If you’ve ever wondered why Iran sometimes is, sometimes isn’t considered part of Asia, this episode has the answer. Because of the revolution in Iran, I really wanted to talk to a woman from the Iranian American diaspora and had the privilege of talking to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality studies professor, Dr. Manijeh Moradian. Manijeh talks about how the U.S. – Iran relationship evolved over decades from the ‘50s to the ‘79 revolution, and beyond. She also shares her thoughts on Western involvement and media coverage of the current feminist Iranian revolution, and what the Iranian people really want.
GUEST BIO
Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and on the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.
DEFINITIONS
- Coup d’état, a.k.a coup, is an illegal and overt attempt by the military or other government elites to unseat the incumbent leader.
- Western hegemony: domination of the west over other countries through economic, political and military power. The
- While colonialism used direct military control or hegemony to control or influence a colony, neocolonialism uses economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former colonies or
- Shah:the leading figure (or king) of an Iranian monarchy
- Hijab: headcovering worn by Muslim women
MENTIONED
- This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, by Manijeh Moradian (*)
- Ghosts of Revolution, by Shahla Talebi (*)
- Fesenjan recipe
- Feminists for Jina
(*) These are affiliate links, meaning the host will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you choose to click the link and make a purchase. This is a free way to support the show if you plan on getting those books anyway!
TAKEAWAYS
- Many of the stereotypes we know are more recent than we think and they happened quickly, seemingly overnight.
- Pitting minorities against each other is a common way for oppressors to keep the status quo. Iran distanced itself from Asia to avoid being subjugated by Europe.
- Instead of always working through our governments, we can think of ways to create solidarity between our local grassroots movements across borders.
- Asian Americans are Americans too, and our marketability should not be restricted to the Asian diaspora, but rather America at large.
- Women’s liberation does not mean assimilating into western culture.
CONTACT
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Host: Lazou
Additional reading materials
Video with captions
Transcript
Lazou: Our guest today is Manijeh Moradian. She is assistant professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies at Columbia University’s Barnard College. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December, 2022.
She has published widely including in American Quarterly Journal of Asian American Studies Scholar and Feminist Online and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, and on the editorial board of Jadaliyya Iran page. Thank you so much for being with us, Manijeh.
Manijeh: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:39] Growing up
Lazou: So let’s start from the beginning. Where’d you grow up and what was that experience like as an Asian American?
Manijeh: I grew up in Washington, D.C., I was born in 1975. It was an interesting time because it was before the Iranian revolution that happened in 1979. So I caught the tail end of a diasporic Iranian community that was organized around left-wing politics and opposition to U.S. support for the Shah of Iran, who was the king or dictator at that time. For those first few years of life my father was around that movement wrote a book about, the Iranian Students Association, and some of the left-wing groups operating within that broader formation. And so I have very faint early memories of dinner parties and meetings and lots of Iranians being around and big Iranian New Year celebrations. And then it all vanished. My impression as a child was just that all those people and parties and meetings just disappeared. It took me many years to even remember that we had been part of that community because When the Iranian revolution happened in 1979 and resulted in an Islamist theocratic government that really turned on the left and persecuted the left, you know, it really shattered the left wing movements in Iran and in diaspora largely.
Um, then we had of course, the taking of hostages in Tehran at the US Embassy, which triggered the hostage crisis, which was a watershed moment that really changed U.S.- Iran relations forever. And ushered in the era we’ve been living in for the last 43 years in which Iran is really demonized and stigmatized and considered a massive existential threat to western democracy.
And then everything changed in terms of what it felt like to be Iranian in the US and what that meant for that community and for my father and for me. So I also have that experience of most of my childhood being during a time in which there was tremendous hostility towards Iran and Iranians. And figuring out how to navigate my way through that as a young person was definitely challenging.
Lazou: yeah, so why did that disappear? Did people not come together because the left was being persecuted
Manijeh: it’s a really good question. So some people went back to Iran to participate in the revolution because that was what they had been hoping for. And, and some of them sadly were executed by the new government. Many people did not make it out of that experience alive.
Others were arrested but did manage to get out. Others, were smuggled out and ended up in other countries separated from their families. I mean, you know, people really went through huge amounts of loss, trauma, displacement and then those who ended up back in the US really could never go back. They lost Iran forever. At least that’s how it felt at the time. And for many it was true. They still can’t go back. So there was so much depression, heartbreak, grief that the revolution had turned against many of its most ardent supporters.
And I think people really had a kind of profound crisis to really think through what had they supported, what had they done, what had they believed in? What was it all for? How did they end up in this situation where so many of their friends were know, killed and, they were reeling from the trauma, the displacement the bloodshed, just the shock of all of it, of what had happened. No one really expected Iran to become an Islamic republic.
It was not what the left was hoping for or imagining. So people felt really blindsided and the unity of the movement in diaspora had been around ending the reign of the Shah. The Shah was gone, so there was no more unity. People went in different directions.
They took different positions. They struggled to survive. So the movement as it was constituted as a kind of anti Shah leftist opposition, its raison d’etre was gone and people were really picking up the pieces of their lives and trying to figure out how to make a life in exile.
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: Yeah.
[00:04:43] 79 revolution – simplified narrative, erasure of diverse opinions
Lazou: how did that happen? Because the people who were organizing here and even there were looking to embrace a more leftist approach, right? How did that backfire and become a theocracy?
Manijeh: Yeah, it’s such a huge question. Volumes have been written by historians and anthropologists, and political scientists trying to answer that very question. It’s obviously super complicated. There isn’t like one thing that happened, but what I can share is that the left, the kind of socialist marxist maoist left in Iran and in diaspora was a minority in relation to the majority of the Iranian people.
