The Iranian Revolution And Political Change In The Arab World

The Iranian revolution has been the paramount catalyst challenging the political order of the Middle East in recent times. Karen Feste's paper explores whether the emergence of political Islam is key to understanding power struggle in the Middle East. Focusing on the link between civil unrest and government response throughout the Arab world, do events leading up to and following the revolution in Iran render a model that explains political change in the Middle East? Examining the factors that converged to create the 1979 revolution in Iran, what does the interaction between domestic and international pressures underpinning social and political change in the region suggest? Employing aggregate measures based on cross-national, longitudinal event data, Feste tests the correlation between public dissent and government sanctions across three distinct phases in Middle East political history in order to discern patterns of political change associated with temporal, geographical and leadership traits.

The Middle East has been the arena of three cataclysmic events since 1979 - the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. All of these have brought about major changes in the inter-regional politics and relations between Middle East countries and the outside world. This book seeks to analyze the impact of these events on Iranian-Arab relations. The authors examine Iran's relations with the Arab states of the Gulf in detail and sheds light on the changing patterns of Iranian-Egyptian and Lebanese relations.

On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution: Power and Resistance Today is the first comparative analysis of two central political events that have altered our world forever: the Arab uprisings which started in Tunisia, and the Iranian revolution in 1979. Adib-Moghaddam demonstrates how contemporary forms of protest are changing our understanding about the way power and resistance function. In a theoretical tour de force which is substantiated with a range of primary material, he argues that acts of protest in Tehran to Cairo can be entirely linked to the same act in New York, London, Madrid and Athens. Breaking through the east/west, north/south divide, Adib-Moghaddam shows how the Arab revolts promise to shift the discourse away from the idea that Arabs and Muslims are peculiar, that "Middle Eastern Studies" cannot be linked to political theory, that the dynamics of rebellion "there" are fundamentally different from the politics of revolt "here". Adib-Moghaddam argues that the dialectics of power and resistance are truly universal and that they are unfolding within a globalised political context that is increasingly interconnected. In order to illuminate this argument theoretically, the study is organised around conceptual terms that feed into forms of power and resistance, such as revolution, radicalism, dissent, knowledge, neighbour and reform. These terms and concepts are discussed and deconstructed via an empirical discussion of pivotal events beyond the non-western world, demonstrating that for a long time, and without realising it, we have been living in the end times of unitary categories such as "west" and "east."

In today's world all eyes are on Iran, which has grappled with an experiment that has had a massive global impact. For some, the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 was the triumph of a modern, political Islam, heralding Muslim justice and economic prosperity. Others, including many of the original revolutionaries, saw religious fanatics attempting to roll back time by creating a despotic theocracy. Either way, the Iranian Revolution changed the Muslim world. It not only inspired the Muslim masses but also reinvigorated intellectual debates on the nature and possibilities of an Islamic state. The new 'Islamic Republic of Iran' combined not just religion and the state, but theocracy and democracy. Yet the revolution's heirs were soon engaged in a protracted struggle over its legacy. Dissident thinkers, from within an Islamic framework, sought a rights-based political order that could accept dissent, tolerance, pluralism, women's rights and civil liberties. Their ideas led directly to the presidency of Mohammad Khatami and, despite their political failure, they did leave a permanent legacy by demystifying Iranian religious politics, and condemning the use of the Shariah to justify autocratic rule. This book tells the story of the reformist movement through the world of Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari. An active supporter of the revolution who became one of the most outspoken critics of theocracy, Eshkevari developed ideas of 'Islamic democratic government', which have attracted considerable attention in Iran and elsewhere. In presenting a selection of Eshkevari's writings, this book reveals the intellectual and political trajectory of a Muslim thinker and his attempts to reconcile Islam with reform and democracy. As such it makes a highly original contribution to our understanding of the difficult social and political issues confronting the Islamic world today.

The first part of this book examines domestic developments and their influence on Iran's policy and posture. The second explores Iran's regional ambitions and politics.

How Iran—and the world around it—have changed in the four decades since a revolutionary theocracy took power Iran's 1979 revolution is one of the most important events of the late twentieth century. The overthrow of the Western-leaning Shah and the emergence of a unique religious government reshaped Iran, dramatically shifted the balance of power in the Middle East and generated serious challenges to the global geopolitical order—challenges that continue to this day. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that same year and the ensuing hostage crisis resulted in an acrimonious breach between America and Iran that remains unresolved to this day. The revolution also precipitated a calamitous war between Iran and Iraq and an expansion of the U.S. military's role in maintaining security in and around the Persian Gulf. Forty years after the revolution, more than two dozen experts look back on the rise of the Islamic Republic and explore what the startling events of 1979 continue to mean for the volatile Middle East as well as the rest of the world. The authors explore the events of the revolution itself; whether its promises have been kept or broken; the impact of clerical rule on ordinary Iranians, especially women; the continuing antagonism with the United States; and the repercussions not only for Iran's immediate neighborhood but also for the broader Middle East. Complete with a helpful timeline and suggestions for further reading, this book helps put the Iranian revolution in historical and geopolitical perspective, both for experts who have long studied the Middle East and for curious readers interested in fallout from the intense turmoil of four decades ago.

The post-Khomenei era has profoundly changed the socio-political landscape of Iran. Since 1989, the internal dynamics of change in Iran, rooted in a panoply of socioeconomic, cultural, institutional, demographic, and behavioral factors, have led to a noticeable transition in both societal and governmental structures of power, as well as the way in which many Iranians have come to deal with the changing conditions of their society. This is all exacerbated by the global trend of communication and information expansion, as Iran has increasingly become the site of the burgeoning demands for women's rights, individual freedoms, and festering tensions and conflicts over cultural politics. These realities, among other things, have rendered Iran a country of unprecedented-and at time paradoxical-changes. This book explains how and why.