Social Research - Volume 67 No. 2: Iran Since the Revolution


	Iran Since the Revolution Volume 67 No. 2 (Summer 2000) Arien Mack, Editor

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Ordering information

Editor's Note

The decision to organize this issue on Iran was made a little more than one year ago during the first term of Khatami’s presidency. This was time of genuine optimism in Iran. The possibilities for liberalization appeared to be within reach and the country seemed on the verge of changes that would increasingly relax the grip of clerical orthodoxy that took hold soon after the 1979 revolution. In the context of this atmosphere of hope, we wished to provide our readers with a picture of life in Iran twenty years after the revolution that deposed the Shah and brought the Ayatollahs to power.

As recently as this January, (January 2000), about a month before the first round of parliamentary elections, I had the good fortune to visit Iran where intellectuals and academics with whom I spoke were remarkably optimistic, convinced that democratization and liberalization were inevitable and would occur rapidly. The outcome of the February elections in which reformist candidates were overwhelmingly endorsed seemed to provide strong confirmation even though this optimism was not shared by most of the women intellectuals and academics with whom I spoke. They seemed far less convinced of the inevitability of change, a difference reflecting the great difference in their position in the society. While women can now work alongside men and do, the rules governing their lives --- from their rights with respect to marriage and their children to what they can wear --- contrasts sharply with those governing the lives of men, so their struggles, not surprisingly, are not the same as those their fathers, brothers and husbands. Nevertheless, it is clear that they too recognize and applaud the reforms initiated by Khatami.

But today, only a four months later, the news is astonishingly different and grows darker by the day. Sixteen reformist newspapers in Tehran have been forcibly shut, including one run by President Khatami’s brother, the outspoken editor of one paper has been gunned down in the streets of Tehran and several others have been summarily jailed. Most recently the former president, Rafsanjani, viewed at least by some as a moderate, and barely reelected to the Majlis (Parliament), is reported to have delivered a sermon in which he made a blistering attack on the reformist press and expressed strong support for its silencing. Not surprisingly, the first student protests since last summer have occurred and it seems likely that there will be others which may provide the occasion for harsher and harsher measures. The second round of elections are set for early May and by the time this issue is out will have been concluded. One can only hope that what is happening now will abate and turn out to be just one more momentary detour in the transition to democracy.

Because Social Research is a quarterly it cannot be responsive to these kinds of day to day changes in political life and, for the most part, this makes no difference since our issues generally are not time sensitive. Not so this one. Nevertheless the appraisals of conditions in Iran since 1979 that you will find in these pages provide a map for understanding the past and thinking about the present and future of a country which has been off limits to most of us for a long time.

Arien Mack
Editor

Recommended Reading

Islam: The Public and Private Spheres
Vol. 70 No. 3 (Fall 2003)

Religion
Vol. 41 No. 2 (Summer 1974)

International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record
Vol. 69 No. 4 (Winter 2002)

Focus: Secularization and Counter-Secularization in Contemporary Society
Vol. 37 No. 2 (Summer 1970)

Beyond Charisma: Religious Movements as Discourse
Vol. 46 No. 1 (Spring 1979)

Religion and Politics
Vol. 59 No. 1 (Spring 1992)

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Table of Contents

Said Amir Arjomand	Civil Society and the Rule of Law in the Constitutional Politics of Iran under Khatami
Ladan Boroumand & Roya Boroumand	Illusion and Reality of Civil Society in Iran: An Ideological Debate [Click here to view notes to this article]
Youssef S. Aliabadi	The Idea of Civil Liberties and the Problem of Institutional Government in Iran
Kian Tajbakhsh	Political Decentralization and the Creation of Local Government in Iran: Consolidation of Transformation of the Theocratic State?
Nikki R. Keddie	Women in Iran since 1979
Appendix by Elham Gheytanchi	Chronology of Events Regarding Women in Iran since the Revolution of 1979
Farhad Kazemi	Gender, Islam, and Politics
Hamid Dabashi	The End of Islamic Ideology [Click here to view appendix]
Ann Elizabeth Mayer	The Universality of Human Rights: Lessons from the Islamic Republic of Iran
Firuz Kazemzadeh	The Baha'is in Iran: Twenty Years of Repression
Hamid Naficy	Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad's Films
Bijan Khajepour-Khouei	Domestic Political Reforms in Private Sector Activity in Iran
Djavad Salehi-Isfahani	Democratic Factors in Iran's Economic Development
Akbar Karbassian	The Islamic Revolution and the Management of the Iranian Economy

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Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)

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Civil Society and the Rule of Law in the Constitutional Politics of Iran under Khatami

Saïd Amir Arjomand is Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook and Editor of International Sociology. He is the author of The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988) and The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (1984), and his paper “The Law, Agency and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society” appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History (41:2, 1999). He is currently at work on a constitutional history of the Islamic Middle East.