So one of the most remarkable things about the Iranian revolution is that a huge percentage of the population actively participated. Most revolutions, you, you don’t have that high a number of people actively participating, even if they support it but this Iranian revolution really had millions of people in the streets and the ideas that were mobilizing those millions were not the Marxist left. Okay. The Marxist left had a base, like on campuses, more among like, Educated classes. Don’t forget the Shah was running a very harsh police state, so it’s not like they could organize openly and go off and recruit workers at the factories, although they tried in some ways.
They definitely tried. But the left was marginalized because of the repression and the group that had the most institutional power and kind of cultural currency were the clerics, and there was a section of clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini who really decisively turned against the Shah as early as, the 1960s. Very briefly the Shah was reinstalled by a CIA- backed coup in 1953 and really became, at least in the eyes of many people in Iran, religious, and the leftist, the Shah really became a kind of puppet of the US or like agent of western domination in Iran.
So many people turned against the Shah. The majority of Iranians are Shiite followers of Shia Islam. And the main ideological current of dissent was a kind of Shiite liberation theology. So if listeners might be familiar with liberation theology in its Catholic iteration in Latin America as a kind of anti-colonial religious force right? In Iran, we have a kind of amalgam of anti-colonial thought with Shiism that, again, people have written a lot about this, but one of the major lay thinkers was someone called Ali Shariati, and he borrowed and pulled from anti-colonial ideas from like Frantz Fanon and other more left-wing ideas and fused it with religious tenets of Shiism create a new kind of Shiism that was a revolutionary ideology that was about the most oppressed you know liberating themselves. And you can see echoes of this in many religious faiths, you know?
That the meek shall inherit the earth, the last shall be first and all these things, right? And so it was a liberation kind of religious idiom. And that’s actually what was most compatible with like how most Iranians felt who were believers, who believed in Islam, and who were upset about Western domination over their country and the kind of top down forms of modernization that the Shah was enforcing that were considered these violent authoritarian attacks on religious values and culture. So that’s what produced the backlash. It was actually a backlash, not so much against the left, which never really had that much power, but it was a backlash against this western backed authoritarian regime.
That was as I said, imposing all sorts of things onto people. All sorts of things like for example, one of the biggest sites of backlash was just the way that the Shah would endorse western consumer culture. The way that there was a top-down imposition of western forms of dress culture that were considered to go against Islamic values right.
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: whether it was cabarets or men and women mixing or miniskirts or Right. There were many markers of this that that really did produce a backlash.
[00:08:47] Iranian stereotypes
Lazou: yeah. So going back to your experience, you know, on this podcast we like to challenge the stereotypes that we face cuz we all have them and they’re all slightly different, but, what are some of the stereotypes that you’ve faced?
Manijeh: Yeah I think for Iranians, certainly after 1979, after Revolution and hostage crisis.
And don’t forget, the Iranian Revolution was a revolution against US imperialism in Iran. So it was very anti-American in its slogans and, whole thing.
And then there was the hostage crisis.
So the stereotypes about Iranians, there are many, but I think the most obvious ones are we’re terrorists, we are Muslim extremists. That, you know, Iranian men must all be horrible misogynists who oppress the women that Iranian women are oppressed by their culture and by their religion and by the men in their lives.
And that the revolution kind of sent Iran backwards in time.
And so yeah, extremists, violent, threatening anti-American, suspect, suspected to be traitors, suspected to be spies. So I think those are the, those are the biggest ones.
And in terms of the perpetual foreigner thing, absolutely. I think, I like the way you said it, that we all have our own kind of version of this. It, it has a particular flavor for each group, given its historical specificity. My entire life I’ve been asked, where are you from?
And if I say Washington, DC it’s no. Where are you really from? And yeah, so this idea that you can’t be both Asian and American, or both Iranian and American, and it’s especially ironic in my case because I didn’t get a chance to mention this, but my mother is actually American, not Iranian.
My father is an immigrant from Iran who came here on a student visa in 1960. My mother is born and raised in the US and is a white identified Ashkenazi Jewish, middle class woman who grew up in post-war America. so having to continually answer that where you’re from question.
And then when you say the word Iran, most Americans, and not only white Americans, I have to say, it immediately triggers like, danger, scary, Muslim extremists, women’s oppression, the veil. It just, it’s like this cascade of images that fills people’s minds and they make up a lot of assumptions about me.
I’m actually not from a Muslim family. My Iranian family are Zoroastrians, which was we could call it the indigenous religion of Iran, or it’s the religion that dominated before Islam came in the seventh century. And Zoroastrians are a tiny minority of the population. So we’re a very small group.
It is an oppressed minority within Iran. And my mother’s Jewish, so I’m, I’m always having to explain, oh yes, I’m Iranian, but I’m not Muslim. I’m Jewish, but I’m not an Iranian Jew. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, but I’m not white. And I’m, and it’s just this constant slipping outside of the categories and not really fitting anywhere that I think was really hard.
It was hard to feel legible as a young person. I felt like I always had to lop off one part or several parts of myself because it was just too complicated for people to get. So yeah, a lot of that,
Lazou: Yeah, I can relate to that because I’m, I’m an immigrant to America, and before that I was in Canada, but I grew up in Mauritius. So there I had no identity issue because everybody we were all Mauritian. But here, people ask me, where are you from? I’m like how far back are we going?
I’m technically African. And then that breaks their brain.
Manijeh: No, absolutely. I always like to return the question,
Lazou: I always like to ask
Manijeh: and where are you from? And if you ask that to a white person, they’re often a little bit surprised at first, but then they actually have to think about where their people came from, right?
And to sort of denaturalize the idea that they’re the true Americans, or they’re the ones who belong here. And we are the ones who, right? It’s like, where did your people come from, and I like to do that. Another strategy I’ve had as an adult is to live among immigrants where everybody’s from somewhere else.
