Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
38
result(s) for
"Iran Politics and government 1979-1997"
Sort by:
Islamic law and governance in contemporary Iran
The current rise of Islamism throughout the Muslim world, Islamists' demand for the establishment of Islamic states, and their destabilizing impact on regional and global orders have raised important questions about the origins of Islamism and the nature of an Islamic state.
eBook
Ghosts of Revolution
\"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . .\"
In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran.
Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred.
At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic \"Islamic State,\" Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all.
\"The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom.\"
eBook
Days of revolution : political unrest in an Iranian village
Outside of Shiraz in the Fars Province of southwestern Iran lies \"Aliabad.\" Mary Hegland arrived in this then-small agricultural village of several thousand people in the summer of 1978, unaware of the momentous changes that would sweep this town and this country in the months ahead. She became the only American researcher to witness the Islamic Revolution firsthand over her eighteen-month stay. Days of Revolution offers an insider's view of how regular people were drawn into, experienced, and influenced the 1979 Revolution and its aftermath.
Conventional wisdom assumes Shi'a religious ideology fueled the revolutionary movement. But Hegland counters that the Revolution spread through much more pragmatic concerns: growing inequality, lack of development and employment opportunities, government corruption. Local expectations of leaders and the political process—expectations developed from their experience with traditional kinship-based factions—guided local villagers' attitudes and decision-making, and they often adopted the religious justifications for Revolution only after joining the uprising. Sharing stories of conflict and revolution alongside in-depth interviews, the book sheds new light on this critical historical moment.
Returning to Aliabad decades later, Days of Revolution closes with a view of the village and revolution thirty years on. Over the course of several visits between 2003 and 2008, Mary Hegland investigates the lasting effects of the Revolution on the local political factions and in individual lives. As Iran remains front-page news, this intimate look at the country's recent history and its people has never been more timely or critical for understanding the critical interplay of local and global politics in Iran.
eBook
After Khomeini : Iran under his successors
Iran has not ceased to surprise the world since the American ambassador's famous \"thinking the unthinkable\" 1978 cable about the imminent fall of the Shah and the coming of Islamic revolution. The apparent sequence of moderate government of President Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-97) and democratic reform under President Khatami (1997-2005) was followed by the return of the hardliners and revolutionary populism coupled with an aggressive foreign policy, including a nuclear program. Iran's political regime has proved remarkably resilient through all these changes, despite the disaffection of the younger half of the population, and become all the stronger, partly as a result of the Bush administration's ill-advised bluff about regime change. The death of Imam Khomeini as its charismatic leader in 1989 did not mean the end of the Islamic revolution, but only the beginning of a prolonged struggle among the children of the revolution over Khomeini's heritage. The integrative social revolution begun in 1979 has continued quietly, while the raucous/noisy struggle to define, structure and control the new Islamic political order set up by Khomeini among different factions of his followers has produced a unique political regime which defies understanding. Arjomand draws on the sociology of revolution to offer a general explanation of political developments in Iran in the last two decades while seeking to understand its unique features in terms of constitutional politics of the creation of the post-revolutionary order. Not only Iran's domestic politics but also its foreign policy are shown to follow a pattern typical of the great revolutions. Surprising as it may seem, the parameters for Iran's constitutional politics in the last two decades are those set by Khomeini's mixture of theocratic, republican and populist elements in the ideology of the Islamic revolution.
eBook
Guardians of the Revolution
For over a quarter century, Iran has been one of America’s chief nemeses. Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah in 1979, the relationship between the two nations has been antagonistic: revolutionary guards chanting against the Great Satan, Bush fulminating against the Axis of Evil, Iranian support for Hezbollah, and President Ahmadinejad blaming the U.S. for the world’s ills. The unending war of words suggests an intractable divide between Iran and the West, one that may very well lead to a shooting war in the near future. But as Ray Takeyh shows in this accessible and authoritative history of Iran’s relations with the world since the revolution, behind the famous personalities and extremist slogans is a nation that is far more pragmatic—and complex—than many in the West have been led to believe. Takeyh explodes many of our simplistic myths of Iran as an intransigently Islamist foe of the West. Tracing the course of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution, Takeyh identifies four distinct periods: the revolutionary era of the 1980s, the tempered gradualism following the death of Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1989, the “reformist” period from 1997-2005 under President Khatami, and the shift toward confrontation and radicalism since the election of President Ahmadinejad in 2005. Takeyh shows that three powerful forces—Islamism, pragmatism, and great power pretensions—have competed in each of these periods, and that Iran’s often paradoxical policies are in reality a series of compromises between the hardliners and the moderates, often with wild oscillations between pragmatism and ideological dogmatism. The U.S.’s task, Takeyh argues, is to find strategies that address Iran’s objectionable behavior without demonizing this key player in an increasingly vital and volatile region. With its clear-sighted grasp of both nuance and historical sweep, Guardians of the Revolution will stand as the standard work on this controversial—and central—actor in world politics for years to come.
eBook