi sought to inform young children about the hardships of life that many people dealt with, including class disparity, poverty, and lack of opportunity. Rather than shield children from the poverty or the authoritarian rule Iran was experiencing, he discussed them in his book. This book is reflective of the existence of a revolutionary mindset ten years before the Revolution. A lot of people believe that the 1979 Revolution occurred overnight, but this book shows that the desire to question the government and revolt was deeply rooted in Iranian society.

In order to contextualize The Little Black Fish, it is important to note that Behrangi’s life was cut short at the young age of 29. It was officially reported that he drowned in the Aras river while swimming, but it is widely speculated that he was killed

by SAVAK. Even though he passed away, Behrangi’s legacy continued, and his popularity only increased after the Revolution.

For many Iranians, Behrangi embodied selflessness and sacrifice for the greater good, because he said what needed to be said.

Indeed, there is no known information regarding how many copies of this book were sold, but this is likely due to the coordinated government effort to suppress its distribution through such methods as the aforementioned book ban.

In 1973, when my father was eight years old, his older brother gave him The Little Black Fish. His brother was in university and was exposed to student-led leftist movements. Upon receiving the book, my father was immediately enamored by the artwork. Swirls of color overlap with the black and white prints of animals. The young fish is painted black and stands out in the shades of murky green and blue. The images evoke somber feelings of melancholy. These are not the bright, optimistic colors and illustrations that one might expect from a children’s book. This beautiful artwork that accompanied the 36

text was globally recognized and won several awards including the Hans Christian Andersen award for illustration in 1974.

As soon as my father finished the book, he was captivated and knew what he read was “different.” It wasn’t like the other picture books he had read—its lesson resonated.

“You had this thrilling feeling when you read the book because you knew it was banned,” my father said. At the age of twelve, my father reread the book with a new understanding of the world. He was struck by the simplicity and eloquence with which larger and powerful themes such as social resistance, justice, independent thinking, integrity, and self-sacrifice for the larger good were conveyed. My father was not the only child affected by The Little Black Fish; it reached the generation of youth that would later participate in the Revolution.

This book is not only a mobilizing political allegory but also a document capturing the revolutionary sentiment felt by many Iranians. Behrangi's life also reaffirmed the belief that some causes are worth dying for. Many young revolutionaries internalized this idea and sacrificed their lives for the greater cause of overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty. This book gives

us another piece of the puzzle that is the Revolution. It tells us not only how far back the dissatisfaction of the Iranian people went, but also the clandestine methods people had to employ in the pre-revolutionary era in order to circulate their opinions. Throughout Iranian history, for hundreds of years, political ideology and social resistance have found expression in literature in subtle and subversive forms; The Little Black Fish is another example of this tradition. Perhaps Behrangi wrote a children’s book not only because he worked with children, but also because he knew that children have impressionable minds, and books help develop their ideologies and morals.

When I was a child, my father would tuck me into bed, turn on my bedside lamp, and crack open a picture book every night. I distinctly remember when my father read me The Little Black Fish. He read every word with a passionate tone and pointed at the pictures. He was passing on to me a piece of Iran he kept close to his heart. One day, I will share this book with my children, and the legacy of the little black fish will be kept alive—as the fish said, “What does matter is the influence that my life or death will have on the lives of others…”

37

40

In Reflection: Forty Years Later a conversation with Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar

D

r. Jaleh Pirnazar is a professor of Persian language and literature as well as Iranian Cinema at UC Berkeley. She came to Berkeley from Iran in the late 1960s and joined student-led anti-imperialist movements, which was an extremely different environment from her upbringing. “At the same time, I loved it. I loved Berkeley. I fell in love with this atmosphere, and this horizon that had opened up in front of me. It was much wider than the small community that I had belonged to,” she recounts to me at the beginning of our interview. Here, Dr. Pirnazar reflects on her involvement in the Revolution of 1979 and how she feels about the state of the nation 40 years later.

any replacement leader in mind. For women, the Shah had done much more than any other monarch had done in Iranian history.

