Current Book Project
A Nation Before God: Schooling and the Pursuit of Paradise in Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979-2009.
Enghelab Square lies at the heart of Tehran’s urban and revolutionary landscape, just meters away from the gates of Tehran University. The site of some of the most pitched battles of the 1979 revolution, the square today bustles as an open-air market of goods. There, among the booksellers and fruit vendors, visitors can buy bootleg DVDs, banned books, drugs and alcohol and, if need be, an entire master’s thesis — written from scratch and prepared for oral defense in less than a month, the illicit buying and selling of advanced degrees the logical, if unhappy, consequence of the commodification of education in post-revolutionary Iran, where possession of academic and professional credentials are the requisites for survival and success in that country’s cutthroat labor and marriage markets.
In my current book project I document the transformation of Iran’s school system from an Islamic and public project of rule to a secularized resource for personal gain, appropriated by mothers and fathers more interested in sending their children to the workforce than into paradise. They do so with the complicity and cooperation of the authorities. Even as ordinary citizens disrupt the Islamic Republic’s political and cultural agenda of producing the “new Islamic citizen,” the ceaseless pursuit of merit and above all the brass ring of a university degree have rendered much of the country’s youth quiet, if not entirely quiescent, on campus and at home. In return for conceding in practice the ideological purpose of the curriculum, state officials have secured the participation of families in the educational system and the withdrawal of students from oppositional activities, one of several unexpected outcomes of post-revolutionary schooling that I preview in the recent volume Power and Change in Iran: Politics of Contention and Conciliation, edited by Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi and published by Indiana University Press.
While much has been written about the efforts of revolutionary states to secure their authority and legitimacy through the inculcation of children and young adults at school, there remains little understanding of why families choose to participate in ideological school systems, or how the presence of a mobilized population at the school site shapes the content and teaching of political curricula in places such as China, Cuba, or Iran. This project, produced with the support of the Social Science Research Council and the Spencer Foundation, is one of the first to document Islamicization as it occurs in the classroom, in the day-to-day encounter between agents of the state and ordinary citizens.[1] It draws upon two years of ethnographic field work in Iran, including archival research of textbooks published between 1979 and 2008 as well as the evidence of interviews and participant observation, to document the ways in which students and school staff interpret, ignore, reject, or repurpose the state’s political and cultural message.[2]
Much of that message, as it turns out, has remained the same since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against the conceit that the 1979 Revolution represents a radical break with the past, my manuscript chronicles the remarkable continuity of the current educational program with Qajar and Pahlavi era efforts to import needed foreign technology while preserving Iran’s “true” cultural identity, a phenomenon that Monica Ringer describes as the “dilemma of modernization.”[3] Like its predecessors, education under Islamic rule localizes modernity in an “authentic” national identity rooted in Iran’s ancient or Islamic pasts (or both), a finding that affirms Ali Ansari’s thesis that nationalism is “the determining ideology of modern Iran.”[4] Ruptures in the cultural content of education exist, but these occur most prominently after 1979 rather than across the Pahlavi and Islamic regimes, breaks produced by the ceaseless rivalry of elites who, unable to agree on what constitutes “true” Islam, nonetheless strive to get education right lest the revolution be lost.
These surprising preliminary results illustrate the importance of qualitative methods for the study of schooling and cultural politics in Iran, a country poorly served by traditional political science’s emphasis on generalization. The search for universal explanations can tempt analysts to internalize the narrative found in official documents, confusing state inputs into education with actual outcomes. As I argue in a forthcoming article in Social Science Quarterly, ethnographic fieldwork under authoritarian conditions is not only possible but imperative for understanding the causal mechanisms linking the implementation of ideological curricula with its reception by a public that may or may not understand or care much what the state has to say, even if, as in Iran, its agents are co-religionists.[5]
The So What? Implications and Future Research
The study of the politics of schooling in Iran not only contributes to an expanding literature committed to demonstrating the versatility of nationalism as an organizing framework for political and social analysis, but it invites a new consideration of formal efforts to shape the subjectivities of ordinary citizens, one that disrupts the usual binaries of domination and resistance associated with cultural politics in the Middle East. I am especially interested in the ways in which encounters between state agents and members of society result in shared discursive and institutional frameworks for meaningful forms of consent and protest by ordinary citizens, an ever-changing grammar of rule that, rehearsed daily at the school site, the office place, or on television, binds state and society together even as it facilitates contentious politics.[6]
The innovation of my current project is to link the presence of the public to the development of discourses of domination and rule. Asef Bayat has shown us how the actions of ordinary citizens in informal realms can have extraordinary effects on the formal politics of Iran and the Middle East, the quiet encroachers on the periphery of public spaces whose “weight in numbers” alters the negotiation and redistribution of material resources.[7] The story presented here details what happens to immaterial sources of power such as religion and language when these subaltern populations enter the formal and regulated spaces of social life, often at the invitation of the state, their struggle for improvement both empowered and constrained by engagement with the public authority and its formal institutions.
