Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Agency in the Iranian Revolution

Few any longer would suggest that any useful analysis of revolution or revolutionary processes should not include attention to people as active agents.²⁵ Leaders matter and so do followers, entwined in a deeply dialectical relationship that remains relatively unexplored.²⁶ Yet for a time people largely disappeared from social science analyses of revolution except as broad, largely undifferentiated groups whose intentions and actions have relatively little to do with how and why the revolutionary process proceeds as it does. It was not, so the argument went, that people were irrelevant, but rather that the conscious, intentional behavior of individuals was insufficient to make a revolution and that the critical variables—which might be “objectively” identified—were structural in nature.²⁷

As noted, the contention here is that agents and structures both play critical roles, which may shift and vary over time, in any revolutionary process. While I am inclined to see this in most every case, few cases demonstrate it so well as Iran. Skocpol, recognized fairly or not as the preeminent structuralist, modified her position on the role of people (as well as ideology) as a result of the Iranian case, noting that “if ever there had been a revolution deliberately ‘made’ by a mass-based social movement . . . the Iranian Revolution . . . surely is it.”²⁸ She allows that the “revolution did not just come; it was deliberately and coherently made.”²⁹ Not only were people involved in enormous numbers, but in Iran’s revolutionary process real people made real decisions that really mattered.

The numbers do merit a mention, as do their locale. Despite popular (and at times academic and political) inclinations to read revolutions as large scale and mass based, usually in the countryside, relatively few revolutions have involved truly huge numbers of the population, even in populous states. Iran’s was “one of the most popular upheavals in world history: 10 percent or more of the Iranian population participated in the demonstrations and general strike. . . . By comparison, less than 2 percent of the population participated in the French Revolution, and less than 1 percent participated in the overthrow of Soviet communism.”³⁰ Iran’s revolution was marked by a large degree of “mass involvement—indeed the largest opposition demonstrations ever seen in human history.” ³¹ By any reasonable definition, enormous numbers of people were actively involved and engaged in the revolutionary process, making choices about whom to support and going out into the streets to show their support.

This points up the other critical feature about these huge numbers: they were in the cities. There seems little question that despite some anger and frustration in rural areas with issues of land reform, Iran’s revolution was clearly a largely urban phenomenon and as such one of the few; most revolutions have been dominated by the peasantry. In Iran, however, “the vital forces of the revolution—the leading clergy, the bazaaris, the urban poor, students, the nationalist opposition, the workers—were [End Page 37] rooted in the cities.”³² The “multi-class character” was profound, and there was a (truly) massive and broad-based urban revolt that drew from various groups, though notably not from the peasantry in any significant numbers.³³ The key groups were the Left, the bazaaris, and significant parts of the religious community.³⁴ Together, if at times tenuously, these were the core people who made the revolution.

The role of the Left in Iran, revolutionary and otherwise, seems largely to have been forgotten, obscured, or ignored. Much as the role of the Left in revolutionary Spain has been elided by the focus on the civil war (1936–39),³⁵ the Left in Iran has been subsumed into the narrative of Islamic revolution, emphasizing the triumphant religious factions. In part this may be an issue of numbers and in part reflect a (re)writing of the Left in Iranian history post 1953. While the aftermath of 1953 reduced the “organized” Left, Kurzman notes that “the disorganized left was far larger, centered among Iran’s 172,000 university students and 2 million high school students,” and these forces played a huge role in the revolutionary process.³⁶ Stimulated to varying degrees by the shah’s “white revolution,” successes of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, and the writings of Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and others, the radical and revolutionary Left arrayed in a few factions had battled the shah since 1963.³⁷ Despite these differences, the Left played a critical role in forcing the shah from power; in 1979 Che T-shirts were one of the most popular items in Tehran.³⁸ Regardless of their programs, it is clear that conscious and intentional choices were made that mattered. Yet within two years, the organized (secular) Left would be brutally repressed by its former allies and driven underground.³⁹ What happened to the Left and why remain complicated, fraught, and beyond my ken and the scope of this essay. To some extent the Left in its factions, despite the different issues and dynamics that may have befallen them, fell prey to some common problems. First, they invested too much in their differences with each other, failing, for example, to form a unified popular front, and overestimated their popular support.⁴⁰ Second, they (grossly) underestimated their allies, the bazaaris and the ulema, not least their ability to attract and hold popular support, at least initially. Third, even as they failed to fully embrace “democratic rights,” they made some liberal(ist) assumptions about their coalition colleagues, seeming to presume that after the triumph various matters would be up for discussion and compromise.⁴¹