Now, they had the right to vote and to fully participate in the social arena. There was a wide participation of Iranian women in teaching positions, medicine and education, sports activities, music, arts, and woman pilots were being trained. Granted, some of this was probably tokenism. However the element of “Yes, we can do!” was there. Women were much more active, vocal, and aware of the ongoings in the rest of the world. The gates had been opened. Women were given the right to divorce, which was denied to them under religious laws. Nowadays, women are deprived of that right and child custody after divorce. I know of many Iranian women who stay in bad marriages in order to not be separated from their children.

Looking back, perhaps, had the state allowed for some participation of the people in regards to constitutional freedoms in the social and political affairs, that would have gone a long way. That's what the Shah’s regime had deprived the people of— freedom—and we in the student movement at Berkeley supported the people’s rights against the Shah’s dictatorial rule.

Forty years later, why do you think the Revolution occurred?

The Shah's regime had been taking measures that aimed to transfer Iran into a modern state. The number one, major accomplishment was the secularization of the country. The state took major strides in building the society economically, industrially, and in the field of education. Hundreds of thousands of university students were trained and educated in the West. The government invited them to return to Iran to contribute to the industrialization, management, and other development projects.

Berkeley graduates were top recruits.

But having said that, there was a dark side to the Shah’s regime: the lack of democracy, lack of participation of people for their own interests, lack of an openness within the society where you would have a freedom of press, expression, and assembly.

Those are all constitutional rights that Iranians had already gained as a result of their revolution in the early 1900s, and that was the dilemma of the Shah’s regime. The student movement grew to become an oppositional force, which banked on the negative aspects of the regime, going along with all the “lacks.” It was a single, one-dimensional movement against the Shah without

When thinking about your own identity, how do you reflect on your support of the Revolution? Do you have any regrets?

There was a big cultural divide between what the Shah was trying to accomplish and a very traditional/religious layer of the Iranian Community that resented this modernity and westernization that was coming about. They resented the rapid secularization, the western-leaning modernization efforts that left them totally marginalized. They felt offended by the presence of western foreigners, women without any hijabs, in sleeveless clothing or in miniskirts, and they opposed the state laws banning polygamy. The institution of the clergy leading these tradi41

tional communities followed Khomeini’s leadership, who promised that he would only lead the opposition and then become an educator in the field of Quranic studies. So you trusted him because of the images coming out—he's the older man, sitting cross-legged on a piece of carpet, with seemingly no interest in governing. But now that I look back he was a populist, and he was able to arouse the masses with the singular slogan, “Shah baayad beravad! [The king must go!]” Following the success of the Revolution, he founded the Islamic Republic with himself as the state’s Supreme Leader.

Here I regret that, as a student in one of the major universities of the world, I never read any of his publications. Why did I follow a populist movement, which really worked against my own interests as a woman, as a western-educated individual who wanted to go back to Iran and help build the society in a secular way? This movement was heading in the opposite direction of my own interests. If I couldn't have custody of my children, if I was stuck in a miserable marriage with no right to a divorce, if I couldn't get jobs here and there because I was a woman, because I was western-educated, why was I participating in this movement under his leadership? This was not progress. This is a major issue that a lot of us have been reflecting on for the last 40 years.

I would be wearing whenever I was out had an orange tone to it, and I just stood out with this orange scarf on my head [laughs].

Everything about my identity was working against me in that society. I was a progressive, western-educated college student, which they did not like, a woman, in many ways a leftist, and part of the non-muslim community in Iran, so everything was working against me in that society. I didn’t belong. When my fellow leftist protestors betrayed the women’s movement, the March 8th movement, that was my moment.

What do you think happened to the Iranian community as a result of censorship in literature and the arts for more than 40 years? Do we see strands of that in today’s society still? Is there hope and potential to grow out from that?

Censorship was strong in the Shah’s time, and you weren’t free to read any material you wanted, to be educated, to be more enlightened, so you were pushed into a role of following that which was presented to you, without any critical thinking.

Whereas here, in this society, we promote people to follow their dreams, not to limit themselves and to go as far as their dreams, capacity, and potentials take them. We didn’t see that. The culture promotes individuals who lack self-esteem, critical thinking, and a lack of belief in themselves. Why is this?