And so there’s no stigma attached to the word. In fact, when people ask it they’re seeking a site of identification because like, you kinda look like them. And so they’re curious if there’s something in common. It’s more about connection and not about othering. So I’ve also really appreciated that question, “where are you from?” can have really different meanings and connotations depending on who’s asking.
[00:12:55] learning the language
Lazou: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve especially noticed that with older Asian ladies who will sometimes come up to me and they’ll ask me where I’m from, and I know that’s a very different context that they’re asking from. And then they’re usually disappointed that I can’t speak Chinese.
Manijeh: Right, right, And that and actually, whenever I used to meet Iranians growing up, and they would be, they would start speaking Farsi to me, Persian. And I didn’t speak any, my mom’s American, my dad didn’t teach me. I grew up here. And they would always be so disappointed with me. And that actually became very irritating to me because I didn’t choose where I was born.
I didn’t choose who my parents are. And yet this is considered a kind of lack that makes me somehow less than, and not really Iranian, and is a judgment, right? As if I chose not to learn the language. Right. I was so irritated by that reaction from Iranians that I decided to buy a one-way ticket, move to Iran, and just learn the damn language because I was so fed up with that.
And I also wanted to sort of address the impacts of assimilation and racism. And, it occurred to me, I was already in my late twenties that, I could learn this language. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible. I could actually right some of these wrongs. The loss of language- why is this an inevitable thing that I have to accept as my lot in life when I didn’t choose it at all. I did work very hard to learn Persian, at least kitchen Persian, as we might say. Enough to be able to be in Iran and live there for chunks of time.
I went back and forth over many years and build relationships with my cousins and really try to have some adult connection to the real living dynamic space instead of it just being something from my father’s memories.
Lazou: Yeah. That’s awesome that you actually went and learned the language and lived there for a bit. That’s cool.
Manijeh: Yeah.
Lazou: What led you to specializing in women’s gender and sexuality studies?
Manijeh: It was a circuitous journey. So I spent some time in Iran. I was going back and forth and I was actually, when I first went, it was 2004, I think it was just before blogs were like exploding as a thing. So I didn’t know about blogs, so I was writing these emails to like a whole group of friends back home because this was such a big trip for me.
I was meeting my family for the first time. I was learning the language. I It was my first time in the country, so I was documenting all these experiences and writing these emails, and somebody suggested, oh, this is really great stuff. You should do an mfa, you should write a memoir.
And so I, I, I came back and I did an MFA in creative nonfiction and I was writing this whole kind of transnational family story. And I was adjuncting teaching in the creative writing program at Hunter College, where I did my mfa. I realized two things. One, that I really liked teaching college and that I could not make a living as an adjunct.
And two, that the pressure on artists of all kinds, including literary to turn your art into a commodity in order to make a living. It puts you up against all of the stereotypes and racism of whatever industry you’re in, in my case, publishing. I had some really challenging experiences where even though my story was unlike anything else that had been written, I was getting responses from publishers, ” oh, we’ve already published our Middle East memoir”. Right, as if like everybody from the Middle East, which is a colonial term anyway, has the same experience, and so I was just up against this kind of racism, this tokenism. I decided, you know what, this is not a good plan for me. I like teaching college. I want to do more theoretical and scholarly work. So let me go do a PhD because it gives you the funding and the support and the community in order to do some kind of intellectual project about the Iranian diaspora. So I ended up doing my PhD in American studies at NYU where had the great fortune to work with professors who really deeply understood and practiced in their own scholarship that gender and sexuality shape the way that race and class and colonization and capitalism are experienced. That they’re not side issues or secondary, but that we had to think, as we say, intersectionally, right? I love how that word has broken out of the academy and travels far and wide now. But, you know, we had to think about how race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, how all of these things intersect, overlap, co-constitute each other.
And so that any kind of intellectual project really had to come with that sensibility, that kind of a feminist queer, really capacious way of thinking about oppression and also liberation. So I was really in a wonderful intellectual community that encouraged me to really think about gender and sexuality as I began this project, this historical research into the Iranian diaspora before 1979, and in particular the anti Shah student movement that I write about in the book.
And so because I had been using third world feminist frameworks, post-colonial and transnational feminist frameworks and queer diasporic approaches to my topic, I was positioned to apply for jobs in many kinds of programs including women’s gender and sexuality studies where I was very happy to be able to join the faculty at, at Barnard in Columbia.
So that’s how I ended up there.
[00:18:04] Iranian diaspora before and after 1979
Lazou: That’s awesome. So your book focuses on the Iran diaspora that came before the 1979 revolution. How do you think the priest 79 and post 79 diasporas defer in their attitudes towards both the US and Iran?
Manijeh: Yeah, it’s pretty stark. one of the things about our diaspora is that it’s a very extreme, almost like whiplash switch that happens. After the CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953, that put the Shah back as a key US ally, many, many foreign students started to come to the US and other places, Canada, Western Europe, other places too, to get their education.
And as I theorize and describe in the book, they were welcomed. They weren’t considered a threatening, menacing other. This was a moment of US Cold War empire, where they were really interested in trying to assimilate different third world populations through their western sphere of influence to try to keep the communists at bay.
And where these foreign students from many Allied third world countries were welcomed here. And the idea was they would get their Western education, absorb the technical professional skills needed to go back home and modernize their economy into a kind of capitalist model that was subordinated to US interests, right?
But that they would also absorb a pro-US worldview that they would bring back home. So this was a key strategy in the Cold War, in the war against communism. So these foreign students, when they came, they were welcomed. They were not systematically discriminated against. And they weren’t marginalized,
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: They were university students. They had tremendous privilege to get this education. And the students who I focus on are the ones who were profoundly alienated by the role that they were supposed to play in you know, managing Iran as a neo colony of the US.
