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How to Read a Revolution: An Interview withIranian Specialist Shervin Malekzadeh

Sam Sussman(http://read.hipporeads.com/members/sussman/)

Exclusives (http://read.hipporeads.com/category/exclusives/) ,Government(http://read.hipporeads.com/category/departments/government/) ,History(http://read.hipporeads.com/category/departments/history/)

Just three years after receiving his

Ph.D in Political Science from

Georgetown University, Swarthmore

College Professor Shervin Malekzadeh

is a burgeoning public intellectual, with

publications in the New York Times

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19shane.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0), The Atlantic

(http://www.theatlantic.com/shervin-

malekzadeh/), and Time Magazine

(http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1920821,00.html).

An Iranian-American whose

dissertation research took him to

Tehran on the eve of the 2009 Green

Movement, Professor Malekzadeh’s

academic contributions follow his life-

long interest in the political divide

between the Islamic Republic of Iran

and the United States. He chatted with

me about growing up Iranian-

American in 1980s Texas, witnessing

the popular unrest in Tehran in 2009,

and what Back to the Future tells us

about our perception of the Middle

East.

SS: You were in Tehran conducting

dissertation research in June 2009 when

the Green Movement

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Green_Movement) unexpectedly

broke out, following the presidential

election. Can you describe what the first

days of the Green Movement looked like

from the street?

SM: It was surreal, of course. At first I

was just walking the streets, filming

with my MacBook— literally just

walking with my MacBook open in

front of my chest, video recording.

Reckless, probably. I was always at the

back of the crowd, until the tear gas

started flying, and everyone else ran,

and I was clueless, and suddenly I was

in the front of the crowd, because

everyone else was gone.

Iran 02

(http://read.hipporeads.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/05/FH000032.jpg)

But I have never been more obsessed

with something, with just watching

something unfold. In his book on the

1979 Iranian Revolution

(http://amzn.to/1odL3Ib), Charles

Kurtzman talks about the moment

when routines break down, when you

don’t know what is coming next, and

when anything feels possible. That was

Tehran in 2009. It evokes such a

powerful feeling, even looking back on

it now. There was this tremendous

sense of camaraderie; if you were on

the streets, you were suddenly friends

with everyone else on the streets.

But that energy can only last so long.

Alongside the sense of infinite

possibility was a desire to return to

normality. Ordinary life takes over,

eventually. Real life is out there, after

all. I remember that on the thirtieth

day, Michael Jackson died, and of

course it meant nothing to anyone

else on the street but me, and yet it

captured so perfectly the convenient,

perhaps secretly desired, break I

wanted. Social movements, being out

of the ordinary, are more thoroughly

exhausted than participants might like

to admit.

SS: The mainstream view is that only with

Rouhani’s election in 2013

(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/15/iran-

presidential-election-hassan-rouhani-

wins) did U.S.-Iranian relations

significantly change. But you’ve talked

about 2009 as the turning point. Why is

that?

SM: Well, politically, 2009 made 2013

possible. But first, look at the cultural

shift that 2009 created, in terms of

how Iranians are perceived in the

United States. The Green Movement

showed broad support for popular

democracy—it was essentially a

movement of citizens who were angry

that their vote hadn’t been counted.

That made it much harder to sustain

the popular view in the United States

that Iranians are so different. When

Iranians are marching for their votes

to be counted, when Facebook is

lighting up with Green Movement

symbols as profile pictures, it suddenly

becomes harder to talk so casually

about bombing Tehran. Suddenly

Iranians are people with recognizable

values.

Iran 03

(http://read.hipporeads.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/05/70280018_2.jpg)So

that’s the cultural dimension. Within

Iran itself, 2009 made 2013 possible.

In the negotiation between state and

society, 2009 was the preliminary

rounds of talks that made the

concessions of 2013 possible. With

Rouhani’s election, the Iranian public

was double-dog daring the regime to

defy reformist tendencies a second

time.

Organizationally, as well, Rouhani’s

election came out of the structures

created by 2009. When I showed up in

Iran in the early summer of 2013,

Rouhani had 3% support in the polls.

