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2 results

  • 3 - On the Streets and Beyond

  • Pouya Alimagham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Book:
    Contesting the Iranian Revolution
    Published online:
    20 February 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020, pp 52-136

  • Summary

    This chapter underscores the utility of a “history from below” approach. Crowd action dispels historical marginalization and state propaganda, making women and men—not states or powerful people—the central agents of history making, and allowing a more nuanced understanding of events. Studying the crowd enables the reader to understand the unique opportunity for mobilization presented by Iran’s 2009 presidential election. The disputed election results prompted a week-long uprising that provoked a crackdown by the state. The chapter outlines how one continuous uprising morphed into many, and how Iran’s political calendar was usurped by the uprising for renewed social movement activity, with the crowd co-opting some of the most politically charged days from Iran’s revolutionary past to evade the security climate and protest the state. Friday sermons, the anniversaries of the US embassy seizure and Ayatollah Beheshti’s assassination, and Student Day, along with revolution-era strategies of action, such as the night-time chants of “Allahu akbar,” all became part of the uprising’s repertoire.

Contesting the Iranian Revolution
  • The Green Uprisings
  • Pouya Alimagham
  • Published online:
    20 February 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020
  • Most observers of Iran viewed the Green Uprisings of 2009 as a 'failed revolution', with many Iranians and those in neighbouring Arab countries agreeing. In Contesting the Iranian Revolution, however, Pouya Alimagham re-examines this evaluation, deconstructing the conventional win-lose binary interpretations in a way which underscores the subtle but important victories on the ground, and reveals how Iran's modern history imbues those triumphs with consequential meaning. Focusing on the men and women who made this dynamic history, and who exist at the centre of these contentious politics, this 'history from below' brings to the fore the post-Islamist discursive assault on the government's symbols of legitimation. From powerful symbols rooted in Shiʿite Islam, Palestinian liberation, and the Iranian Revolution, Alimagham harnesses the wider history of Iran and the Middle East to highlight how activists contested the Islamic Republic's legitimacy to its very core.