What was your defining moment in the Revolution?

However, look at people like Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and Iranian to win the Fields Medal in Mathematics, an extremely prestigious award. Her accomplishments and her identity goes against all odds and makes her exceptional.

March 8th, 1979—International Women's Day. The Revolution was very young and there were signs of major discrimination against women in Iran already. I was there in Iran at that point, and there were signs of the mandatory hijab coming down and Khomeini grasping power and not letting go. He implemented religious and discriminatory laws against women. All these signs were very disturbing, and women took to the streets.

On that day, there was this massive demonstration by vast numbers of women demanding their rights. Many of these women protesting were probably pro-Shah or pro-women's rights. The pictures are very telling of that demonstration: not everybody was wearing the hijab, and they were marching, hair showing, wearing big dark glasses and high heels, which is not something that women in traditional roles would be wearing. They signified, through their clothing and chants, a western, nonreligious, educated, professional middle to upper middle classes.

The demonstration was dispersed using force, and some women were injured and taken to hospitals. My moment, that which what was not expected, was that the left and secular—those who we aligned with to get rid of the Shah—came down against this demonstration by women. The leftist literature of that period, the newspapers that came pouring out, talked about the “class element” within the Revolution, that these were women from the upper classes who had been supporters of the repressive regime of the Shah. The left had really aligned itself with the regime of Khomeini and was dismissive of the women’s movement. It was just a crude awakening. That was when I said, “What am I doing? This guy stands for everything that I am against.” So that was my moment—after that I did not participate in supporting him. I didn't participate in any activities within the organization after that and stopped supporting Khomeini. I asked myself what am I doing in Iran? The only scarf I had that

Yes, and the next Fields Medal went to another Iranian, a Kurdish man [Caucher Birkar] raised in Marivan. But Maryam being the first woman ever and to be the youngest… All of that just contributes to the making of a symbol for the Iranian people.

There are so many exceptional Iranians that we do hear stories about, which could be why the younger generation clings onto these people [like Maryam and Caucher] as role models. Perhaps these symbols of hope and progress have been lacking.

We need these role models, and frankly, if Iran hadn't gone through the route that it did—look at the potential. The vibrant youth that Iran has produced today, despite all the repression, is remarkable. For women, there is always a ceiling, unfortunately. Despite active participation in protests and demands for rights, they have not been able to change the laws in cases such as divorce and child custody. Women, for example, cannot claim equal rights to inheritance with their brothers, which is a repressive, archaic law, so there is every reason for us to demand more. Can we in UC Berkeley once again participate in the movement for human rights and women’s rights?

There is amazing potential within the youth, women, and anyone who has been oppressed. Once they get the chance to fight back, I’m sure things would change majorly. You cannot block any of those people looking for an education, for basic, fundamental rights. These are like streams, they will find a way.

They will flow.

42

Women working in medicine pre-Revolution

43

EXPANDING ARCHIVES & BUILDING DISCIPLINES: The San Francisco State University Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies

by Mana Javadi

N

eda Nobari saw a problem in the way that Iran was being studied and discussed at universities. In her view, political and socio-economic conflicts between Iran and the US, for example, often obscure the rich and colorful culture of Iran and its people, and she felt a need for something different. Having seen the same voices, perspectives, and approaches be recycled for years, Nobari believed it was time for the new generation of Iranian Americans to reclaim their narrative and create a more accurate sense of their culture as immigrants and second-generation Americans. Nobari summed up her forward-looking mindset saying, “We’ve been looking in the rearview mirror for too long; it is time for the second and third generations of Iranian-Americans to have a voice in their history, too.” Younger generations of Iranian Americans identify with their culture in vastly different ways than Nobari did, who arrived in California in 1979. Nobari noted this shift and decided to support it with a $5 million endowment to San Francisco State University, her alma mater, to establish the The Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies.

To Nobari, San Francisco State University was the perfect institution for pioneering this new area of study because of the academic legacy of social, racial, and economic justice, which are central to that the university’s vision. “As the first university to establish a College of Ethnic Studies, SFSU has always valued diversity and the study of racial and ethnic histories of the US,” she said.

