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Neither Dowlati nor Khosusi: Islam, Education and Civil Society in Contemporary Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Zep Kalb
Zep Kalb*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Abstract

Private universities are a rapidly expanding form of education in Iran, and increasingly include Islam and the social sciences alongside the hard sciences too. What implications does the privatization of religious and social scientific knowledge have for the Islamic Republic? Scholarship has so far responded by looking at the ways in which the Iranian authoritarian state has monopolized religion, repressed the social sciences and hollowed out student activism. Complicating these arguments, this article provides a historical and institutional comparison of higher education in Iran in order to look at the evolving degree of autonomy of academic institutions and the ability of actors that operate within them to contribute to critical debate, social activism and novel discourse. The article proposes that while state universities and Islamic Azad suffer from politicization and control, a small set of privately owned “Islamic” universities is using its elite connections, financial independence and socio-pedagogical ties to the seminary and modern academia to secure enhanced levels of free debate and independent thinking.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 575 - 600
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2017

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Footnotes

He would like to thank in particular the professors and students of the University of Tehran and Mofid University for their insights and guidance, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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