While most attention goes to the role of Iran’s religious community, a brief review of the literature extant suggests that students of the Iranian revolutionary process are well aware of the role of the bazaaris, albeit usually in combination with their traditional allies, the ulema.⁴² The “bazaar,” according to Arang Keshavarzian, is a multifaceted concept that “can be used to depict a place, an economy, a way of life, and a class,” among other things.⁴³ Its denizens, bazaaris, are “merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans” from across the economic spectrum who, even so, often act as “a single social force during political crises” and have “provided resources” [End Page 38] for other groups during large-scale political conflicts. ⁴⁴ “Westernization” threatened their way(s) of life and reinforced their common ground with the ulema as well as the popular classes, an increasingly skeptical middle class, and a critical group of intelligentsia. In Parsa’s analysis, religiosity aside, their ideology was closer to the “liberal-nationalists”; he argues (persuasively) that they “supported Ayatollah Khomeini not because of ideological reasons, but rather out of political considerations” and that while they “shared Khomeini’s anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist orientation,” their slogans echoed those from “when they rallied in the nationalist movement during the 1950s and 1960s.” ⁴⁵ Here, too, the choices and decisions made were critical with regard to support both for the shah and his regime and for those opposed; few people were positioned to attract so much attention and touch so many lives. Disagreements about the economy and ideology led to dissension within the broad swath of society represented by the bazaaris, and they, too, like the Left, soon faced “unprecedented” and “harsh” repression from their erstwhile allies in the ulema.⁴⁶

While it does (unnecessary) violence to the complexity of the revolutionary forces to single out any one group or class as the key, many post hoc analyses have not hesitated to do so. Given the outcome(s) of the revolutionary process, it is no surprise that in popular literature and consciousness, religious leadership has been the primary focus. If the paragraphs above seem paltry, attenuated, and adumbrated, this one is even more so—it is hardly possible to capture briefly the role of Iran’s ulema, that is, broadly the clergy and those who have received religious training. Here, too, as with the bazaaris and even more the disparate strands of the Left, the religious community was hardly a monolithic bloc; the popular image of a religious community mobilized for revolution, Kurzman points out, “is the image of an end-point, not a starting point.” ⁴⁷ Much like African American (and some Anglo) churches in the southern United States during the civil rights movement provided a base, meeting places, food distribution, and organizational capacity, in Iran the “mosque network” played a, if not the, critical role.⁴⁸ Already fighting the Left in the field and universities and the bazaaris in the market, the shah attacked the relatively (initially) small group(s) harassing him from a religious perspective, a decision that seems hard to fathom. As in the other cases, this served primarily to unify a rather diverse group, the religious community, which felt compelled to respond.

This brings us to the outsize role—real and mythic (which is no less real for being mythic and perhaps in some ways even more so for those on the ground)—of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. As with any revolution, it is possible to identify multiple leaders who played critical roles and made key decisions. But as Ervand Abrahamian pithily frames it: “Khomeini is to the Islamic Revolution what Lenin was to the Bolshevik, Mao to the Chinese, and Castro to the Cuban revolutions.” ⁴⁹ A man careful to build and broaden his base—Parsa points out his tactics of sticking to a “nationalist or national liberation line, attacking ‘dictatorship and imperialism’ and calling for ‘freedom and independence’” and “proclaiming that the Islamic government was to serve the interests of the poor and the downtrodden”—Khomeini avoided calls for an Islamic theocracy.⁵⁰ Khomeini proved adept not only at playing to his audience(s) and mingling his message with others (when useful; most notably Ali Shariati, touched on below) but also at being able to cast a wide net and fashion a broad tent as a fiery populist revolutionary leader.⁵¹ Would there have been a revolution without [End Page 39] him? Certainly—but it would have looked quite different and may well have had a decidedly different outcome.

