Nuclear Iran Patrikarakos, David
2012, 2012-08-22
eBook
The Iranian nuclear crisis has dominated world politics since the beginning of the century, with the country now facing increasing diplomatic isolation, talk of military strikes against its nuclear ...facilities and a disastrous Middle East war. What is Iran’s nuclear programme all about? What is its genesis? There is little real understanding of Iran’s nuclear programme, in particular its history, which is now over fifty years old. This ground-breaking book is unprecedented in its scope. It argues that the history of Iran’s nuclear programme and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked, and only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the programme’s beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the book details the central role of the US in the birth of nuclear Iran, and, through the relationship between the programme’s founder and the Shah of Iran himself, the role that nuclear weapons have played in the programme since the beginning. The author’s unique access to ‘the father’ of Iran’s nuclear programme, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and Western officials at the centre of today’s negotiations, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment programme that lies at the heart of global concerns. What emerges is a programme that has, for a variety of reasons, a deep resonance to Iran. This is why it has persisted with it for over half a century in the face of such widespread opposition. Drawing on years of research across the world, David Patrikarakos has produced the most comprehensive examination of Iran’s nuclear programme – in all its forms to date.
Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) became one of the most important secular leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting ...influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the group. A Guerrilla Odyssey presents the first comprehensive examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla movement in Iran. Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of archival material and interviews with activists, the author demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that defined Iranian political life in the 1970s. Vahabzadeh offers a critique of various aspects of the Fadai’s theories of national liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary Iran. In addition, the author makes a compelling case explaining why older revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed into the new democratic social movements that emerged from the 1980s onward in the form of today’s women’s, student, and youth movements in Iran. A Guerilla Odyssey is a meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.
This book presents a cultural history of modern Iran from the point of view of Shiraz, a city famous for its poetry and its traditions of scholarship. Exploring the relationship among history, poetry ...and politics, the book analyses how Shiraz came to be defined as the country's cultural capital, and explains how Iranians have used the concept of culture as a way of thinking about themselves, their past and their relationship with the rest of the world.
Weaving together a theoretical approach with extensive ethnographic research, the book suggests a model to integrate broad concerns with a nuanced analysis of Iran's cultural traditions and practices. The author's interdisciplinary approach sheds light on how contemporary Iranians relate to classical Persian poetry; on the relationship between expressive forms and the political imagination; and on the different ways teachers, professors, cultural managers, poets and scholars think and work. He describes how history and poetry are the two dominant modes to talk about the past, present and future of the town and demonstrates that the question of knowledge is crucial to an understanding of the political and existential dimensions of life in Iran today.
This book will be a major contribution to the current effort to move away from nationalist views of Iranian history and culture, and as such will be of great interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, history, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian studies.
While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. ...Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam’s role and those who take a hardline defensive stance. Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajaee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology. Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha’eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari‘ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and ...sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.
Iran has remained one of the most effective tools in Russia's foreign policy towards the West for more than two hundred years. Drawing on previously unpublished and recently declassified sources ...which change the established wisdom on many aspects of the history of Russia and Iran, Denis V. Volkov examines this relationship, and situates it within the broader context of Oriental studies. With a particular focus on the activities of scholars-diplomats, as well as scholars involved in academia, missionary activities and the military within their own professional domains, Volkov analyses the interaction of intellectuals with state structures and their participation in the process of shaping and conducting foreign policy towards Iran. This work explores the specific institutional practices of Russia's Oriental studies, including organisation of scholarly intelligence networks, taking advantage of state power for the promotion of institutional and individual interests, and profound engagement with Russia's domestic and foreign policy discourses of its time.
Explores the ways in which esoteric religion shaped the masterpieces of classical Persian painting. Marks an important interpretation of celebrated, but enigmatic paintings from collections in the ...Metropolitan Museum, the British Library and the Freer Gallery. An interdisciplinary work that bridges art history, literature and religion to offer a novel reconsideration of Shia and Safavid cultural and intellectual history.
In Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th - 15th Century Tabriz, an international group of specialists investigate the role of Tabriz as one of the foremost centres of ...learning, cultural productivity, and politics in post-Mongol Iran and the Middle East.
This first systematic study of a wide range of Persian and European archival and primary sources, analyzes how the Muharram rituals changed from being an orginally devotional practice to public ...events of political significance, setting the stage for the emergence of the early modern Iranian public sphere in the Safavid period.
