Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies, has written an interesting 200-year history of Iran, its culture, and its politics, both geo-political and internal. I find his writing in this book to be arrogant, opinionated, full of big words, extremely interesting, and very important. Sometimes I wondered if I would even finish it when I got lost in some of his concepts. But I read several pages most nights and made it through and I'm glad I did.
I will return it to the Duluth Public Library 2009-08-11. If you are interested in borrowing it, its call number is 955.05 D11i.
For starters about arrogance, he writes in his introduction:
"I promise you by the end of this book, you will know more about Iran than the U.S. Department of State, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and five other neocon think tanks–not to mention the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Islamic Culture in the Islamic Republic of Iran–all put together. I know things they do not know, or do not care to know, or would rather forget, or never learned, or would not tell you." (p. 11)
But considering the arrogance of the people in these institutions who pretend to understand a complex history and a complex people, I feel he is justified. Do I know more than they do after reading his book? In some respects, yes. I do know that war, torture, and execution are not going to do the Iranian people and a lot of other peoples any good. But many of the so-called experts think that these undemocratic and irreligious actions will bring greater glory for their causes.
As an example of the complexity that these experts do not understand, Dabashi writes:
"Iranian political history is a Trojan horse. Inside its belly is a hidden force never noted either for what it is or for its catalytic effect on that political history. The hidden force is the power of the imagination, the force of defiant intellect. Any attempt to reduce the cosmopolitan pluralism of Iranian political culture to an Islamist, nationalist, or socialist absolutism is at once analytically ludicrous and politically catastrophic. More than anything else, such lame and lazy reductionism distorts the inner grace and overriding power of a thriving culture that outsmarts its tyrant rulers and career opportunistic observers alike." (p. 125)
Geopolitics often damages the ships of the high and the mighty. With their grand designs treating others as mere pawns, they do not recognize that the pawns are icebergs. So it was with the U.S., first overthrowing an elected prime minister of Iran, then treating the Shah as a great ally, then using the Afghani resistance to fight the Soviets and to contain Iran, and finally then having the Afghani resistance turn against the U.S. and having the Iranian mullahcracy turn inward.
As part of this grand design of geopolitics, the high and the mighty indulge in demonizing those who oppose them, for example, George W. Bush and others calling any resistance to their grand design "the enemy". Is it any wonder that many of the rulers of Iran are paranoid about the U.S.? Especially when Bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil". His and his advisors' ignorance of internal Iranian politics undercut reformers who had been making gains. Now these reformers were considered traitors.
BTW, Dabashi wrote this book in 2007, two years before the recent election in Iran. An election followed by the resistance of a culture that was often outsmarting its tyrant rulers.
Dabashi predicted the current turmoil as one of two possibilities of failure with the election of Ahmadinejad. "At worst, he will abuse the hopes and aspirations invested in him and resume an Islamic reign of terror over those young yuppie voters with their stylish hairdos, chic scarves, and sexy sunglasses–in which case he will turn them and their innocent semiotics of resistance into the real inheritors of the moral authority of Shi'ism. ... [Shi'ism] is alway on the side of the tyrannized and discredits those who are in power..." (pp. 233-234)
I have many more notes, but I'll finish with Dabashi's last sentence:
"...the only way that Americans can help promote democracy in Iran and anywhere else in the world is by first and foremost restoring and safeguarding it in their own country." (p. 263)