This gloss hardly does justice to the actors discussed and leaves out other critical actors without whom it is hard to imagine the revolution succeeding or looking much like it does. Women, for example, played a significant role in a variety of ways and across all areas; as almost always seems to be the case when matters revolutionary are explored and explicated, women receive short shrift (and have here as well).⁵² More often discussed, but more contentious, is the role of the working class, which some scholars forefront, some put in the mix, and others largely dismiss.⁵³ Another key group was the urban poor (at times conflated with and at other times distinct from the “sub-proletariat”), which in many accounts seem in the final days to have functioned as the “foot soldiers of the revolution.”⁵⁴ There were many other key individuals as well, none more so than Shariati, a leftist sociologist “ justly credited as the main intellectual, even the Fanon, of the Islamic Revolution,” whose melding of “Sorbonne socialism with Islamist nativism” was wildly popular and his thought pervasive.⁵⁵ Another key player was Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, Tehran’s religious leader and one of the few ayatollahs from a poor background.⁵⁶ Taleghani “played an essential role in holding the revolutionary alliance together” and despite being “quite isolated among the ulama . . . was nonetheless the most popular of them.”⁵⁷ Hamid Dabashi goes so far as to hail him the “Father of the Revolution.” ⁵⁸ Together, these people—in groups and as individuals—and those discussed above fearlessly with “wildness” and a “sense of abandon” sensed and seized the possibilities and made a revolution.⁵⁹

Ideology in the Iranian Revolution

After years of inattention, the revolution in Iran refocused interest in the role of ideology in revolutionary processes. In part this reflected the unfortunate, if perhaps inevitable, tendency to read history backward, driven in large measure by a desire to ascertain and explain the outcome(s). But it also reflected, as discussed more below, the apparent appearance of something (perhaps) new. To some extent common ideological ground—however limited—enabled the various revolutionary groups to make common cause with great success; this should not suggest that there was “a single, monolithic and politically coherent ideology.” ⁶⁰ The relatively ugly and brutal collapse of the revolutionary coalition and victory of the Shia Islamists have both served to reinforce the impression that it was the ideology of the revolution and a single body of thought rather than several. Ideology was a major battleground in the power struggle.

Briefly, ideology broadly refers to the thoughts and ideas in circulation in any given society or segments of that society. People draw on “a package of relatively consistent ideas . . . to make sense of their place in society and the world around them,” and hence there is often as well “some sort of vision of what society and the world should be like and how that vision might be obtained.” ⁶¹ As a rule, any body of thoughts and ideas labeled an ideology is almost certainly [End Page 40] not monolithic. Equally certain is that at any given time there are multiple, competing ideologies extant in any society. That was certainly the case in prerevolutionary and revolutionary Iran and remains so.

Identifying and explicating all the ideologies extant is almost certainly a fool’s game; it may not even be relevant. Focusing on the demand and drive for freedom that, with its varied meanings and interpretations, was the (most) common ground, Taleghani argued that “this Great Movement . . . has not been brought about by any single individual, group, or ideology. It is not born of hero worship or efforts of political parties,” a view that was shared by Khomeini.⁶² Still, we might usefully separate out at least two broad ideologies, one associated with the Iranian revolution (1977–79) and the other with the Islamic revolution (1981–), and recognize some of the ideologies that constitute those as well as the battle royal that was joined.