Dr. Persis Karim became the inaugural director and the Neda Nobari Chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies in 2017 and is now in her second year in that position. Previously, Dr. Karim was the founding director of the Persian Studies program at San Jose State University, where she also taught English and Comparative Literature. Her passion for the subject and commitment to the development of Iranian diaspora studies originated with her own interest in capturing the voices of Iranian immigrants and second-generation Iranian-American writers. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature, which, in her words, “help identify and share the unique stories and experience of Iranians who are part of the diaspora.” Nobari and Karim place great importance on the fact that the center is not a place simply to study Iranian history and

culture but to create a fresh approach to researching Iranian diaspora communities, their impact on Iranian identity, and their contributions to host societies.

The center’s vision is to employ an interdisciplinary approach, allowing students from all fields to contribute, learn, and grow through its research and projects. The center seeks to collaborate and engage with new research in many fields including political science, sociology, and American studies. The center is also a platform for public lectures, collaborative opportunities, and other programs that allow diverse diaspora communities to participate in important conversations. “We want to engage in complex topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and identity—and to situate it outside of Iran and also in the context of other fields than Iranian Studies.”

Using the perspectives of scholars who utilize the center, Karim hopes ultimately to pursue projects such as an archive that will document and share the stories of real people to educate others about Iran’s recent history and also about the history of Iranians in the U.S. Karim recently was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant to pilot a Bay Area archive of Iranian-American history. Karim believes that ordinary people’s everyday stories can tell us so much, not only about moments in history such as the Iranian Revolution, but about the human experience as a whole, including those stories of survivors, immigrants, and their children. “These stories need to be collected while we can still access them,” because as Karim says, “if you do not contribute to our history, to claiming it, and naming it, it will disappear.”

The Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies is working on several projects this year. Along with SFSU’s Doc Film Institute, the center is producing the first-ever documentary focusing on the Iranian community within the Bay Area. The film, We Are Here, We Have Always Been Here, showcases the personal stories of Iranians who migrated to the Bay Area over the past five decades and focuses on the contribution and challenges of those who have made the Bay Area their home. The film will be completed in March 2020. The center’s biggest effort of 2018 is an international conference marking the 40th anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and examining the past 40 years of diaspora. “Forty Years & More: International Conference on Iranian 44

Diaspora Studies” will foster important conversations regarding Iranian diaspora that have largely occurred in isolation. The goal of the center is to make these conversations more inclusive and transnational, and in doing so, complicate the narratives of the Iranian diaspora globally. “The conference will help us understand the effects of the revolution, not as a singular historical event but as the cataclysm for global events that situate migration in an under-studied field.” Karim sees the revolution as a clock—and 1979 is just 12 o’clock. The 40 years after are just as rich in untold stories. The conference will analyze the entirety of the clock through presentations, keynotes, and panels in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It will showcase new research from various perspectives by distinguished researchers including Dr. Neda Maghbouleh, Dr. Amy Malek, and Dr. Beeta Baghoolizadeh.

“Forty Years & More” highlights the role of art in Iranian culture and how it has thrived and reinvented itself in the diaspora through its sponsorship of two exhibitions of Iranian

diaspora artists’ work at the San Francisco Art Commission and the Minnesota Street Project—both curated by Bay Area artist Taraneh Hemami. “Because art has been instrumental to Iranian identity at every point in its history, we need to recognize the ways that art speaks to our dynamic and changing experiences,” said Karim, who admires artists of the diaspora for their ability to show how their community is “far more than what you’re seeing in the media.” The exhibits will not only showcase the ability of the art to complicate the narrative but also relay the dynamic nature of the Iranian experience. “The arts are our salvation.

They are wellsprings of knowledge and self-understanding that show how rich our culture is,” Karim adds.

According to Karim, there is no homogeneous Iranian diasporic experience. It is a beautiful manifestation that should be celebrated and shared—and this conference aims to do just that. The Iranian diaspora community finally has a space to say what Karim believes is overdue: “We are here, we have always been here, this is our story, and we deserve to tell that story.”