But there was a clear consensus

among the reformist candidates that

the debates would determine who

would win the right to unify the

movement that came out of 2009. The

technocratic Mayor of Tehran,

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Bagher_Ghalibaf),

was expected to win. But his appeals

didn’t resonate: he legitimated himself

by talking about his sacrifices in

combat in the Iran–Iraq War, and his

religious faith. Rouhani didn’t talk

about wars—he spoke to a new

politics, demanded by a public that

was shaping elite discourse with its

demands to be heard. There was an

organizational structure behind

Rouhani’s rhetoric, and it was littering

Tehran with supportive flyers.

Rhetorically and organizationally,

Rouhani’s victory was all about the

political currents that came out of

2009.

(/)

(/)

(/)

I do think that’s a good dealof what politics is about. Itcan’t be ignored, bothbecause it impacts people’slives, but also becauseobserving those culturalportrayals tells us somethingabout our politicalassumptions, about ourworldview.

SS: You talk about cultural perception,

which most realists would say isn’t

relevant at the elite policy level. Can you

talk about where you differ from

standard approaches?

SM: My response to that has to be

personal as well as academic. For me,

cultural perceptions matter in terms of

both political trends, and individuals’

lives. I remember being a kid in Texas,

in the early 1980s, in the first years

after the Iranian Revolution. I was

conscious that there had been a rapid

shift in how Iranians were perceived in

America. Before the Revolution,

Iranians were admired as a historic

culture, perhaps “other”-ized, sure, but

in an admiring way—but that

overnight, with the hostage crisis,

Iranians were suddenly portrayed as

the worst type of human beings. I

remember my kindergarten teacher

telling me, ‘No, you’re not Iranian,

you’re German.’ I’m German? What?

Iran 04

(http://read.hipporeads.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/05/70280019_2.jpg)So

as a kid, I was teed into how people

from other cultures were portrayed in

the public imagination. And I do think

that’s a good deal of what politics is

about. It can’t be ignored, both

because it impacts people’s lives, but

also because observing those cultural

portrayals tells us something about

our political assumptions, about our

worldview. I remember in the late

1980s, a Chinese man was beaten to

death in Detroit, because his attackers

thought he was Japanese. What better

barometer of American anxiety about

Japanese manufacturing competition

could you ask for?

Do you remember Doctor Brown

being shot by Libyan terrorists in Back

to the Future? There we go, the security

anxieties of the 1980s, when Reagan

bombed Libya and called Gaddafi the

‘Mad Dog of the Middle East.’ That

scene wouldn’t have resonated a

decade later. From a young age I

looked to film, music, television,

because there’s where these shifts in

cultural perception play out.

Resistance can happenwithout barricades. Ideologydoes not need to bepernicious

SS: And you see political progress as not

merely a matter of policies, but also

perceptions?

SM: Yes. Our notions of who is good

and bad, of who deserves our scorn

and who does not, even of who is or

who is not an American, requires

significant cultural work to develop.

Gramsci

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci)

writes about culture and class, culture

and power, as mutually constituting

realities, as processes. His notion is

that our existences carry marks of

power, of cultural domination. So a

woman wearing a veil is carrying a

literal mark of patriarchy, which

signifies not only her submission, but

also her social function: to raise

children. And it’s on the terrain of

these assigned roles, these accepted

normative cultural frameworks, that

you see resistance, and progress. So in

Iran, the movement for women’s

education comes out of women’s

appeal to their designated roles in

patriarchy: they start saying, ‘You

know what, it’s so important that as

mothers we can educate the future

male leaders, that perhaps we need a

little education ourselves.’

Let me bring this back to

contemporary Iran. When I was in

Tehran in 2009, what the Green

Movement was doing was using the

accepted language of Islam to

question the regime. Protesters were

holding signs that read, ‘Honesty =

Islam.’ And the questions were very

clear: How can Ahmadinejad say there

is no inflation when everyone knows

inflation is 20%? How can an honest

Muslim claim to have won an election

we know he did not win?

So resistance can happen without

barricades. Ideology does not need to

be pernicious. It can be used for,

appealed to, for meaningful progress.

This process of negotiation, of appeals

to authority within even severely

repressive system, is what is missed by

simplistic leftism, certain brands of

Marxism which reduce everything to

mere class domination. That misses

human agency, even denies it.

SS: As a scholar, how do you begin to

systematically study something as vast

and as nebulous as ‘culture’?