Mansour Moaddel suggests that “ideology is the constitutive feature of revolution,” and a number of others seem to agree that in Iran’s case it is a critical or even essential aspect.⁶³ Certainly, as Iran moved from the revolutionary imagination to revolutionary sentiments and then into a revolutionary situation, there were a number of ideologies in play. It is possible to identify five groups that represent distinct ideological positions: fundamentalists, who wanted a cleric-led Islamic state; Islamic revolutionaries, who wanted an Islamic state headed by nonclerical Shia; Islamic revolutionaries, who sought an egalitarian Islamic state that would significantly redistribute wealth; liberals, who wanted to create a secular parliamentary government; and secular socialist revolutionaries, who followed Marxist-Leninist lines.⁶⁴ There were also Maoists and those who might be labeled “Guevarists” or “Third Worldists.” ⁶⁵

While Khomeini and his people chose to attribute revolutionary solidarity to “ideological consensus,” the haphazardly and loosely cobbled together coalition found its ideological common ground on vague conceptions of freedom and justice.⁶⁶ While “the unanimity and the harmony of the public in demanding the Shah’s expulsion” was a defining feature of the revolution, Suroosh Irfani argues that “the common denominator for all the forces that joined together . . . was freedom—freedom for individual expression and thought, and freedom from despotism, exploitation, and imperialism,” which he supports in part by invoking Taleghani’s claim that the “Great Movement was born of the struggle for freedom and its success would mean freedom for all people.” ⁶⁷ This focus on freedom (and justice) is stressed by Kurzman as well: “Intellectuals sought intellectual freedoms. Merchants sought freedom of commerce. Leftists sought social justice. Workers sought raises and other benefits. Even a drug counter-culture got into the act.” ⁶⁸ All of these people must have been reassured when an important cleric such as Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, in some estimations, Khomeini’s “leading intellectual,” proclaimed that, “if our revolution does not continue in the direction of establishing social justice, it will surely never reach its objective.” ⁶⁹ Motahhari stated that, moreover, “everyone must have freedom of thought and expression, both in speech and in writing and only in this form will our Islamic Revolution continue on the road to victory. Incidentally, previous experiments have shown that whenever society has any kind of freedom of thought, even though this may be through bad intention, [End Page 41] it never results in any detriment to Islam, but in the end is to its advantage.”⁷⁰ The message seemed clear enough: freedom.

If many of the slogans and key concepts during the revolutionary process were essentially democratic and borrowed from the familiar, they were also being embedded in an Islamic context, marrying “the principles and laws of Islam. . . . with a populism that combined the radical language of anti-imperialism and egalitarianism borrowed from secular and religious Leftism.”⁷¹ Shariati was key to this: not only did he reinterpret Shia Islamic concepts and popularize the idea that Shiism could play a role in the revolutionary effort, but his ideas came to be intertwined with those of Khomeini by many wary of the fundamentalist positions.⁷² And Khomeini, in particular, kept those positions close, focusing instead on promises to “serve the interests of the poor and the downtrodden,” borrowing “the general egalitarian principles from the socialists and Marxists in order to gain the support of the poor and isolate the left.”⁷³ Here again, Motahhari was clear: “Freedom, Independence, and Justice were the objectives of this Revolution, and in so far as they were sought in an Islamic context, the Revolution was Islamic.”⁷⁴

After a (surprisingly) brief social democratic interregnum, Iran’s revolution fairly quickly—and brutally—turned away from any of its leftist inclinations and aspirations and focused attention on the Islamic world, seeking to resurrect a bygone era that may never even have existed, at least as formulated by the fundamentalists. In what amounted to a vicious and tragic civil war, repression worthy of anything seen under the shah was unleashed, and the Left and even moderates and other former supporters—workers, bazaaris, and urban poor—were quashed or brought into line. An ideological shift occurred, and, rather than the broad vision of the Iranian revolution, those in power were “a traditional clergy armed with mosque pulpits and claiming the divine right to supervise all temporal authorities, even the country’s highest elected representatives.”⁷⁵ To consolidate their power and position, they had to unleash “an unprecedented wave of repression and violence to demobilize the population and silence the left.”⁷⁶ With allowances for degree, this authoritarianism continues to this day.