© Gelare Khoshgozaran

45

The Revolutionary Clock

by Nasim Jahangard-Mahboob

T Iran.

he clock strikes midnight, and the people of Iran, led by an exiled Imam Ayatollah Khomeini, start a revolution to establish what would become the Islamic Republic of

laid out the framework for a government that would serve the people. Many who did not believe in the Islamic faith still saw an opportunity for the Quran to fulfill their ideals of socio-economic egalitarianism. The combination of these revolutionary forces ended the Shah’s regime, leaving Iranians with a clean slate to rebuild the country with their varying ideals.

As time moved forward, Iran’s progress was slowed by the Iran-Iraq war from 1980-1988, during which almost one million Iranians died. Following the decimation from war and the death of Khomeini, the country tried to rebuild Iran’s economy and settle its new government with Ayatollah Khamenei as the Supreme Leader.

Throughout the years, many smaller revolts and movements spurred, trying to force the government to stray away from their strict laws and enforcement. These include the 1999 protests in Tehran when the reform-minded government clashed with the conservative clergy, the 2003 student protests, and the human rights protests in 2006. Many of these protests were centralized in Tehran, as some of the urban population held a more liberal and westernized opinion that differed from the conservative-led government. Iranian women led one of the first uprisings against the newly established regime, in their fight

In 1978, just one year before the Revolution, French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Iran to write about the political unrest following the Black Friday Massacre, where over 80 people were killed and 205 people injured due to shootings during a religious demonstration in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. In his essay, “What are Iranians Dreaming About?” he described how Khomeini was appealing to the Muslim community, the army, and students. When Foucault asked members of the public what they wanted from the government, most said they wanted “a utopia.”

The teachings of Ali Shariati, a professor in Tehran, supplied a path to this desired utopia. Shariati’s lectures fueled his students with the ideas of Shi’ism, a branch of Islam that, according to him, encouraged revolution. After being arrested multiple times, Shariati left the country. When word got out that he died of mysterious causes, he became a martyr for the very revolution he’d promoted. With Khomeini as the leader, Islam provided the ideal that many Iranians wanted, and the Quran 46

against the mandatory veiling. Though many Iranians practice Islam and voluntarily wear the hijab, there are still thousands of women who object to the law and its harsh punishments, both in Iran and abroad. Over time, women have pushed back and tested their boundaries, leading social media campaigns to show that women are unwilling to accept this infringement on their freedom to choose.

The 2009 Green Movement marked a return of the clock to the hour of ‘79. The Green Movement encompassed millions of people protesting the 2009 election results, in which Mir Hossein Mousavi, former Prime Minister of Iran, lost to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During one protest, a cell phone video captured the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan, and that video spread internationally, making Neda the symbol of the Green Movement. As the government began using unprecedented brutality to maintain power, the leaders of the Mousavi-led movement created a new covenant. Mousavi condemned the actions of the regime and allowed “the movement [to embody] the frustrated aspirations of Iran’s century-old quest for democracy and desire for peaceful change.” As the movement lost momentum, the ideas it represented stayed in the minds of the people, especially the younger generation who had not experienced a pre-Revolution Iran. Many of them believed that they could bring back democracy to Iran or at least change the country to represent a different ideal. Since the Green Movement, Iran has never truly settled down. The clock is ticking faster as Iranian individuals face financial woes and the government deals with economic issues and persistent corruption. Such economic strug-

gles of the Iranian people are not always represented in Iran’s economy, which is largely supported by the oil industry and grew slightly following the nuclear deal Iran made with America in 2015. Currently, heavy sanctions brought on by the United States have impeded Iran’s growth, but internal affairs, such as the injustice of economic disparity between classes, are among many other concerns affecting Iranians. These issues are added onto a host of others, including environmental burdens, democratic interests, and safety concerns with regards to buildings and military endeavors. The Rial has depreciated by over 172% over the past few years, and though the government has tried to control the market, many Iranians have attempted to convert their money to other forms of stable currency, such as the U.S. Dollar.