Indeed, the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the Islamic state is not likely to come from a secularized or westernized opposition movement, but from within the ranks of the devout, by partisans disappointed in Iran’s current leadership but who remain committed to preserving the legacy of the revolution and the memory of Khomeini. Nearly all of my informants, including students and staff of religious schools as well as veterans of the war with Iraq, became active participants in the massive street protests mounted in the wake of the 2009 presidential elections, a phenomenon chronicled in my reporting from Tehran for The New York Times, Time, and Salon during the Green Movement. Their righteous politics provides the premise of my next book, The Accidental Iranian: Dispatches from the Green Movement, in which I argue that the 2009 protests, far from being a failed revolt, provided the democratic terms that powered the Rouhani coalition to victory in 2013 and 2016, and upon which secularism might someday be reconciled with the current system of Islamic rule.
Building on my work in Iran, I am in the planning stages of a new research agenda that studies the ways in which the logic of the meritocracy overwhelms the moralizing project of the pedagogical state in non-democratic and democratic settings. I am fascinated by how the worldwide move towards producing the “credentialed society” has resulted in similar patterns and pathologies among the educated, regardless of regime type. In particular, I want to know why young students persist in meritocratic systems despite stubborn rates of youth unemployment. Journalists and scholars commonly assume that the expansion of education, and in particular the education of women, is propitious for the development of liberal democracy and a mortal threat to authoritarianism. I hypothesize that the pressures of testing and memorization associated with higher education inadvertently insulates states from protest from below, by generating a generalized apathy towards politics on the part of teachers and students who, being practical-minded, desire only to get the grade, get through the day, and then get on with the rest of their lives.
[1] For an outstanding ethnography published in Farsi see Mohammad Rezaei, Tahlili az zendegi-ye roozmari-ye danesh amoozeshi: Nasaziha-ye gofteman-e madreseh [An Analysis of the Daily Lives of Schoolchildren: The Failures of School Discourse] (Tehran: Society and Culture Publishing, 2008).
[2] Much of my cross-disciplinary research on postrevolutionary schooling is directly influenced by the innovations of cultural historians of the Mexican Revolution. See for example Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools In Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1997).
[3] Monica Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2001). See also Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[4] Ali Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Afshin Marashi makes a similar claim in Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
[5] Shervin Malekzadeh, “Paranoia and Perspective, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Research in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Social Science Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2016).
[6] Nader Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005); Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[7] Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
A Nation Before God: Schooling and the Pursuit of Paradise in Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979-2009.
Enghelab Square lies at the heart of Tehran’s urban and revolutionary landscape, just meters away from the gates of Tehran University. The site of some of the most pitched battles of the 1979 revolution, the square today bustles as an open-air market of goods. There, among the booksellers and fruit vendors, visitors can buy bootleg DVDs, banned books, drugs and alcohol and, if need be, an entire master’s thesis — written from scratch and prepared for oral defense in less than a month, the illicit buying and selling of advanced degrees the logical, if unhappy, consequence of the commodification of education in post-revolutionary Iran, where possession of academic and professional credentials are the requisites for survival and success in that country’s cutthroat labor and marriage markets.
In my current book project I document the transformation of Iran’s school system from an Islamic and public project of rule to a secularized resource for personal gain, appropriated by mothers and fathers more interested in sending their children to the workforce than into paradise. They do so with the complicity and cooperation of the authorities. Even as ordinary citizens disrupt the Islamic Republic’s political and cultural agenda of producing the “new Islamic citizen,” the ceaseless pursuit of merit and above all the brass ring of a university degree have rendered much of the country’s youth quiet, if not entirely quiescent, on campus and at home. In return for conceding in practice the ideological purpose of the curriculum, state officials have secured the participation of families in the educational system and the withdrawal of students from oppositional activities, one of several unexpected outcomes of post-revolutionary schooling that I preview in the recent volume Power and Change in Iran: Politics of Contention and Conciliation, edited by Daniel Brumberg and Farideh Farhi and published by Indiana University Press.
While much has been written about the efforts of revolutionary states to secure their authority and legitimacy through the inculcation of children and young adults at school, there remains little understanding of why families choose to participate in ideological school systems, or how the presence of a mobilized population at the school site shapes the content and teaching of political curricula in places such as China, Cuba, or Iran. This project, produced with the support of the Social Science Research Council and the Spencer Foundation, is one of the first to document Islamicization as it occurs in the classroom, in the day-to-day encounter between agents of the state and ordinary citizens.[1] It draws upon two years of ethnographic field work in Iran, including archival research of textbooks published between 1979 and 2008 as well as the evidence of interviews and participant observation, to document the ways in which students and school staff interpret, ignore, reject, or repurpose the state’s political and cultural message.[2]
Much of that message, as it turns out, has remained the same since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against the conceit that the 1979 Revolution represents a radical break with the past, my manuscript chronicles the remarkable continuity of the current educational program with Qajar and Pahlavi era efforts to import needed foreign technology while preserving Iran’s “true” cultural identity, a phenomenon that Monica Ringer describes as the “dilemma of modernization.”[3] Like its predecessors, education under Islamic rule localizes modernity in an “authentic” national identity rooted in Iran’s ancient or Islamic pasts (or both), a finding that affirms Ali Ansari’s thesis that nationalism is “the determining ideology of modern Iran.”[4] Ruptures in the cultural content of education exist, but these occur most prominently after 1979 rather than across the Pahlavi and Islamic regimes, breaks produced by the ceaseless rivalry of elites who, unable to agree on what constitutes “true” Islam, nonetheless strive to get education right lest the revolution be lost.