The triumph of the ayatollahs has led to the misleading (and unhelpful) notion that what took place in Iran was an “Islamic revolution.” As Moghadam points out, “the revolution that ushered in the Islamic Republic . . . is more properly a populist, anti-imperialist social revolution.”⁷⁷ It seems clear that the great majority of Iranians supported the revolution for political and economic reasons, driven by the desire for freedom(s), justice, and separation from the long Anglo-American domination of their country. Even among those who did have religious reasons for supporting the struggle, many of them were less in accord with the fundamentalist clerics, who were being relatively quiet about their intentions in any case, than embracing “populist Shi’i ideology as a source of self-empowerment and national identity.”⁷⁸ Khomeini, as Parsa notes, never told “the Iranian people . . . his intention to establish an Islamic theocracy. . . . did not articulate any new ideological claims . . . [and] only revealed his goal of establishing a theocratic state” after the overthrow of the monarchy.⁷⁹ While the claims may indeed not have been new, Ali Mirsepassi-Ashtiani argues that we “should not underestimate the fact that the Shi’i clergy made an unwavering effort to construct a political ideology and organize a viable movement.”⁸⁰ Willfully and purposefully, they created both a practical program to achieve their aims and an ideology to explain them.

The ideologies that were extant prior to the revolution, including those identified here, were human creations, the thoughts and ideas of individuals and groups in society. The ideology [End Page 42] that, properly or not, has come to be associated with the Islamic revolution (or, even more, the Islamic Republic) was equally the conscious and intentional formulation of the fundamentalist clerics who came to power. In both cases, in the construction and conglomeration of ideas and concepts, hopes and dreams, possibilities abounded. The eventual disposition should not obviate the possibilities that existed, particularly in 1977–79, a period when ideas flourished and much was up for grabs, and arguably well into 1982, when the brutal repression of the opposition seemed complete and matters of social justice were eliminated from the Islamic Republic’s agenda.⁸¹

Stories of Revolution

Every case of revolution is unique, and yet every case shares something, however tenuous, with all the others.⁸² The desire for nomothetic explanations drives us even as we desire the sort of idiographic accounts that deepen and ground (and of course that serve to explicate, illustrate, and illuminate) those covering laws; we want it all. Short of that, efforts to capture the breadth and depth will continue, and one possible approach might be to consider basic stories of revolution discernable across time and place. It is possible to construe several basic stories of revolution that capture most revolutions. Some of these are, in essence, elite stories from above that feature famous characters, reference large processes, and are denoted by big events. Others are more popular stories that emerge from below, often smaller stories, built around local figures or, if famous, figures who are plausibly read as popular rather than elite; they less commonly mention or recognize processes as such and imbue small events with great significance.

The Civilizing and Democratizing Revolutions story is built around notions of civilization (i.e., “Western”), progress, democratization, and, incongruously, nobility.⁸³ This narrative tracks with the triumph of the Enlightenment and is often used by elites to provide an imprimatur to their process. This is in effect a “liberal” (i.e., cautionary) tale and hence an encomium (of sorts) to reform. The models here are England (1688), “America” (1776), and France (1789); some versions invoke Iran’s 1905 constitutional revolution. This story could perhaps apply to the shah’s 1963 white revolution—though democracy in any meaningful sense of the term was not on offer—but hardly seems apt for the 1979 revolution. While Iran has been more democratic, it has not followed the Western, liberal, bourgeois model by which this is often measured internationally, and, ironically, given Persia’s role in keeping Western Civilization alive during the European Dark Ages, it has not conformed to dominant notions of “civilization” either.

The Social Revolution story is perhaps the most familiar elite story of revolution, wherein 1789 in France transforms the very conception of revolution: it is no more simply another turn of the wheel; henceforth occurs profound sociocultural transformation of the nation, the state, perhaps the world. In this story, people find themselves presented with boundless opportunities to transform the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives and reshape their world and themselves. Following France, the most common examples here are Russia (1917), China (1949), and Cuba (1959), though Mexico (1920), Iran (1979), and Nicaragua (1979) often appear as well. The focus is on struggle for control of state power and fast and fundamental transformations of a society’s state and class structures driven in part by class-based revolts that alter the political, social, and economic systems in a contemporaneous and mutually reinforcing fashion. This story fits Iran’s process most neatly and is most commonly how the Iranian revolution has come to [End Page 43] be understood (as discussed above). Yet this approach may obscure as much as it illuminates, and contortions designed to make it fit the social revolutionary narrative are misleading and unhelpful. This is not to deny either the power or the scope of Iran’s revolutionary process but rather to wonder if it is the most fruitful way to think about it.

The Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution is looser and longer yet (some versions begin with Spartacus’s slave revolt in 73–71 BCE against the Romans).⁸⁴ This saga focuses on various antislavery, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist revolts and rebellions strewn across the globe in which people sought their freedom or liberation from sundry oppressors and overlords. There is attention to egalitarianism, faith, and “self-determination,” the hollow promises of which were all too familiar to Iranians. Some of the most notable examples here would be Haiti (1791), the Sepoy rebellion (1857), the Mahdi rebellion in Egyptian Sudan (1880s), and China’s Boxer rebellion (1900) and the myriad anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. There is some resonance here for the Iranian revolutionary process. The anti-imperial nature seems clear (and echoes earlier anticolonial memories), with the shah rendered as a stand-in for Anglo-American interest, a charge difficult to refute. In addition, the element of spiritual faith, particularly present in many slave uprisings as well as some anticolonial struggles, matches up with the initial and then growing role of Shia Islam in Iran’s revolution. The attention to freedom and liberation among the Iranian revolutionaries was powerful.

Finally, there is the tenuous if sturdy Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten story. If the Freedom and Liberation story is a long and loose one, it is largely chronological, building toward an end and featuring a discernable plot. While clear and chronological are clearly convenient (and in any telling, inevitable?), they are also illusory. Here are “smaller,” more obscure, more local, narrower, more insular stories,⁸⁵ framed not by the “larger” processes but by the more local and specific. This much vaguer, more impressionistic story of struggles “lost” to us is a tale of everyday resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Examples are literally incalculable and reflect only the ones we “know”—it is impossible to tell what we are missing; here I hope a (very) few might be illustrative: the 1534–35 Anabaptist reign in Münster, the massive seventeenth-century slave revolt that resulted in the roughly seventy-year Republic of Palmares in northeast Brazil, the nine-day revolt of Masaniello in 1647 Spanish Naples, the 1741 New York conspiracy involving sailors and dock workers, nineteenth-century North American ghost dancers, the 1911–14 Red Battalions of the Casa del Obrero Mundial in Mexico City, the 1927 Guangzhou “three-day soviet” (the “Paris Commune of the East”), the 1967 (still active) Naxalite uprising in India, and the 1980 People’s Republic of Greenwich Town in Jamaica. The connections between and among these lost and forgotten episodes and the larger process(es) of which they may be part are borne not simply on the breezes but, whether hierarchical or lateral, direct or indirect, active agitators or more passive communicators, by people who, in the vernacular, walk the walk and talk the talk. I am not familiar enough with Iran to know what the examples may be (the 1971 Siakal incident?), but I am sure that they are there and confident that any full accounting and understanding of the Iranian revolutionary process merit attention to them. Consider all the instances that hover around the edge or were lost in the shuffle or are simply no longer expedient but that are critical elements of this story, which lurk just beneath the surface. These moments of possibility, too, are powerful and essential components of the story of the Iranian revolution.

Is it useful to force Iran’s revolutionary process into one of these stories, or does it merit a new story, distinct from those mapped out? There seems little question that the revolution fits most neatly and fruitfully with the Social Revolution story, despite Ayatollah Motahhari’s claim that “the nature of the Islamic movement is in no case similar to the French revolution [End Page 44] or to the great October revolution of Russia.”⁸⁶ As noted earlier, most scholars comfortably categorize Iran as a social revolution and, with all due respect to Motahhari, it is not unusual to encounter references to other such cases, links made to Russia and France in particular. Certainly the assertion of Khomeini and others that “Iran was to be only the first of many Islamic republics” is in keeping with the tradition of social revolutionary efforts to change not just the material and ideological conditions of people’s everyday lives but the very nature of the world.⁸⁷ While Moghadam’s point that there can be no “replication of national experiences elsewhere . . . the Soviet, the Chinese . . . nor the Cuban model” is reasonable, it seems clear that there are broadly similar outlines, which is what this story suggests.⁸⁸

