Historical analyses tend to agree that the Iranian Revolution was an overwhelmingly “urban” revolution. But how did the revolutionaries themselves see “the urban,” that is, the material, social, and ideological phenomena entangled with the processes of urbanization?In this chapter, the author explores how the arguably most prominent revolutionary Iranian socialist organization prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Organization of the Iranian People’s Fadâ‘i Guerrillas, engaged “the urban.” The author examines a range of Fadâ‘i materials from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s that reflect the organization’s theory and action through four analytical points related to “the urban,” namely, (1) as a central feature of the organization’s historical context and profile; (2) as elements in the organization’s revolutionary theory and strategy; (3) as a setting and resource for its armed action; and (4) as a site for detection of revolutionary potential. The author contend that the urban was used by the guerrillas to work through the global, that is, the universalistic pretentions of Marxist ideology and of Third Worldist revolutionary theory, toward an Iran-specific praxis. “The urban” became an abstract and concrete link, the author argues, connecting a transnational space of ideas to a particular, localized struggle for national liberation and thus, in short, to anchor theory in practice.

This chapter examines how certain attitudes toward science and technology during the Cold War contributed to the shaping of transformative educational policies in Iran, from the 1950s to the eve of the revolution. Different agents of social change – from the royal court at the top down to high school administrators – embraced modern learning in mathematics and the natural sciences not only as a corpus of essential knowledge but also as a vehicle to advance their respective political plans and ideological preferences. The impact on the transformation of Iranian society can hardly be exaggerated. Among other social indicators, the impact of such policies is reflected in the high number of former students and graduates of engineering and technical schools among the revolutionaries who imagined modernity and progress primarily in terms of construction and control.

In the late 1920s, at the same time as the centralization of Iran’s legal system, the nascent Pahlavi state inaugurated a carceral system and imaginary in which modern prisons were promoted as necessary and progressive solutions to myriad social crises. In this era, Pahlavi statesmen and law enforcement officials attended conferences on policing and prisons in Europe, drawing architectures and techniques of punishment from those sources and working to dramatically expand Iran’s carceral system. This chapter examines state discourses on the prison in the aftermath of legal centralization and argues the mid-century Iranian government claimed its new-look prison system as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By vastly expanding Iran’s prison system and extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, the Pahlavi government marked the prison as a space of rehabilitation in which the bad criminal could be reformed into the good citizen, normalizing the incarceration of increasing numbers of Iranians in the process. This chapter also examines the establishment of the academic field of criminology in Iran, which emerged at the same time as these state-led reform efforts. Charting the rise of social scientific debates on crime and punishment, this chapter argues that this new academic discipline mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, citizenship, rehabilitation, and modern progress.

In the 1960s and 1970s, revolutionary guerrilla groups rose as the epitome of anti-imperialist resistance across the globe. Feeling the heat of this global movement, Iranian activists left the country to undergo guerrilla training and participate in irregular battles in the Middle East and beyond. After the 1979 revolution, a few of these trained guerrillas became involved in the formation of a revolutionary state militia, soon to be known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). This did not make the IRGC a professional guerrilla force, despite IRGC leaders’ retrospective claims. Nevertheless, the IRGC can be seen as a participant in and a contributor to the global network of guerrilla organizations, although not in terms of structure and practice. This chapter follows Iranian activists’ extraterritorial networks and trajectories of key individuals within them. It demonstrates that as a state-sponsored militia, the Revolutionary Guards translated the common global guerrilla agenda – that of a systematic fight against a given imperialist state – into defying state-mandated rigid and centralized organization. With the help of previously tested patterns of informal order within Islamist circles, the IRGC emerged as a revolutionary organization for postrevolutionary times, leaving its mark on a new era of state-sponsored yet insurgent militias.

This chapter is a political memoir on political activism in the late 1960s, in a small town of Golpayegan. The story of political activism and intellectual life in a small town illuminates the prerevolutionary period in Iran. Similarities link political and cultural sensibilities in the modernizing capital and a “religious” town such as Golpayegan.Political Islamism or the many streams of Marxism were formed in Golpayegan through the lived experience of ordinary people. Even in the late 1960s, young high school students passionately embraced transnational experiences through books, newspapers, magazines, and the study of such foreign languages as Arabic. Other institutional mediums included schooling, transnational religious exchanges, and technology (radio and cassettes recordings). Golpayegan was a fertile zone of transnational and transregional exchange. While living in Golpayegan, the author was fascinated by the outside world. Its cultural trappings were more accessible than one might think. The author loved listening to foreign radio, in English or Arabic and Farsi, through stations based in East Berlin, Baghdad, and Peking. He also listened to BBC in Persian and read, whenever possible, Time Magazine and Newsweek.

