By exploring topics such as the Internet, print press, advertising, satellite television, video, rock music, literature, cinema, gender, religious intellectuals, and secularism, this unique and ...wide-ranging volume explains Iran as a complex society that has successfully managed to negotiate and embody the tensions of tradition and modernity, democracy and theocracy, isolation and globalization, and other such cultural-political dynamics that escape the explanatory and analytical powers of all-too-familiar binary relations.
Featuring contributions from among the best-known and emerging scholars on Iranian media, culture, society, and politics, this volume uncovers how the existing perspectives on post-revolutionary Iranian society have failed to appreciate the complexity, the paradoxes and the contradictions that characterize life in contemporary Iran, resulting in a general failure to explain and to anticipate its contemporary social and political transformations.
The puzzle of how a vibrant civil society has continued to thrive under a theocratic Islamic state in Iran has long baffled many scholars and analysts of Iranian politics. This wide-ranging collection of essays by a group of young scholars, based mostly in Iran, provides the most informative analysis of this complex relationship between the society and the state in Iran by exploring the role of the media (including the press, television, cinema, the internet, etc.), music, popular literature, and gender relations. It offers fresh perspectives on the contemporary Iranian political culture—as well as politics of culture—in the postrevolutionary period and should be of great interest to students of Middle East politics, communications theory, and cultural studies.
Ali Banuazizi, Professor of Political Science, Boston College, and Past President of the Middle East Studies Association
Iran is often seen as a series of frozen images, with angry clerics and anti-American shibboleths being the byproducts of a stultifying theocratic order. In this path-breaking book, a different Iran comes to life, as a number of authors challenge the prevailing impressions. From the politics of the internet to disquisition of religious discourse in the seminaries, Media, Culture and Society in Iran opens new vistas into this most complex of countries. For anyone interested in understanding the Islamic Republic, its tribulations and contradictions, its promises and ideals, there is simply no better guide.
Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations, author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic .
If the world needed any reminder that Iranians, like any other people, are busy resisting domestic tyranny, defying globalized imperialism, and mapping out the contours of their own place in history, Mehdi Semati's judiciously edited volume is here to respond to that need. Through a succession of brilliant first hand accounts on media, culture, and civil society in Iran, the essays capably collected in this volume cut through the mind-numbing clichés that think tank analysts and their native mis-informers have fed the public at large. The rambunctious Iranian press, a thriving internet culture, the politics of its youths, their arts and music, the importance of satellite TV, a globalized cinema, the inner dynamics of a grassroots women's movement, and innumerable other minutiae of a struggling cosmopolitan culture come to life in this unprecedented and deeply informative book. Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, Author of Iran: A People Interrupted
Living with Globalization and the Islamic State: An Introduction to Media, Culture, and Society in Iran Mehdi Semati Part 1: New and Old Media in Iran 1. The Iranian Press, State and Civil Society Gholam Khiabany 2. The Politics of the Internet in Iran Babak Rahimi 3. Youth, Politics, and Media Habits in Iran Kavous Seyed-Emami 4. The Language of Rock: Iranian Youth, Popular Music, and National Identity Laudan Nooshin 5. The Politics of Satellite Television in Iran Fardin Alikhah 6. The Iranian Moral Panic over Video: A Brief History and a Policy Analysis Mahmood Shahabi 7. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Persian Advertising in Post-Revolutionary Iran Mohammad Amouzadeh and Manoochehr Tavangar 8. Trends in Contemporary Persian Poetry Alireza Anushiravani and Kavoous Hassanli 9. Iranian Émigré Cinema as a Component of Iranian National Cinema Hamid Naficy 10. Iranian Cinema and the Critique of Absolutism Zohreh T. Sullivan Part 2: Religion, State, and Culture 11. Fundamentalism, Gender, and the Discourses of Veiling (Hijab) in Contemporary Iran Fatemeh Sadeghi 12. Religious Intellectualism, Globalization, and Social Transformation in Iran Abbas Varij Kazem 13. Secularization in the Iranian Society Yousef Ali Abazari, Abbas Varij Kazemi and Mehdi Faraji Part 3: Epilogue 14. Whither Iran? Majid Tehranian .
Mehdi Semati is Associate Professor of Communication at Eastern Illinois University, USA. His writings on international communication, cultural politics of global communication, popular media and cultural studies, media and terrorism, and Iranian media have appeared in various academic journals and books.
InWho Is Knowledgeable Is Strong,Cyrus Schayegh tells two intertwined stories: how, in early twentieth-century Iran, an emerging middle class used modern scientific knowledge as its cultural and ...economic capital, and how, along with the state, it employed biomedical sciences to tackle presumably modern problems like the increasing stress of everyday life, people's defective willpower, and demographic stagnation. The book examines the ways by which scientific knowledge allowed the Iranian modernists to socially differentiate themselves from society at large and, at the very same time, to intervene in it. In so doing, it argues that both class formation and social reform emerged at the interstices of local Iranian and Western-dominated global contexts and concerns.
The Tehran Bazaar has always been central to the Iranian economy and indeed, to the Iranian urban experience. Arang Keshavarzian's fascinating book compares the economics and politics of the ...marketplace under the Pahlavis, who sought to undermine it in the drive for modernisation and under the subsequent revolutionary regime, which came to power with a mandate to preserve the bazaar as an 'Islamic' institution. The outcomes of their respective policies were completely at odds with their intentions. Despite the Shah's hostile approach, the bazaar flourished under his rule and maintained its organisational autonomy to such an extent that it played an integral role in the Islamic revolution. Conversely, the Islamic Republic implemented policies that unwittingly transformed the ways in which the bazaar operated, thus undermining its capacity for political mobilisation. Arang Keshavarizian's book affords unusual insights into the politics, economics and society of Iran across four decades.