In 2018, Iranians took to the streets to protest the government’s corruption and economic downfall. The scope and the geographic extent of the 2018 riots is notable because these riots did not start in Tehran; they began in Mashhad and extended to 72 cities and 29 of 31 provinces. More importantly, they happened in small and traditionally conservative cities, where government opposition could lead to severe consequences. Though these riots were quickly quelled by the government, the issues that motivated them continue to worsen.

Midnight arrives again. The essence of the Revolution has dispersed among generations of Iranians and has extended far beyond the political boundaries of Iran. Revolutionary spirit can be detected in years of art, culture, and rebellion. The future of Iran is uncertain, but the revolutionary spirit of the Iranian people remains constant.

47

R E FE R E NC E S Pages 8-9 Interview: Farah Pahlavi Recalls 30 Years In Exile, Radio Free Europe, (July 27, 2010).

Excerpts from Speeches and Messages of Imam Khomeini on the Unity of the Muslims.

The Sound of Resistance Kifner, John. “Khomeini Bans Broadcast Music, Saying It Corrupts Iranian Youth.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 July 1979.

Rafat, Ahmad. “Kayhan Life.” KAYHAN LIFE, 8 Mar. 2018. “ !” Tavaana, 5 Dec. 2018.

Lucas, Ann. “Understanding Iran Through Music: A New Approach.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, vol. 40, no. 1, 2006, pp. 79–89. JSTOR. Fatemi, Sasan. “

Bane, Theresa (2012). Encyclopedia of Demons in World Religions and Cultures.

McFarland. p. 335.

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A Short History of the World. 1. (translated into English by Katherine Judelson). Moscow: Progress Publishers. p. 182. OCLC 1159025, 1974.

“Mazdakism”. Cambridge History of Iran: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods. 2. Cambridge. pp. 991–1024, n.d..

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Saba, Sadeq. “Obituary: Vigen Derderian.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 26 Nov. 2003.

The Legacy of The Little Black Fish “Historic Personalities of Iran: Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi”, Iran Chamber Society.

“The Little Black Fish - Realism, Oppression, Revolution in Children’s Literature.” Ajam Media Collective, 26 Mar. 2018.

Revolvy, LLC. “‘Samad Behrangi’ on Revolvy.com.” Trivia Quizzes.

Pages 14-15 Translated by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 78-79.

Tehran’s Megaprojects Bakhash, Shaul, and Haleh Esfandiari. “The Long Career of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 6 Mar. 2017.

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Chalabi, Mona. “Tehran in Numbers: Crowded, Low-Cost and Fashion Conscious.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 30 Jan. 2014.

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Maloney, Suzanne. “Rafsanjani Proved That Pragmatism Couldn’t Moderate Iran.” Brookings.edu, The Brookings Institution, 13 Jan. 2017.

Pace, Eric. “Teheran Planning One of the World’s Largest Plazas.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 Sept. 1975. “ .” Iran University of Science & Technology “ Agency,

Pages 42-43 Hayes, Sean Amir. Family Photos. 1950.

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Aman, Fatemeh. “Iran’s Headscarf Politics.” Middle East Institute, Middle East Institute, 3 Nov. 2014.

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Beyond The Revolution Dastmalchi, Yass. Personal interview. 6 February. 2019.

Pages 22-23 Shariati, Ali. “Red Shi’ism (the Religion of Martyrdom) vs. Black Shi’ism (the Religion of Mourning).” Iran Chamber Society.

Mandate or Choice Bureau, Marketa Hulpachova for Tehran. “Hijab: A Woman’s Rite of Passage in Iran.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Dec. 2013.

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Pages 32-33 February 1979 (according to Dilip Hiro in The Longest War p.32) p.108 from 48

A PPE NDIX Cover Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 1979.

Tehran, Iran. February 1979. Refa School. A crowd of chador clad women welcome Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini upon his return from exile.

Pages 32-33 Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 1979.

Ahwaz, Khuzestan Province, Iran. 1979. Militiamen in charge of the protection of oil fields, praying.

Pages 2-3 Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 1980.

Tehran, Iran. May 1980. Rally of the Fedayin Khalg in front of the Azadi (freedom) monument, formerly the Aryamehr (light of the Aryan).