And they didn’t wanna do that because they had had experiences in Iran with repression, with seeing the impacts of the Shah’s authoritarianism in different ways. And they just couldn’t align themselves. Like they just, they could not feel good and happy about this special friendship between the US and Iran.
In fact, they were really horrified that the US claimed to be democratic and claimed to be spreading peace and democracy. But in fact was supporting a dictator who was torturing dissidents and censoring and, really running a police state, that was supported with us funding really.
The point is that before 79, it was a very pro US environment. And so I study the students who were like the outliers, right? Who didn’t go along with that. Post 79, we have this extreme switch where Iran becomes enemy number one for the US right?
And Iran is demonized and Iranians are really treated very badly here. There are death threats and hate crimes and violence, and there are efforts at mass deportations, surveillance. It’s so bad that many people don’t even wanna say they’re Iranian. They say they’re Italian or they change their names or they, so we just went from like one extreme to the other really.
[00:20:57] US neo colonialism
Lazou: Yeah, one thing that I thought was very interesting in your book was how you talked about the c i A backed coup in 53 was a template for this neocolonialism that the US was participating in. I’d love for you to unpack that a little bit. Like how was that a template and what other countries was that replicated in?
Manijeh: Sure. So one of the things that’s really important, I think, for us to understand about US imperialism or global expansion and the different strategies that the US has used to exert its domination influence is that it has quite a playbook. It has quite a range of tools. So sometimes the US directly invades, occupies, overthrows a government, takes over. We can look at the Philippines, we can look at obviously Vietnam, I’m skipping ahead to the Cold War era. So the US has a track record of direct military invasion, going to war, invading, occupying, installing whatever government they want.
But they also use other kinds of tactics, right? And so especially during the Cold War there was a kind of diversity of tactics, right? Where they both used direct military intervention in Southeast Asia, for example. But they also used a whole series of covert tactics to exert their influence.
And the main goal was to prevent so-called communism right from spreading.
The US government would label any liberation movement.
Any movement that challenged Western domination, any movement that wanted the people of the society to have control over their own resources, right?
To have some kind of self-determination, independence, even if they weren’t really communist, the US would label them communist and then that would justify overthrowing them, whether directly or covertly. In, I think it’s in 1952 that the US engineers a coup in Guatemala, 1953, Iran again in Guatemala, they do it again.
They do it in the Congo. Helping to organize the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. They do it in country after country and in particular all over Latin America. The most famous example would be Chile in 1973 with the overthrow of the Allende Socialist government. So some of these governments were socialists or social democratic, or even avowedly communist, but many of them were just, like in Iran, in 1953, the person who they overthrew was not a communist. His name was Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq. He was actually from the aristocracy. He was a western trained lawyer. He was quite elite in many ways. But what he strongly believed in was that the British, who had been one of the major colonial powers in Iran, should not have control over Iran’s major resource, which was oil.
He wanted to nationalize the oil and make this a resource controlled by Iranian people, that the proceeds of this resource could go to actually Iranian people building up a society. He believed in democracy. But the US labeled him a communist and justified his overthrow. So this was really, these kutas were about eliminating any threat to Western hegemony, any threat to Western capitalism as the dominant economic and political mode that required, of course, a constant extraction of resources and labor from what we used to call the third world and now we call the global south.
So anyone who challenged that, regardless of their actual ideology, was considered a threat and they would figure out what was gonna be the most effective way to eliminate that threat. And so use of these covert CIA coups was extremely effective because they would use local actors on the ground, right?
They would stir up divisions, they would ally with conservative forces, and they would make it seem as if these were purely internal conflicts. And so nobody knew for many years, nobody knew the c i A was involved. These were actually secrets. And, the US disavowed all of this. And so it was a way for the US to maintain its image as spreading democracy and peace while carrying out these really violent coup d’etats and putting into power incredibly right wing governments that would unleash reigns of terror against peasants and workers and anyone who had been part of that alternative.
So, without having to taint its image, the US was actually supporting really right wing, anti-democratic forces all around the world, including in Iran.
[00:25:15] ISA cross pollination
Lazou: Yeah, so students came from many of those countries to study in the US and as you said, they were welcome. the goal was to have them assimilate and then bring that back. And at the same time you mentioned there were global anti-colonial movements those countries, and in the US as well. How were the domestic US movements influenced by the presence of these Arab, Iranian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Chilean students here?
Manijeh: Yeah, I think those connections are definitely understudied. There’s been more coming out about them, in the last decade or so, but the US social movements: student movements, the civil rights and black liberation movements, the anti-war movement, all of these movements they were profoundly influenced by decolonization revolutions and mass movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
So people did have a global outlook. For some groups it was very explicit. The Black Panther party, of course, was reading Mao and selling Mao’s little Red book everywhere, right? And really their whole concept of a kind of Marxist, anti-racist, cultural revolution, you know, what they were trying for was deeply inspired by their understanding of what was happening in China, right?
Or if we think about the way that the anti-war movement goes from a more liberal peace movement to having sections of it that really are in solidarity with the Vietnamese fighting for socialist revolution and self-determination. I think the Iranians were part of that.
So many of the people I interviewed um, they first got here as foreign students they were just surprised. Most Americans didn’t know where Iran was and nobody knew the CIA had overthrown the government like nobody knew about Mosaddeq’s democratic era and what nobody knew anything about it.
So these students really play the role of educating the Americans around them about Iranian history, about the desire for freedom for democracy. That Iran wasn’t just some place with no history or culture, you know, that it wasn’t stuck in time and real time was happening in the west and Iran was just off in some other temporality right?
So they really tried to educate Americans and as the movements picked up, especially around the anti-war movement and the shift from more like nonviolent civil rights to more militant black power kinds of organizations and tactics, Iranians uh, student activists who were against the Shah, they were making the connections for people.