The Idea of Civil Liberties and the Problem of Institutional Government in Iran
Youssef S. Aliabadi
A quasi-mechanical sketch of society and its institutions is presented which precludes the allegiance of a social agent to an authority. It is argued that this sketch captures the ideal of the social agents which the Enlightenment, at least in Kant's view of it, envisages. An investigation of prominent theories that have been advanced within the last century in Iran to characterize institutional government show a remarkable similarity between them on two counts. They all display (1) an insensitivity to specify an idea of social agents with whom and for whom the state machinery is supposed to be organised, and (2) an insistence on placing a human authority on top of this machinery. This clearly goes against the Enlightenment idea. Yet the bodies that in these theories are charged with running the state machinery resemble, in formal respects, those that are the products of the Enlightenment. It is argued that this gives rise to an incongruence that lies at the root of the failures of institutional government in Iran. To remove it, a consensus on the view of society in terms of the units that comprise it is necessary, which is not at hand.

Youssef S. Aliabadi is a member of the Academic Staff of the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran, Iran. His publications include “Heidegger and Science,” which appeared in Goftogu (1999) and "Language of Truth and the Trith of Language, which appeared in Organon (Tehran, 1374/1995). His current work is on “Newtonian Mechanics and the Problem of Uranian Anomalies.”
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Illusion and Reality of Civil Society in Iran: An Ideological Debate
[Click here to view notes from this article]

Ladan Boroumand is currently Visiting Fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington D.C. Her paper “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate” appeared in the Journal of Modern History (March 2000). She and Roya Boroumand are at work on a volume titled Interpreting Iran’s Islamic Revolution: A Conceptual History, and their paper “The Meaning of Elections in the Iranian Theocracy: A Historical Perspective” is forthcoming in the Journal of Democracy (October 2000).

Roya Boroumand is an independent historian who has worked as a consultant for the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch on discrimination in Moroccan family law and violence against women in Algeria. She has also researched discrimination against women and children in Iran penal and family code. Her paper report for Human Rights Watch, “Women’s Rights Division: Algeria, Morocco, Iran” appeared in World Report 1999.
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The End of Islamic Ideology
[Click here to view an appendix to this article]

Hamid Dabashi, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, is co-author of Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic (with Peter Chelkowsky, 1999) and author of Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993). His paper “In the Absence of the Face” appeared in Social Research 67:1 (2000).
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Chronology of Events Regarding Women in Iran since the Revolution of 1979 (Appendix)

Elham Gheytanchi is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California–Los Angeles. Her paper “Civil Society in Iran: Politics of Motherhood and the Public Sphere” is forthcoming in International Sociology. Her current research is on women’s legal rights in Iran.
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The Islamic Revolution and the Management of the Iranian Economy

Akbar Karbassian is a Lecturer at the Iran Banking Institute and is also affiliated with Azad University. Among his recent publications are “Budget and Budget Planning in the Iranian Economy” (in Farsi, 1999) and “A Note on the Islamic Banking Practice in Iran” (in Relazione Internationale, 48: [1999]). His book Iran: A Socio-Political Assessment is forthcoming in Italy.
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Gender, Islam, and Politics

Farhad Kazemi is Professor of Politics and Middle Eastern Studies and Assistant Provost at New York University. He is co-editor (with John Waterbury) of Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (1997) and the author of Poverty and Revolution in Iran (1980), and he guest-edited the Fall 1995 issue of Iran Nameh on “Civil Society.”
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The Baha'is in Iran: Twenty Years of Repression

Firuz Kazemzadeh, board member and former president of the World Federation of Baha’i, is Professor Emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of “Central Asia’s Foreign Relations: An Historical Survey” in The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (1994).
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Women in Iran since 1979

