[NYTr] Bk Rvw: Iran: A People Interrupted

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - December 28, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs12282007.html

Iran, a People Interrupted:

Transcending the Colonizer's History

Book Review by RON JACOBS

Hamid Dabashi's 2006 book on Iran, "Iran: a People Interrupted," turns
conventional western scholarship on that country upside down. By
rejecting the dynamic that counterpoises so-called western modernity to
"Oriental" traditionalism, Dabashi creates a new historiography
inspired by Edward Said's scholarship and Fanon's studies of
colonialism. Dabashi, who currently teaches Iranian Studies at Columbia
University, does not reject the modernizing influence of western
colonialism and imperialism. Instead, he describes a dynamic where that
very modernity created its anticolonial/anti-imperial opposite. This
anticolonialist modernity is and was a direct result of the methods
used by the colonial invaders to impose their Enlightenment philosophy
and way of ordering things-that is, through guns and oppression.
Incorporating a multitude of philosophies, with Marxism, Shi'a Islam,
and bourgeois nationalism being the primary ones, Dabashi's
anticolonial modernity has both informed and inspired the various
movements against outside domination in the last one hundred and fifty
years of Iranian history.

Although this historical dialectic is of course expressed in the fields
of politics and economics, the essential and continuous thread of this
history of resistance is found most importantly in the poetry, prose
and film of the Iranian people. This resistance is not merely a
conversation among Iranians or even between Iranians and other
non-imperialist states. It includes the West in its conversation and,
in essence, turns its history upside down. There is no "end of history"
just because western policymakers and their sycophantic intellectuals
say there is. Instead, history remains alive and is being written by
the very forces those intellectuals and policymakers disregard and try
to subjugate. This approach describes his approach to history as one
that "is open ended in its search for freedom."

Underneath this current of resistance is a phenomenon forced upon the
world by Washington and directly related to how it wants the world to
see history. Dabashi denotes this phenomenon as tribalism. It is the
logical outcome of the neocon intellectuals and their silent neoliberal
cohorts that pretend that history has ended and the West has come out
on top. It is a phenomenon that calls its attempts to dominate the
world in every way possible a "clash of civilizations." Through
Dabashi's prism, this so-called clash is shown to be what it actually
is: a reduction of struggles against imperial domination into battles
between religious extremists. This battle features a Zionist regime
that exists because of a Christian empire that is organized and
controlled by a Washington that labels all of its opponents Muslim
extremists. In reality, this label is accurate only in so far as it
describes the actions and philosophies of a relatively small number of
primarily Sunni Muslim millenarians who were spawned in Washington's
anti-Soviet wars of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the lineage of
Al Queda and the Taliban (both millenarian in nature and Islamic in
name) can be traced back to the machinations of the CIA, the Saudi
clients of Washington, and the political establishment in DC.
Meanwhile, a Hindu fundamentalism based in part on its desire to remove
Muslims from India is on the rise and in Iraq a war flares between
various Islamic sects -in large part because of Washington's invasion
and occupation. Instead of ending history, Washington's support of the
Zionist government in Tel Aviv and Islamic millenarians in Afghanistan
and elsewhere has turned history into an echo of the Middle Ages.

What about Iran today in the wake of the 1979 revolution? Dabashi
accurately describes the revolution as a popular upheaval with
philosophical underpinnings in the three philosophies noted
above-Marxism, Shi'a Islamism and nationalism. Furthermore, he
discusses the devastating effect the assumption of absolute power via
the Guardian Council by the conservative Islamist elements represented
by Ayatollah Khomeini and his circle had on the elements involved in
the revolt and the country of Iran as a whole. Unlike most Western
analyses of the revolution, Dabashi discusses the class nature of the
various elements and the failure of the Marxist and nationalist
elements to acknowledge and attempt to bridge the class divide between
their student and skilled worker bases and the peasant and urban
working class. This failure enabled the conservative clerics aligned
with the merchant class to manipulate the religious and revolutionary
passions of the poorer masses, resulting in the eventual almost total
control of the government by those clerics. Perhaps the most refreshing
aspect of this part of Dabashi's text is his insistence that the 1979
revolution was more than an Islamic revolution and would not have
occurred without a complementary coalescing of all the forces opposed
to the Shah and US domination. This perspective and Dabashi's detailing
of its foundations in Iran's history provides a more hopeful reading of
that revolution than the one provided by Washington and its unwitting
allies among the conservative clerical establishment in Tehran.

Dabashi reflects on his personal experiences growing up in Iran under
the Shah as a means to narrate Iran's history and the meaning of that
history. He describes his youth in the country and his college years in
Tehran as a student and opponent of the Shah's regime. Unlike most
Western readings of Iran, Dabashi names the 1953 CIA-organized coup
against the anti-imperialist prime minister Mossadegh as the essential
event in twentieth-century Iranian history. He discusses the hopes of
the 1979 revolution and his observation of the destruction of many of
those hopes in the years immediately after as some revolutionary
opponents of the conservative clerics were disappeared and exiled while
others lent their support at the cost of their politics. He also
discusses the historical role of Shi'a as a movement in opposition to
authority and what that means for the government in Tehran. Iran, A
People Interrupted is a panoramic history of Iran that addresses the
political and cultural realities of that history. It also serves as a
cry against the increasing tribalization of world politics by the
theocrats and their allies in Washington, Iran, Delhi, Tel Aviv and
elsewhere.

This is a complex book that just begins to examine the complex history
of the nation called Iran. Simultaneously despairing and hopeful, it
provides the historian with an alternative and ultimately more complete
way to explore Iranian (and world) history. Dabashi writes that the
despair ever present in the Iranian's various eras of political failure
is overcome by the optimism of their literature that not only inspired
the political events at the time it was written, but survives to
inspire future revolutionaries. For the non-historian, "Iran, A People
Interrupted" is a concise introduction to the breadth of Iranian history
and culture unencumbered by the Orientalist nonsense found in the
current western library on the subject.


[Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather
Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big
Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and
sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is
published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625 at charter.net ]