Iran's Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State Ali Mirsepassi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Pp. 242. $99.99 hardcover, $29.99 paper. ISBN: 9781108725323

Abstract

The Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 is often characterized by scholars as a sudden and violent break, the moment when Iran’s political development took an abrupt turn in a new and revolutionary direction, away from the Westernized modernism of the Pahlavi era toward Khomeini’s brand of political Islamism and vilāyat-i faqīh, or “Guardianship of the Jurist,” the system of government adopted by Iran in the wake of the revolution. In Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, Ali Mirsepassi argues that this break was not quite as sudden as we might believe, and that the apparent raison d’être of the shah’s regime was thoroughly, and, in many cases, deliberately, undermined by Pahlavi elites who embraced forms and discourses of gharbzadegi, or “Westoxification,” and antimodernism in the years prior to the Islamic Revolution. Mirsepassi illustrates how a “cultural and discursive shift in Iranian political culture” occurred over the course of the 1960s and 1970s (p. 4). This “Quiet Revolution” was grounded in Heideggerian anxieties surrounding Iran’s encounter with modernity. It drew from distinct currents of Iranian social and political thought, as well as the general antimodernism spreading through Western intellectual circles. Versions of gharbzadegi were adopted by Pahlavi elites, and even the shah himself, to delegitimize liberalism and undermine the regime’s opponents on the Left and among moderates. Although some of the elites Mirsepassi examines seem to have held sincere doubts regarding modernity’s viability, he generally characterizes their efforts in cynical terms, as attempts “to foster national hegemony for one’s own cause and destroy opposing nationmaking ventures” (p. 4). Embracing mysticism and a vision of national identity grounded in pastoral mythology was, as Mirsepassi sees it, an expression of insecurity and a massive gamble by a regime that lacked a fundamental source of legitimacy. This gamble ended in failure and the “violent annihilation” of both the Pahlavi state and its governing elite (p. 5). Mirsepassi structures his book as a series of thematic chapters, often organized around a specific primary source that speaks to a distinct feature of Iran’s Quiet Revolution. Chapter 2, for example, examines Bonyad Monthly, a journal published in 1977–78 with support from Ashraf Pahlavi, the shah’s sister, that was outwardly antimodern and engaged with gharbzadegi. Chapter 3 turns the focus to Ehsan Naraghi, a high-living member of the Pahlavi elite with ties to Queen Farah, whose published work flirted with antimodernism. The chief inspiration for the rise of antimodernism in the late Pahlavi period was the work of Ahmad Fardid, an early Pahlavi era intellectual and the subject of a separate monograph by Mirsepassi. It was Fardid who first formulated gharbzadegi, characterizing it as a cultural, and even spiritual, phenomenon. This contrasted with Jamal Al-e Ahmad’s more famous formulation from the 1960s, which was directed in political terms at the shah’s statebuilding project. When expressed by Pahlavi elites, Westoxification referred to an attack on Iran’s national soul. The antidote to such contamination was a revival of Iran’s ancient past, the resuscitation of Iranian nationhood tied to Iran’s imagined pastoral antiquity. Mirsepassi illustrates an irony: elites educated in the West and tied explicitly to the Pahlavi regime’s programs of land reform, industrialization, and urbanization opined for an agrarian Iran that never existed in the first place.