They were trying to explain the role the Shah played in helping to crush liberation movements in the region and also even beyond that. For example solidarity with the Palestinian movement was really key because the Shah and of course the Israeli government were the key US outposts in the region that were working to suppress Arab liberation, for example.
Or they helped to expose the Shah’s complicity with the white racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa selling oil to help support those governments, right? So they helped to chart the connections between Iran and other sites of struggle. And they also helped to win Americans over to the idea that the Shah was not the kind of person that the US should be supporting because the mainstream American media really glamorized the Shah.
They represented him as an enlightened monarch, modernizing his people, bringing progress. They really whitewashed what was going on there. So there was this effort to break through that media spin and win Americans over to support the cause, which was of course to demand that the US withdraw its backing of the Shah.
And I think that idea was that if the US stopped funding the Shah and sending him weapons and all sorts of aid, and giving him political cover, that he would become very weak because he was so unpopular at home. And then, Iranian people would be able to overthrow him.
[00:28:58] Is Iran part of Asia
Lazou: Yeah. I love that. The presence of these students really helped people here in America zoom out and see the big picture rather than whatever they were seeing on tv. That was a very curated version, what they were seeing. And we’ll talk a bit more about that in a bit. You know, you mentioned that the ISA’s (Iranian Students Association) contribution to the social movements in that era is not very well known outside of Iranian studies and not even in Asian or Afro-Asian studies.
When did Iran get carved out of that Asian narrative?
Manijeh: That is such a good question. I think the story really begins with European colonialism. And Iran is a strange situation because it wasn’t really directly colonized. Again, colonization has many modes, right many kinds of versions, right? It doesn’t all look the same.
Lazou: not the classic
Manijeh: right?
We have settler colonialism like in the United States. We have the kind of British colonization of India, which wasn’t exactly settler colonialism, but they directly ran India, right? So in Iran it was somewhat different. Beginning at the end of the 19th century you had incursions by the British, the French, the German, and what they would do was they would basically buy up entire industries.
They would try to control major aspects of Iranian resources industry, and also the government. I wanna make a long story short here, but the Qajar dynasty was very weak and so European countries took advantage of that. It was an early version of Neocolonialism, right? Like they would just control all these aspects of the economy the political decision making. And then when the Qajar Dynasty collapsed it was actually the British who picked Shah and launched a whole new dynasty for Iran.
They chose this officer Reza Pahlavi from the sort of Cossack brigades, this soldier who had been very successful in various military campaigns. And they made him king and launched this whole new dynasty. So, In reaction to European colonization, the Iranian kind of elite, the learned class, the upper class, and this new Shah, their strategy for resisting European domination was to say, oh no, we’re, we are not some backward savage, we’re actually just like you.
In fact, we are the true Aryans. Okay? And so they take this word, Arya, from these ancient Persian texts that is not a racial term and they basically use it to say that there’s this evidence that Iranians are really Aryan. So they literally adopt a sort of like racist discourse from Europe
Lazou: Hmm.
Manijeh: and they tried to use it to assert equality with Europe so that they won’t be subjugated by Europe.
So the kind of nationalist ideology of the modern Iranian state, especially under this British selected selected Shah, is this notion of an Aryan Persian identity. And it’s all about, oh, the Persian Empire from 3000 years ago. We were once a great empire. We are basically European. We just happened to be a little further east, and this sort of disavowing of connections to the surrounding countries and to Asia, because of course Asia was deemed the inferior other to Europe and the Iranian elite class did not wanna be in that category.
They wanted to differentiate themselves. So this Persian nationalist identity, it’s racist, it’s anti-Arab it’s anti-black. And what it does is it tries to exceptionalize Iran of that European colonial. Categorization so that Iran can avoid the fate of being dominated. And subjugated and looked down on.
So it’s out of those concerns about we don’t wanna be seen as inferior, that they kind of borrow this whole ideological racial apparatus from Europe, then becomes the ruling ideology
Lazou: Yeah,
Manijeh: for most of the 20th century.
Lazou: that’s fascinating. Go proximity to whiteness.
Manijeh: Exactly. And then of course in diaspora, that takes on a whole other set of meanings around model minority myth, proximity to whiteness, anti-blackness, preventing solidarities and affiliations between Iranians and other Asians, Arabs Latinx folks, indigenous folks. It’s a huge problem
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: within our diaspora because the weight of this Persian Imperial Arian ideology is still very strong.
And the last thing I’ll say about it is that because Iran has become an Islamic republic, ruled by the Shiite theocracy, clinging to the pre 79 versions of Iranian identity, Arian Persian empire stuff has also become a kind of resistance to the Islamic Republic and a kind of anti-Islamic Republic identity for the diaspora, which people don’t always realize, unfortunately, positions them in a really conservative way vis-a-vis racial politics in the United States.
[00:34:03] ISA – unwilling participants in western propaganda
Lazou: Yeah. So you interviewed a group of former ISA activists. What would you say was the common thread among all those stories?
Manijeh: And I should say that it was the US affiliate of the Confederation of Iranian students National Union, which had branches across Europe, Canada, and North America, and a few other places as well. But the Iranian Students Association was like the U.S. branch of this transnational student movement.
I think one common thread for the people who joined the Iranian Students Association.
Many of them had experiences in Iran directly or indirectly, where they encountered reality of repression, that the Shah wasn’t just some benevolent monarch modernizing society, right?
They either had friends or relatives who’d been tortured or they were part of some of the first demonstrations that began in the sixties against like. a bus fair hike. But then anytime people would protest, even the smallest thing the police would come out and beat people up and, and so, there was no tolerance for any dissent.
