Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Your first book is Khomeinism by Ervand Abrahamian.
Yes, Abrahamian is one of the leading historians of modern Iran. He always writes very interesting things about the social and political history of the country and this book is actually a collection of essays that he has written on the Islamic revolution and its aftermath.
What is really interesting about the work he does is that he tries to challenge various assumptions that we may have about recent events. Particularly about the Islamic revolution and the role of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He looks at the way in which Khomeinism became an ideology which borrowed very heavily from left-wing ideas and Islamised them to an extent by putting them into the language of religion. But nonetheless it shows how fluid the thought of not only Ayatollah Khomeini but also the thought of the Islamic revolution really was.
And he deals something of a blow to this idea of a staunchly orthodox Islamic state by exposing the idea that the reality was a much more heterodox movement than people normally accept. So I think this collection of essays is very good for showing that and really challenging many assumptions. He always has the capacity to make you think. He shows that the Islamic revolution is a very standard modern revolution rather than something than harks back to earlier centuries.
What about The Turban for the Crown by Said Amir Arjomand?
Said Amir Arjomand is another leading historian of modern Iran. He is probably better classified as an historical sociologist. Whereas Abrahamian comes from a Marxist outlook and uses a Marxian approach, Arjomand is someone who applies Weberian concepts to Iranian history and development. He also works with the long view and he looks at religious historical developments. So he looks at the history of the country from the early 19th century through to the contemporary period.
There are, for me, two really influential English-language histories of the 20th century and this is one of them. And he is really showing that element of continuity of the monarchy and the Islamic republic that overthrew it – the way in which the concept of the supreme jurist came to replace the monarch as the supreme arbiter and also in some ways the autocrat of the estate. He makes people think about the historical context of more recent developments.
There is this idea that people in the West are often baffled by how the revolution came about.
Yes. But people like Arjomand have been writing about the revolution for the best part of two decades, so it is something they do very well. And you have to remember that back in the 1980s there were very few accessible scholarly texts on modern Iran, unlike Europe and the US. So their contribution is important. They try to explain things using concepts that are familiar to us in the West to show that although this was ‘a religious revolution’, which seems unlike anything we expected in the West, nonetheless it is explainable using methods and tools that are very common to Western sociologists and historians
Ali Ansari is the Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, as well as Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He has just finished a study of the recent presidential elections, to be published this month. He is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, and has recently been appointed Editor of the Cambridge History of Iran Vol 8 (The Islamic Republic). It is difficult for Iranian people within the country to freely express their views, although the internet makes it easier, he says. But what has been published in the last decade before the current crackdown reflects the fact there is a literate readership that hungers for history.
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