These surprising preliminary results illustrate the importance of qualitative methods for the study of schooling and cultural politics in Iran, a country poorly served by traditional political science’s emphasis on generalization. The search for universal explanations can tempt analysts to internalize the narrative found in official documents, confusing state inputs into education with actual outcomes. As I argue in a forthcoming article in Social Science Quarterly, ethnographic fieldwork under authoritarian conditions is not only possible but imperative for understanding the causal mechanisms linking the implementation of ideological curricula with its reception by a public that may or may not understand or care much what the state has to say, even if, as in Iran, its agents are co-religionists.[5]
The So What? Implications and Future Research
The study of the politics of schooling in Iran not only contributes to an expanding literature committed to demonstrating the versatility of nationalism as an organizing framework for political and social analysis, but it invites a new consideration of formal efforts to shape the subjectivities of ordinary citizens, one that disrupts the usual binaries of domination and resistance associated with cultural politics in the Middle East. I am especially interested in the ways in which encounters between state agents and members of society result in shared discursive and institutional frameworks for meaningful forms of consent and protest by ordinary citizens, an ever-changing grammar of rule that, rehearsed daily at the school site, the office place, or on television, binds state and society together even as it facilitates contentious politics.[6]
The innovation of my current project is to link the presence of the public to the development of discourses of domination and rule. Asef Bayat has shown us how the actions of ordinary citizens in informal realms can have extraordinary effects on the formal politics of Iran and the Middle East, the quiet encroachers on the periphery of public spaces whose “weight in numbers” alters the negotiation and redistribution of material resources.[7] The story presented here details what happens to immaterial sources of power such as religion and language when these subaltern populations enter the formal and regulated spaces of social life, often at the invitation of the state, their struggle for improvement both empowered and constrained by engagement with the public authority and its formal institutions.
Indeed, the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the Islamic state is not likely to come from a secularized or westernized opposition movement, but from within the ranks of the devout, by partisans disappointed in Iran’s current leadership but who remain committed to preserving the legacy of the revolution and the memory of Khomeini. Nearly all of my informants, including students and staff of religious schools as well as veterans of the war with Iraq, became active participants in the massive street protests mounted in the wake of the 2009 presidential elections, a phenomenon chronicled in my reporting from Tehran for The New York Times, Time, and Salon during the Green Movement. Their righteous politics provides the premise of my next book, The Accidental Iranian: Dispatches from the Green Movement, in which I argue that the 2009 protests, far from being a failed revolt, provided the democratic terms that powered the Rouhani coalition to victory in 2013 and 2016, and upon which secularism might someday be reconciled with the current system of Islamic rule.
Building on my work in Iran, I am in the planning stages of a new research agenda that studies the ways in which the logic of the meritocracy overwhelms the moralizing project of the pedagogical state in non-democratic and democratic settings. I am fascinated by how the worldwide move towards producing the “credentialed society” has resulted in similar patterns and pathologies among the educated, regardless of regime type. In particular, I want to know why young students persist in meritocratic systems despite stubborn rates of youth unemployment. Journalists and scholars commonly assume that the expansion of education, and in particular the education of women, is propitious for the development of liberal democracy and a mortal threat to authoritarianism. I hypothesize that the pressures of testing and memorization associated with higher education inadvertently insulates states from protest from below, by generating a generalized apathy towards politics on the part of teachers and students who, being practical-minded, desire only to get the grade, get through the day, and then get on with the rest of their lives.
[1] For an outstanding ethnography published in Farsi see Mohammad Rezaei, Tahlili az zendegi-ye roozmari-ye danesh amoozeshi: Nasaziha-ye gofteman-e madreseh [An Analysis of the Daily Lives of Schoolchildren: The Failures of School Discourse] (Tehran: Society and Culture Publishing, 2008).
[2] Much of my cross-disciplinary research on postrevolutionary schooling is directly influenced by the innovations of cultural historians of the Mexican Revolution. See for example Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools In Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1997).
[3] Monica Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2001). See also Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[4] Ali Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Afshin Marashi makes a similar claim in Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
[5] Shervin Malekzadeh, “Paranoia and Perspective, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Research in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Social Science Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2016).
[6] Nader Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005); Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[7] Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