You know, there was no freedom of assembly, no freedom of speech, everything was censored, all the adults were scared. There was a n elaborate secret police organization with informants operating everywhere, even in the U.S., called SAVAK , which was actually trained by the US and set up after the coup.
So this atmosphere of fear and terror and torture, people had memories, they had somehow encountered that as young people in their formative years. And so they knew deep down like, something’s really wrong here. They weren’t gung-ho to like perpetuate the status quo, right?
They had these moments of emotional, or as I talk about in the book, like affective, almost like embodied moments of being alienated, being disaffected, being out of sync with the way you’re supposed to feel. And so that kind of affective dissonance, they, that traveled with them when they came to the United States and so many of these young people were really looking for an outlet.
They were looking for a way to express how hard it had been to grow up in a police state, and some of the repression and injustice that they had heard about or had even witnessed themselves. They were looking for a way to process that, explain it, and also something to do about that.
And that’s what the ISA (Iranian Students Association) provided it became this kind of vehicle as social movements are right for people to come together and collectively process their experiences of oppression, which at the time feel fragmented or individual or you don’t really know what’s happening, but when you come together with other people who share your feelings, you begin to unpack together, okay, why, what happened?
What was that all about? And then, learning the history of all about the coup and having more space in diaspora to have meetings, to read books, to have teach-ins, to have conversations with radical students from other backgrounds, to think about Iran in relation to these anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia and Latin America, right?
There was this opportunity for them to kind of situate themselves within this larger milieu of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. And so I think that was very appealing to people. I think the main thing they had in common was they found it very rewarding be part of this larger movement.
It gave people a sense of purpose, meaning, community, connection, and they really felt that they were part of changing the world. It was a very hopeful time for the folks I interviewed. Yeah.
[00:37:29] Current revolution
Lazou: So linking this all to present day Iran, there’s a current wave of political uprising. Is it different from what happened before it this current wave? Are you optimistic about the outcome?
Manijeh: It’s very different. Just to summarize briefly for your listeners: this past September, 2022, a young Kurdish Iranian woman was visiting the capital from Iranian Kurdistan, and she was detained by the morality police, which would routinely patrol the streets of cities and towns across the country, enforcing the mandatory Islamic dress code, which for women is extremely strict.
And she was detained for supposedly not wearing her hijab, her head covering correctly, and she was beaten by the police in custody and died. And this was the spark that just lit the bonfire of grievances, right? That had been accumulating for so very long. And I would say this uprising is very different, but it’s also the inheritor of 79.
So many of the mistakes, the unfulfilled promises, the betrayals, especially of women and ethnic minorities who do not have equal rights in the Islamic Republic, those tragic betrayals, those injustices that were put into law after the 79 revolution. This time around issues of gender and sexual equality, issues of ethnic minorities were no longer relegated to the sidelines.
They were no longer considered like, oh, that doesn’t matter. The most important thing is national unity against the United States. You know that’s how it went in 79 this time around, it was actually those second class citizens, you know, women groups like the Kurds and other ethnic groups, their grievances were the starting point, the catalyst, for what became a nationwide uprising. So I strongly believe that this current wave of mass resistance needs to be understood as a feminist uprising. Because starting point and the core of it really began with, opposition to mandatory hijab, opposition, not to Islam per se, or hijab per se, but to the idea that the state, with the threat and use of violence, should enforce upon you what you wear as a woman, what your beliefs are and, try to regulate and control every aspect of your body and your life under threat of violence. This is what people are resisting. And this is profoundly feminist, right? The idea of the, the body as a site of political battles and contestation the body as a site of liberation, the body as a site of knowledge, of accumulated wisdom about different forms of regulation, about different forms of structural oppression, right?
So this is a profoundly feminist uprising. Which also indicates that many people, whether they call themselves feminists or not, understand that the oppression of women has to go in order for the whole regime to collapse. And really, this is what people want. People want a different kind of society, a different kind of government.
They don’t want a religious government, and they want everyone to have equal rights. So the movement continues. There was just a whole round of strikes around mayday. But there’s been massive repression. Sadly hundreds of people have been shot and killed. There have been some official executions of prisoners and thousands of people arrested.
And very tragically a lot of horrific torture of young people and dissidents. And really just tragic loss of life. So this state of affairs of course you don’t win people over through mass violence.
Right.
The government doesn’t win any of its credibility back.
Instead they face a huge economic crisis and a huge political crisis and all they have to respond with is violence, right? And so the determination to resist continues in people’s everyday lives. And I would like to be optimistic in the sense that I think it’s hard for a government to survive on repression alone.
I think that The vast majority of Iranian people are done with this government.
They’re totally done. And I think from where I sit I want to be hopeful that historically, even very entrenched, very brutal regimes have fallen. We know it’s possible. And I just hope that the Iranian people are allowed the space and time to do that without any foreign intervention.
[00:41:41] Why we should look beyond western intervention
Lazou: That was my next question. What do you think should the West’s role be in this revolution? And if they were to play any supporting role at all, what would that look like?
Manijeh: It’s a super complicated question. And the Iranian diaspora is like massively polarized around this. Probably the majority opinion among the Iranian diaspora is pro, some kind of western, intervention, not necessarily military, although some people support that.
But, but you know, that people feel like the US government has a role to play. They should be sanctioning Iranian officials and their children who are living abroad on Iranian taxpayers money. They should be sanctioning Iran around human rights record. They should be helping the people by making loopholes in some of the sanctions to allow more access to the internet and other kinds of things to help people communicate.
So there’s a lot of focus on you know, how, how western governments can pressure Iran and help the people and, I’m really… I struggle with this to be honest, because I feel like the US government has a really pretty clear track record. If we just look on either side of Iran’s borders and we see, US invasion occupation of Afghanistan for 20 years, that brought so much death and destruction and violence and led to a resurgence of the Taliban and didn’t save or liberate anybody, right?