SM: My dissertation research

examined Iranian school textbooks,

before and after 1979. A revolution

provides an appealing case study,

because we can follow both the

continuities and ruptures implicit in

what emerges. So over thirty years,

you can observe in these textbooks

the negotiation of Iranian culture. How

is piety portrayed? How is modernity

portrayed?

Iran 05

(http://read.hipporeads.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/05/70280007.jpg)In

the 2009 and 2013 election cycles, I

watched closely for the way in which

certain issues were discussed. Take

the Iran–Iraq War, which is always

standard for candidates to appeal to.

Rouhani went totally off script. He

didn’t focus on the war. He didn’t focus

on the martyrs. He talked about the

needs of his audience. That’s how

democracy works, and it’s how ‘culture’

can begin to be studied. In Rouhani,

you have an elite leader whose

rhetoric is shaped by the lived

experience of the Iranian public. On

what day did Rouhani wake up and

decide he cared about factories

closing in Tehran, instead of the

martyrs of the Iran–Iraq war? That’s a

transition that came out of the lived

experience of the Iranian public.

SS: Rouhani’s election surprised most

western experts. What did the scholars

get wrong?

SM: That there is politics in Iran. The

‘expert’ consensus was that because

behind-the-scenes elites didn’t want a

reformist candidate, there was no

chance that one could win. Iranian

politics is not that deterministic. In

2013, there were 1,000 candidates for

the Tehran City Council, which has 31

positions. Why have so many

candidates if Iranian politics is all

about elites simply pulling strings? If

you were tracking Iranian public

sentiment, there was good reason to

believe that another 2009 was not

going to be tolerated by the public.

Which meant that the leading reform

candidate—who turned out to be

Rouhani—would have a chance.

We have to get beyond this idea that

there is no politics in Iran. It’s the same

on the nuclear question. The issue is

covered as, ‘Will Rouhani reject

Ahmadinejad’s extremism?’ That

framing ignores that Rouhani has a

constituency, and his constituency

wants nuclear development. Even the

Green Movement has always been in

favor of nuclear development. It’s

sloppy to attribute Rouhani’s

reluctance to give up nuclear

development entirely to some inborn

personality trait.

SS: Let me finish by asking you about the

role of the public intellectual. What sort

of receptivity do you encounter for that

interest within the academy?

SM: Public commentary certainly

counts far, far less for tenure review

and general evaluations than many of

us who care about public commentary

would like. It may not even count at all,

or it may count against you. Of course

there is something unique and

valuable in publishing academic

scholarship, so I’m not taking away

from how much that matters. But if we

believe that public discourse matters,

that scholars should negotiate culture

and care about outcomes in the

subjects they study, then we have to

be frank about things like how many

more people will read an online op-ed

as compared to an academic journal

article. As scholars, we have to do a

better job of striking a balance

between research and public

discourse. Circling back to the idea

that culture is about negotiating the

possible, that discourse is where

change happens, we have to

acknowledge that scholars are not

exempt from that. If they care about

their ideas, they should use available

opportunities to promote them in

public conversation.

SS: Thank you for joining us.

SM: My pleasure.

(http://read.hipporeads.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/05/s200_shervin.malekzadeh.jpg)Prof.

Shervin Malekzadeh

(http://swarthmore.academia.edu/ShervinMalekzadeh)

is an Assistant Professor of Political

Science at Swarthmore College. He

received his Ph.D. in Government from

Georgetown University where his

dissertation focused on the efforts of the

Islamic Republic of Iran to produce the

New Islamic Citizen through schooling.

He is currently working on a study for the

United States Institute of Peace on the

changing role of student movement

groups in Iran since the 2009 Green

Movement, as well as the ways in which

the university admissions process has

become part of the state’s strategy for

securing the quiescence of Iranian youth.

He has lived and worked in Chile and

Brazil, as well as in Qatar where he

taught comparative politics at the

Georgetown School of Foreign Service. An

accidental reporter and participant in

the Iranian Green Movement, he has

written for The Atlantic, NYT, Time, Al

Jazeera, and others.

All Iran images courtesy of Prof.

Malekzadeh.

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Sam Sussman(http://read.hipporeads.com/members/sussman/) International Relations, University ofOxford

Sam’s research and political

commentary has appeared in the Tufts

Journal of International Affairs, The

Diplomat, Asian Times, International

Policy Digest, and the Oxford Left

Review. This fall he will begin an M.Phil

in International Relations at the

University of Oxford.

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