Yet the other stories help illuminate and explicate the Iranian revolutionary process; the “stories from below” highlight the sense of possibility that represents just what was so revolutionary about the Iranian revolution. It was, as Tim McDaniel argues, a “stunning” event “that altered the temper” of its time; “no modern revolution has been led and supported in the name of ancient religious values claimed to provide a truer and more just foundation for modern society than do Western ideas of progress.”⁸⁹ While the previous discussion of ideology challenges whether or not that was what people were supporting—which is, in part, what these other stories might help us to do—it is certainly what they got.⁹⁰ While it is tempting to write Iran’s revolutionary process as social revolution and perhaps even the end point of the social revolutionary story, it is also part of a beginning—or perhaps a renewal—of religious or spiritualbased revolutions, a powerful example of antiimperial struggles that remain, and a reminder that ultimately all revolutions are local. Perhaps there is yet another story to be fashioned.

Conclusion

So what was so revolutionary about the Iranian revolution? Whatever one makes of the many streams—known and unknown, small and large—that contributed to the strength and course of the revolution, it seems clear that what was so revolutionary was its very possibilism, the possibility of possibilities—a deeply radical moment most of us rarely imagine. By 1977 the “unthinkable” started to seem possible, and a lot of people began to consider what world they might be able to make, what life they might be able to forge, for themselves, their children, and their communities. After decades—or longer—in which options were few and far between and almost none of them good, there seemed to be an opening in which a new world could and indeed should be created.

I am inclined to end where I began, that it is in some profound sense too early to tell what the Iranian revolution means, why it mattered, and, along with Farideh Farhi, what the implications and ramifications of its outcome(s) will be.⁹¹ But I am also apprehensive of mystifying what took place or suggesting that it is somehow beyond our understanding. While I am intrigued by Michel Foucault’s provocative suggestion that Iran’s was a postmodern revolution, I am equally chary of subscribing to the idea often associated (fairly or not) with that position, that we can see what we choose.⁹² While there is much about the Iranian revolutionary process to sort and understand, analyze and interpret, with a lot of room necessary for reasonable people to disagree, I think serious reflection will (or can) produce at least three areas of broad agreement.

First, in the (admirable) search for generalizability we can lose sight of the specifics and miss that those specifics matter and that, indeed, without them our presentation may well mean the broader picture we wish to paint [End Page 45] is misleading or inaccurate. Yet specifics can limit our ability to see the larger issues and dynamics at play. If this seems a tautology, mea culpa; I stand by its verity. Forcing the Iranian revolutionary process into the litany of “Great Revolutions” misses too much, while isolating it as some sort of uniquely or peculiarly religious revolution serves no one well. There was a lot going on.

Which highlights that the Iranian revolution was gloriously—if, perhaps, destructively—diverse, a mad amalgam of something old, something new, something borrowed, something, well, green. One can find countless strands being woven together into some sort of revolutionary bricolage.⁹³ Here I have noted only some of the most obvious, but a wide array of forces, communities, groups, classes, and individuals were cobbled together by the process, by events, and by one another.

Finally, regardless of the name applied—“Iranian revolution” or “Islamic revolution”—from 1977 to 1983 people in Iran made a revolution. The name is important. Many people who fought and struggled against the shah and his minions did not share a vision of an Islamic revolution except perhaps in its most inclusive (and hence blandest) sense, connoting broad anti-Western, anti-imperial, and pro-Iranian sentiments. Many of these same people then found themselves engaged in what was in effect a civil war over the direction of that revolution and its evolution into an “Islamic revolution.” Revolution, Adolfo Gilly has recently reminded us, happens when people “give themselves a political goal, organize themselves in accordance with their own decisions and awareness and, with lucidity, ref lection and violence, insert their world into the world of those who rule, and obtain . . . what they were demanding.”⁹⁴ However one might feel about the outcome(s) and where matters may yet go, to deny the Iranians their struggle and victory over the shah, his minions, and his external allies is at best disingenuous and even churlish and ignores the all too real possibilities that seemed to be within their grasp. [End Page 46]