Pages 38-39 English translation of poem "I Am Iran": I am telling a story / A story about the loneliness of a woman, me / Amid this time of madness / After my own repose / After a path or a savior or a light After tranquility or a dream or a passer-by / My body has been severed by the blade of history / My heart has broken from pain, anguish, and force / I’m neither north, with dreamy beauty / Nor south, like a seductive lover / Nor like the uncontrollable sea / Nor grand / Nor gaunt / Nor am I tough like a tiger / Nor feeble like a mite / I’m neither tall, nor plentiful / Neither rich, nor poor / Nor Black, nor white / My body / My body is a toy in the hands of strangers / My body is the world’s prostitute / The prostitute of the world / My north, darkness / My south, apathy / I am neither east / Nor west / I am a stranger / I am a stranger / My Caspian is colder than snow / My Gulf is crimson with blood / My rivers have dried / My cities have vanished / I am neither peace nor war / I am neither an embrace nor a weapon / I am neither song nor silence / Neither soaring nor plunging / My savior is adrift in this darkness of history / And my body agonizes from the whip of life / How will I ever fly again? / How will I ever start over? / I am neither hopeful nor forlorn / Neither imprisoned nor free / Neither fulfilled nor shattered / Because I am Iran / I am Iran.

Pages 8-9 Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 1979.

Tehran, Iran. February 1979. At a pro-Shah demonstration at the Amjadiyeh Stadium, a supporter puts a banknote with the Shah's portrait to her eye as a sign of allegiance.

Pages 10-11 Exhibition view of 40 posters for the 40th anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Revolution curated by Aria Kasaei. Safavi Grand Book Bazaar. Teer Art Week 2019. Tehran, Iran. Photo by Saalar Aghili.

Pages 12-13 Andy Warhol, Farah Diba, 1976. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 x 40 inches. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Warhol created a collection for the Pahlavi family that includes these three photos, as well as photos of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his twin sister, Ashraf, with his polaroid at Niavaran Palace in Tehran.

Pages 44-45 Gelare Khoshgozaran, Diplomatic Relationships, 2019.

Installation with books, wooden shelves, postal packages and slide projections.

Photo by Taraneh Hemami.

“Forty Years & More: International Conference on Iranian Diaspora Studies” will be held from March 28-30, 2019, at the Seven Hills Conference Center at in San Francisco State University. For more information about Forty Years & More: International Conference on Iranian Diaspora Studies, please visit https://ids.sfsu.edu/conference.

Pages 18-19 Aidin Bagheri & Hamid-Reza Alisani, The Place of Martyrs, Neon installation.

Exhibition view of Teer Art Week 2019, Tehran, Iran. Photo by Saalar Aghili.

Photo of mural by unknown artist depicting Martyr Dr. Mostafa Chamran, Chamran Expressway, Tehran, Iran. Photo by Saalar Aghili.

Pages 22-23 Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 1979.

Tehran, Iran. January 25, 1979. After a demonstration at the Amjadiyeh Stadium in support of the Constitution and of Shapour Bakhtiar, who was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah before the left the country, a woman, believed to be a supporter of the Shah is mobbed by a revolutionary crowd.

Pages 46-47 Exhibition view of 40 posters for the 40th anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Revolution curated by Aria Kasaei. Safavi Grand Book Bazaar. Teer Art Week 2019. Tehran, Iran. Photo by Saalar Aghili.

Pages 50-51 Abbas Attar, Untitled Photo, 2001.

Ali Abad Village, Lorestan Province, Iran. 2001.

Pages 26-27 Hushidar Mortezaie, (I Die For You), 2019. Digital painting.

Artist statement: “Late Muslim transgender pioneer Maryam Khatoon Molkara is redrawn as what could be her youth living as a young trans Muslim woman in Iran. An androgynous militia from the future now reject political correctness and revolt for queer Muslim futurism... as they long live for their look.”

Pages 30-31 Flyer distributed by the Iranian Student Association. Accessed via Bancroft Library Archives.

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"My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation."

Abbas

1944 – 2018

© Abbas Attar/Magnum Photos