The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran - Hardcover

Kurzman, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067401328X ISBN 13: 9780674013285

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2004

Synopsis

The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a top-secret CIA analysis issued in October 1978. One hundred days later the shah--despite his massive military, fearsome security police, and superpower support was overthrown by a popular and largely peaceful revolution. But the CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Charles Kurzman reveals in this penetrating work; Iranians themselves, except for a tiny minority, considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred. Revisiting the circumstances surrounding the fall of the shah, Kurzman offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general.

As one Iranian recalls, "The future was up in the air." Through interviews and eyewitness accounts, declassified security documents and underground pamphlets, Kurzman documents the overwhelming sense of confusion that gripped pre-revolutionary Iran, and that characterizes major protest movements. His book provides a striking picture of the chaotic conditions under which Iranians acted, participating in protest only when they expected others to do so too, the process approaching critical mass in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Only when large numbers of Iranians began to "think the unthinkable," in the words of the U.S. ambassador, did revolutionary expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A corrective to 20-20 hindsight, this book reveals shortcomings of analyses that make the Iranian revolution or any major protest movement seem inevitable in retrospect.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Kurzman is Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

When Elias Canetti, the Nobel-prize winning theorist, spoke of a people’s "propensity to incendiarism," he had in mind one of the most dangerous traits of mass gatherings: their potential for unpredictable combustibility. Iran’s Islamic revolution, like many other uprisings, was a consummate instance of this, Kurzman argues, and he continues in Canetti’s tradition by using the Shah’s overthrow to engage in his own meditation on crowds and power. Kurzman’s investigation propelled him to the Islamic republic, where he conducted countless interviews, in an attempt to chart the eddies and undercurrents of one of the world’s most complex and sudden social upheavals. Along the way, he takes a critical tour of canonical political and sociological theory. The result is a thought-provoking combination of journalism and analysis that offers an atypical juxtaposition of voices: shopkeepers, lawyers and high school students share their views on what happened, as do academics and policymakers. Perhaps the most intriguing voice is Kurzman’s. His interviews and reading lead him to conclude that any historical approach that seeks to restore "20-20 hindsight" to Iran’s revolutionary movement is mistaken; "explanations in general," he decides, are problematic. Instead, he says, one should embrace history in all its specificity, and accept that anomalous behavior and confusion are norms that cannot be neatly decoded. "I propose anti-explanation," he says, coining a term that "means abandoning the project of retroactive prediction in favor of reconstructing the lived experience of the moment." Unquestionably, some readers may feel cheated by this intellectual back flip, especially since this is, unavoidably, an explanation in its own right.
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When the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, it was something of a surprise to the CIA and the Carter administration, who as recently as October 1978 saw only a strong ruler and inconsequential protests; legacy of this intelligence failure has plagued the state department ever since. What if, however, revolutions like that which put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power were unpredictable? What if even the best intelligence misses the scent of possible uprising because even the people uprising don't know uprising is possible until they start doing it? Sociologist Kurzman addresses five familiar sets of explanations about why the Iranian revolution took place--political, organizational, cultural, economic, and military arguments--and finds each valuable but flawed, offering instead an "anti-explanation" that foregrounds anomaly and characterizes the revolutionary moment as confusing, unstable, and as unpredictable for participants as it is for outside observers. Despite this, optimism is in order; there is, after all, exciting potential in moments in which the unthinkable suddenly becomes thinkable. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067401328X
• ISBN 13: 9780674013285
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304