Nikki Keddie is Professor Emerita at the University of California–Los Angeles. She has published widely on Iran and the Muslim world, including, most recently, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan (1999). She is currently working on articles and an AHA pamphlet on women in Middle Eastern History. She is co-editing (with Rudi Matthee) the proceedings of the UCLA conference, “Iran and the Surrounding World since 1500: Cultural Influences and Interactions.”
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Domestic Political Reforms in Private Sector Activity in Iran

Bijan Khajepour-Khouei is the managing director of Atieh Bahar Consulting, an independent strategic consulting firm based in Tehran. He has commented on political and economic developments of Iran, especially through contributions to international conferences and reviews on Iran. He is also an editorial member of the Farsi social and intellectual review Goftogu (Dialogue).
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The Universality of Human Rights: Lessons from the Islamic Republic of Iran
Ann Elizabeth Mayer
The experience of the Islamic Republic of Iran offers historic lessons about the universality of human rights. Official slogans to the effect that international human rights are Western and are unsuited for use in Islamic milieus had some resonance in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. However, Iranians subsequently suffered greatly from the post-revolutionary regime's policy of running roughshod over human rights in the name of following Islamic culture. The overwhelming electoral support for President Khatami and his reform program are proof of how skeptical Iranians now are when clerical hardliners admonish them that demands for more rights and freedoms are incompatible with Islamic law and morality. Iranians have come to perceive the political motives behind the cultural and religious pretexts offered for denying them rights and degrading their freedoms. Two decades after the Islamic Revolution and with then heightened awareness of the malign consequences of according priority to what are supposedly local cultural standards, Iranians seem ready to move into the vanguard of those articulating why protections for human rights need to be universal.

Ann Elizabeth Mayer is Associate Professor of Legal Studies at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. A participant in a number of non-governmental human rights organizations, her publications include Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (1999) and many papers, including “Lessons of the Zaheeruddin Case: Why Adjudication of Constitutional and Islamic Issues Should Not Be Combined” (1998) and “Islamic Reservations to Human Rights Conventions: A Critical Assessment (in van de Islam, 1998).
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Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad's Films

Hamid Naficy, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Rice University, is the editor of Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (1999) and author of The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993). He has published extensively on Iranian and postcolonial cinemas as well as on exile culture and media. His volume An Accented Cinema: Diasporic and Exile Filmmaking is forthcoming in 2001.
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Democratic Factors in Iran's Economic Development

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Honorary Professor at the Institute for Research and Planning and Development in Tehran. He is a Research Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Economic Research Council for the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey, and is on the Editorial Board of the Middle East Report (MERIP). His current research is in human resources and the economics of the family in the Middle East, especially Iran.
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Political Decentralization and the Creation of Local Government in Iran: Consolidation of Transformation of the Theocratic State? [Click for full article]
Kian Tajbakhsh
In February 1999, Iranians went to polls for the first time in their history in competitive elections for over 200,000 local government posts. The process was just as important as the results—the local elections were very popular and entirely new groups of people participated in the elections as candidates: young professionals, many women, and many technocrats, ran ads in newspapers, and put up wall posters with their qualifications and experience prominently displayed. A significant proportion of women were elected to local council seats; in some cities they form a majority of the council (Tajbakhsh, 2000). The councils have been in operation for a little over a year, and are now an important aspect of the evolving form of the Iranian polity as it struggles to redefine itself. Part of a broader set of decentralization reforms, these elections brought into being a new tier of local government, which has received much less analytical attention.

Clearly, it is too early to judge whether the new structures of local governance will lead to a more differentiated polity, contribute to the growth of civil society institutions, create an effective and responsive urban politics and policy arena, and thereby contribute to the democratization of Iranian society–-all ambitious goals articulated by supporters of the reforms. Given this proviso, the central question I address in this paper is the extent to which the continuing political development and institutionalization of political democracy in Iran represents a consolidation or a potential transformation of the Iranian theocratic regime twenty years after its founding. In this paper, therefore, I analyze the debates within Iran. I do this to better understand the nature and scope of political discourse in contemporary Iran with respect to the reform of political institutions, efforts at decentralization of state power, and the dilemmas and controversies surrounding the notion of civil society in an Islamic context.

Kian Tajbakhsh is Assistant Professor at the Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at the New School University and is on the steering committee of the Iran Initiative of SSRC’s Middle East and North Africa program. His book The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought is forthcoming in 2000.

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