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: It was like a complete disaster. And then we look on the other side of Iraq and we look at, decades of US rounds, of us multiple invasions years of sanctions, another invasion occupation that leads to what? It leads to massive sectarian violence. The rise of ISIS. It’s hard to find an example.
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: Anywhere really in the world where US intervention has really led to some kind of democracy or justice. So I struggle with that. And the last thing I’ll say is that because the Islamic Republic, one of its ideological pillars is anti imperialism or anti-Americanism. Anytime the US or western government are seen to be helping the protestors, the government in Iran uses that to justify a crackdown. They say, this foreign intervention. Even if it’s not, they use that excuse anyway, right? They don’t even need real evidence. They’ll just, they just say that anyway. They say, oh, you’re all spies and traitors, and this is treason.
And they, they will execute people who they accuse of being foreign agents, even if they’re not. Because this is one of the ways that they securitize and surveil and exert their power is against any kind of Western intervention. So Iranian people are really caught between a rock and a hard place.
They’re caught between this really repressive, authoritarian government in Iran, and horrific sanctions. The US sanctions are contributing to the commiseration of the population. So is the Iranian government, its own corruption and mismanagement is a huge part of it. But the sanctions are as well.
They combine, you know, Iranian people are being like doubly hurt by Western sanctions and their own government. And I’m always trying to reach for an alternative that instead of thinking about what can the western governments do? How could we open up space for thinking about grassroots solidarity, solidarity from below?
And that’s why I think the historical precedent of the ISA and that whole moment of third world internationalism and solidarity among liberation movements across borders is a really important example or time for us to think with. We’re not gonna reproduce the same thing with the same ideologies.
The context is different. The times are different, the ideas are different. But there is something about having an alternative
for what we can do that comes from making connections between our liberation movements, you know, here and in Iran, and not running everything through the governments which have their own agendas, unfortunately.
Lazou: no free lunch under capitalism.
Manijeh: Well said. Exactly.
[00:45:33] Media representation of the ’79 revolution and current revolution
Lazou: you know, what I’ve learned about the revolution? I’ve learned through grassroot movements, through Iranian diaspora, raising awareness on TikTok, on Instagram. I’ve learned about, the prisoners that have been taken by the morality, police the executions. And there’s been several movements to try and save those people by making them trend on social media.
But I’m not seeing that covered in Western media as much. Yesterday I typed in Iran News. All I see are the bad things that are happening. They’ve taken this boat and they, they’ve executed this and that, and I’m not seeing the hope. I’m not seeing the progress. I’m not seeing the people movements that are actually getting things done.
Can you talk about how Western media is covering this revolution and how it compares to how it covered the 79 revolution?
Manijeh: Oh, that’s a really big question. Okay. I mean, I think with the 79 revolution there was a lot of just like shock and confusion because people thought the Shah was very stable and didn’t see it coming. And then there was this sort of bewilderment that the revolution was taking this like religious form, which seemed so anti-modern.
And yeah, just expected. So there was a lot of confusion from the western media and oversimplification. The narrative of the 79 revolution is, it was a sort of monolithically Islamic thing from start to finish. And of course, as my research and the work of many other scholars shows, there was much more diversity of opinions and views and parties and factions.
And the fact that the clerics one goes back to your first question, how did that happen? Is a kind of historical question. So in 79, it was a revolution against the US right? Against the U.S.-backed Shah and against American imperialism. So the mainstream media was not aligned with that in its own political perspectives.
This time around though, the danger is more the co-optation of the movement and the sort of mapping onto it or projecting onto it a kind of pro-western content. I think that the coverage initially was very supportive. Women are taking off their hijabs, they’re burning their hijabs, and this is amazing. We wanna support them and they should be free. And I agree with all of that too, right?
It’s just that it’s challenging when that can slip into an idea that they want to be like us, or that somehow this proves that it’s really true that all of Islam is inherently oppressive to women, and the hijab is inherently oppressive to women, and it’s really western culture and value that offers true liberation for women. It’s hard when the coverage reinforces those preexisting stereotypes and preexisting binaries between the West and Islam, especially around the issue of women’s oppression and women’s liberation. So that’s a tricky spot .The reality is that, Iranian people, they don’t really want to be Western. They certainly don’t wanna be invaded and occupied by the west.
What they want is the right to make their own future and their own society and to transform it. You know, and I mean, most Iranians believe in, you know, they’re religious, they’re they have faith, they’re believers, but that doesn’t mean they want an authoritarian state forcing them to adhere to one particular version of what their belief system should look like.
That’s oppressive, right? People don’t want an authoritarian theocratic state, but it doesn’t mean they are against Islam or want to become like somebody else. You know, I think that the job of feminists everywhere is to intervene in and transform our own cultures and our own societies to make them less oppressive, right?
It doesn’t mean you want to renounce everything about your culture and become something else, or that you want someone else to save you So I think that’s been the main challenge this time is how the western media, sometimes it feels like they’re co-opting it and making it into this cause celebre that reinforces all the ideas about western supremacy and superiority and the backwardness of other cultures, right?
So, so that’s been a challenge.
And I, I also think that, it is gonna be from grassroots movements, from activists on social media and other spaces, that we get a more nuanced view. That we get a more diverse range of opinions. And that’s also where it’s gonna be sustained because the mainstream media, they wanna sell newspapers or get clicks or whatever.
So it ebbs and flows. It comes and goes. And the default is to track Iran around these sort of geopolitical, top-down state centered narratives about nuclear weapons and trade and oil and, all of that geopolitical stuff. And really not to focus on what Iranian people want or what they’re doing on the ground.