This chapter reconstructs rumors and demonstrations in 1968 around the death of Gholamreza Takhti, Iran's beloved gold-winning wrestling champion, recentering them in the history of the 1979 revolution and the global 1960s. The account of the demonstrations provided here explains a mobilization tactic used to great effect in the lead up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution: the staging of protests on the fortieth day of mourning. Locating this tactic in 1968, at a moment of global protest, and before ideological disputes between leftists and Islamists congealed in Iran, casts a spotlight on the indeterminate quality of the revolution as a lived event. The authors argue that discussions of “global 1968,” and approaches to global history more broadly construed, must account both for the local specificity and the global echoes signaled by events like the Takhti demonstrations.

What did it mean for Iranian revolutionaries to understand the revolution as global? To answer this question, this chapter investigates the idea of enghelab-e jahani (global revolution) in Morteza Avini's documentary films and theoretical writings. Avini was a faithful supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini who dedicated his art and thinking to grassroots mobilizations of Hezbollah volunteers after the revolution. Raised in intellectual and artistic environments of avant-garde art before the revolution, Avini's key intellectual struggle was to reconcile the cosmopolitan nature of his prerevolutionary training in modernist art with postrevolutionary faith in political Islam's assumption that all people are eventually and universally convertible to Islam through the revolution. Navigating between the cosmopolitanism of modern art and the universalist aspirations of political Islam, combined with his socialist commitment to a materially more just society, Avini offered a theory of the global revolution in which the global emerged at the intersection of four discursively distinct categories: global, cosmopolitan, universal, and worldly, all of which reflected the Persian concept of jahani.

The men and women that made the 1979 Iranian Revolution were of their time and place. We could not expect them to be otherwise, short of certain arguments that they were “guided by the eternal.” As researchers, we face a similar predicament of spatial and temporal specificity. Yet, neither time nor space are isolated; they become meaningful analytical categories when “made” in relation to larger social processes interconnecting times and places.

This chapter argues that this volume furnishes a nuanced narrative of the 1979 revolution. The authors explain the revolution within the historic context of two crucial decades leading to the demise of the old regime. This juncture reveals diverse global inspirations driving the revolution. The existing scholarly literature on the Iranian Revolution falls short of fully appreciating the contemporaneity of the revolution as an experience for the Iranians. That is, the Iranian Revolution as a “transnational” social and political event, as experienced by Iranians. The contemporaneity and transnational quality of the experience embed the revolution in the preceding two decades of widespread cultural transfiguration at every social level, in the “quiet revolution.” The “quiet revolution” itself cannot be understood except in terms of a circulatory system of flows of people and ideas between Iran, the West, the Middle East, and Asia, and other countries like the Soviet Union and those in Latin America.

This chapter sets out the book’s main theoretical claims. It argues that understanding the emergence of revolutionary challenge along ethnic lines requires a focus on local-level interactions between social actors and state agents and how they vary over time. This approach directs attention to variation within ethnic groups and, specifically, to linkages between sub-ethnic units and the state. The chapter then presents the book’s main theoretical intervention: state linkages often condition the participation of “ethnically excluded” populations, and incumbent response to challenge is often not focused singly on dividing the population on ethnic lines but includes important forms of conciliation aimed at preserving cross-ethnic clients. This conciliation often fails, however, because informal, ethnically dominated autocratic regimes resort to violence to deal with immediate threats posed by prolonged urban demonstrations and challenger violence, shattering many of the linkages forged across ethnic lines. This view of challenger–incumbent interaction under ethnically dominated rule challenges the dominant view that regimes intentionally polarize their polities on ethnic lines to cling to power; the patchwork of bargains such regimes strike with various elements of the populations they rule can channel contention toward ethnic violence, even when ethnicization is not in the incumbent’s interest.