Despite changes in sovereignty and in religious thought, certain aspects of Iranian culture and identity have persisted since antiquity. Drawing on an exploration of history, religion and literature ...to define Iranian cultural identity and link the Persian past with more recent cultural and political phenomena, this book examines the history of Iran from its ancient roots to the Islamic period, paying particular attention to pre-Islamic Persian religions and their influence upon later Muslim practices and precepts in Iran.
Accessible English translations of the pre-Islamic Andarz (Advice) literature and of the Adab (Counsel) genre of the Islamic era illustrate the convergence of religion and literature in Iranian culture and how the explicitly religious Adab texts were very much influenced and shaped by the Andarz sources. Within the context of this historical material, and in particular the pre-Islamic religious material, the author highlights its literary and ethical implications on post-Islamic Iranian identity.
Exploring the link between a consistent pre-Islamic Iranian identity and a unique post-Islamic one, this book will be of interest to students of Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern studies and Religious Studies, as well as anyone wishing to learn more about Persian history and culture.
Fereshteh Davaran teaches Persian language courses in the San Francisco Bay area, most recently at the University of California, Berkeley, and at De Anza and Diablo Valley Colleges. She has translated three classic works of English literature into Persian and has published many literary reviews in both languages.
Introduction 1. Old Iranians 2. Middle Iranians 3. Iranian Religions 4. Middle Persian Literature: Andarz 5. Iranian Persistence in the Islamic Era 6. Islamic-Era Persian Literature: Adab. Conclusion
This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501-1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early-modern and ...Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship.
It is often assumed that Iran must necessarily submit to the forces of globalization and liberalize its economy, but the country's ruling elites have continued throughout the post-revolutionary era ...to resist these pressures for neo-liberal economic reform, seeking to survive in the battlefield of today's globalizing economy whilst remaining loyal to their own rules of engagement. This book analyzes the dynamics of economic reform in the Islamic Republic of Iran as they have played out in this post-revolutionary struggle for economic independence from 1979 up to the present day. It shows how, although some groups within the Iranian elite are in favor of opening up the economy to the inflow of foreign capital - believing that lasting independence requires economic growth powered in part by investment from abroad - others argue that such economic liberalization might endanger Iran's national interests and put the survival of the post-revolutionary regime at risk.
By examining the political causes of the ongoing tug-of-war that has taken place between these two sides of reform and counter-reform, this book provides a new approach to understanding the complex process of economic policy-making in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which will be relevant to future examinations of the political economy of the Middle East.
The first Persian Empire (559-331 BCE) was the biggest land empire the world had seen, and seated at the heart of its vast dominions, in the south of modern-day Iran, was the person of the Great ...King. Immortalized in Greek literature as despotic tyrants, a new vision of Persian monarchy is emerging from Iranian, and other, sources (literary, visual, and archaeological), which show the Kings in a very different light. Inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and their heirs present an image of Persian rulers as liberators, peace-makers, valiant warriors, righteous god-fearing judges, and law-makers.
Around them the Kings established lavish and sophisticated courts, the centres of political decision-making and cultural achievements in which the image of monarchy was endorsed and advanced by an almost theatrical display of grandeur and power.
This book explores the representation of Persian monarchy and the court of the Achaemenid Great Kings from the point of view of the ancient Iranians themselves and through the sometimes distorted prism of Classical authors.
Iran has not ceased to surprise the world since the American ambassador's famous "thinking the unthinkable" 1978 cable about the imminent fall of the Shah and the coming of Islamic revolution. The ...apparent sequence of moderate government of President Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-97) and democratic reform under President Khatami (1997-2005) was followed by the return of the hardliners and revolutionary populism coupled with an aggressive foreign policy, including a nuclear program. Iran's political regime has proved remarkably resilient through all these changes, despite the disaffection of the younger half of the population, and become all the stronger, partly as a result of the Bush administration's ill-advised bluff about regime change. The death of Imam Khomeini as its charismatic leader in 1989 did not mean the end of the Islamic revolution, but only the beginning of a prolonged struggle among the children of the revolution over Khomeini's heritage. The integrative social revolution begun in 1979 has continued quietly, while the raucous/noisy struggle to define, structure and control the new Islamic political order set up by Khomeini among different factions of his followers has produced a unique political regime which defies understanding. Arjomand draws on the sociology of revolution to offer a general explanation of political developments in Iran in the last two decades while seeking to understand its unique features in terms of constitutional politics of the creation of the post-revolutionary order. Not only Iran's domestic politics but also its foreign policy are shown to follow a pattern typical of the great revolutions. Surprising as it may seem, the parameters for Iran's constitutional politics in the last two decades are those set by Khomeini's mixture of theocratic, republican and populist elements in the ideology of the Islamic revolution.
A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran
from 1501 to 2009 This history of modern Iran is not a
survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of
the story of a nation. ...It offers a revealing look at how events,
people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes
reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history
of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the
background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign
occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic. Abbas Amanat
combines chronological and thematic approaches, exploring events
with lasting implications for modern Iran and the world. Drawing on
diverse historical scholarship and emphasizing the twentieth
century, he addresses debates about Iran's culture and politics.
Political history is the driving narrative force, given impetus by
Amanat's decades of research and study. He layers the book with
discussions of literature, music, and the arts; ideology and
religion; economy and society; and cultural identity and heritage.