So yeah, the mainstream media they’re, they’re fairweather friends. They come and go with the news cycle. But I do think it’s the activists in Iran and in diaspora who are consistently trying to say the movement’s not over. It continues and, and to really pay attention to the ways that people are continuing to organize and resist.
Lazou: So how can our listeners help in this movement if they want to help?
Manijeh: Such a good question. If there weren’t these horrific sanctions, I would say, contribute to the strike fund of the oil workers so they can stay out longer. But, we can’t send money directly. Iran is banned from the international banking system. So we really can’t have any kind of grassroots fundraising efforts to support people in that way.
Which of course the Iranian government would just use against them anyway and say, oh, you’re foreign funded, right? So that’s a very messy topic that is not really actionable at this time. I think one of the things people can do is really to educate themselves, right? Is don’t believe the stereotypes.
Try to access sources, articles posts, wherever you can. I can recommend jadaliyya.com, the Iran page that I’m one of the co-editors of, where we’ve tried to give some other opinions and some coverage. Iran Wire is also a good source of news. They have an English language interface on their website.
Try to educate yourself, and try to challenge the creep of the stereotypes. If you start to feel like oh, these poor Iranians, they can’t liberate themselves. Or if you start to feel like, oh my God, Islam is just so horrible and Western values are, we’re so lucky we’re here.
You know, If you start to feel those kinds of things, you know, do a little like, okay. Let me just check myself and, and so I think some of it really is trying to interrupt the stereotypes, the racism, the Islamophobia, the pro-western imposition of what this revolution is about. And then another piece is trying to offer solidarity.
If you are an activist. For example, say you’re involved in movements that are challenging mass incarceration, understand that’s a big part of what’s going on in Iranian society too. Maybe there are sites in common, where we could think across our differences and not imagine that, oh, we in the west are superior or more free, but rather that we’re engaged in different kinds of movements because of where we’re located, that share many aspirations, dreams and values. Another example I could give is, religious patriarchal control over women’s bodies. We are facing a huge backlash in this country right now in which our bodily autonomy, our reproductive freedoms are being taken away. This has a lot in common actually, with efforts of the Iranian government to control women’s bodies and to regulate them.
What if again, instead of seeing the West as more evolved and freer, what if we understand Yes, of course it’s different. It’s not the same. We have different histories. We have different contexts. But maybe there is a way that we can think about our struggles are against patriarchal control over our bodies.
This is something we have in common. How can we learn from what they’re doing in Iran? How can we offer our solidarity? Sometimes you can sign a statement or a petition. Sometimes you can go to an event, a rally, a teach in an where there are Iranian activists there telling the stories, trying to share what’s going on.
You can repost things on social media that are, again, the voices coming from Iran, challenging some of these dichotomies and stereotypes. And just to stay tuned in, to understand that what’s happening in Iran, I think is really historic. We haven’t really seen a feminist revolution in this way before.
And that history is happening. History is in the making. And I think it matters for all of us who care about freedom and liberation to learn from what’s happening there, to pay attention to look for ways that we can connect our struggles.
Lazou: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Thank you so much for that. We like to close our interview with a rapid fire section. So these are one word or one phrase answers. You don’t have to explain, but you can if you want to.
Manijeh: Okay. Wow.
Lazou: What’s an Asian food that you should like, but don’t?
Manijeh: Oh my gosh. I I don’t eat red meat, so there’s a lot of really great Asian food that I end up not being able to eat.
Lazou: what’s an Asian food that you’ll never get tired of?
Manijeh: Fesenjan. So this is a Iranian dish that’s made with pomegranate paste and ground walnuts. It’s like a rich, nutty sour stew. And I put yellow plums in it you know, you can make it with meat or chicken or whatever. I use the fake meat but it’s so layered and just my comfort food.
Lazou: oh, that sounds delicious. I’m gonna have to look that up. What’s a favorite memoir that you’ve read?
Manijeh: I’ve read a lot of Iranian diaspora memoirs, there are many very good ones out there. Let me think off the top of my head. Shahla Talebi’s book, Ghosts of Revolution, I believe it’s called. I should have been better prepared. Yes. Ghosts of Revolution. It’s philosophical.
It’s haunting, it’s deeply moving. It’s deeply feminist. And that’s just a really a really brilliant book.
Lazou: Okay. I’m gonna link to it in the show notes.
Manijeh: Okay.
Lazou: What’s the best Iranian representation you’ve seen in Western media?
Manijeh: Huh? You mean like popular culture like TV and movies
Lazou: Yeah.
Manijeh: like that? You know, I don’t watch a lot of that stuff, so I could have missed things. Nothing is coming to mind.
Lazou: I was afraid that would be the answer.
Manijeh: Literally nothing. But there could be interesting things that have happened that I’ve missed. There really could be, but, representation of Iranians in American culture that I like. Nothing’s coming to mind.
Lazou: Hmm. I wonder why.
Manijeh: Yeah.
Lazou: And finally, who is inspiring you these days?
Manijeh: Who’s inspiring me these days are an incredible group of activists. Mostly recent immigrants from Iran that have organized a nude feminist network called Feminists4Jina, Jina being the Kurdish name of the woman who was killed in September and sparked this uprising. Feminist4Jina started in late September, early October, and there are chapters across Europe and North America at this time, and I think other places as well. A lot of these people were activists in Iran and had to leave for their own safety at different times. So this is a really remarkable group of people who have a tremendous amount of collective experience and knowledge, deep knowledge of Iranian society and find themselves in diaspora and are organizing across borders and trying to really center the feminist aspects of this uprising, sort of against all odds trying to, from outside Iran really be accountable and committed to the most capacious vision of liberation that we can imagine coming out of the movement in Iran at this time. And I’m just continually inspired by these wonderful activists.
Lazou: Well, Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. It was really wonderful chatting with you.
Manijeh: Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.
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