Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice: Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism

335 Pages·2017·3.06 MB·English

by  Peyman Vahabzadeh (eds.)

IRAN’S STRUGGLES
FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
ECONOMICS, AGENCY, JUSTICE, ACTIVISM
Edited by Peyman Vahabzadeh
Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice
Peyman Vahabzadeh
Editor
Iran’s Struggles for
Social Justice
Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism
Editor
Peyman Vahabzadeh
Department of Sociology
University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-44226-6 ISBN 978-3-319-44227-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44227-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961360
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To the memory of
Khosrow Shakeri (Cosroe Chaqueri) (1938-2015)
social justice advocate par excellence
F
oreword
What does it mean when a group of young and middle-aged a cademics
gather on a North American university campus and wonder what has
happened to the enduring problem of “social justice” in their homeland
half way around the globe in Iran?
Early in July 2015 I was part of such a group of almost exclusively
Iranian academics who had gathered at the University of Victoria, in
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. All the papers were delivered in
English. All the discussions in between the papers were in Persian. We
delivered our papers, exchanged and debated ideas, topics, concepts, and
issues in English, and then we retired to dining halls and restaurants and
caught up with the latest news in our homeland in Persian.
In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1977–1979, a generation
of Iranian critical thinkers has emerged outside their homeland. There is a
palpable disconnect between this generation and the unfolding history of
their country of birth. The chapters you will read in this book are a sample
evidence of the work of this generation that remains deeply concerned
about their national history and yet confined in their abilities to offer only
critical perspectives. This “generation,” to be sure, includes colleagues in
their sixties as well as younger scholars and critical thinkers in their thirties.
Both these cohorts, however, share the common denominator of having
exited the nasty censorial policies of the ruling Islamic Republic to be able
to live and think and read and write in relative freedom.
The writings of these chapters and their delivery in an academic gathering
in Iran are next to impossible to imagine. Over the last almost four decades,
the ruling apparatus of the Islamic Republic has s ystematically destroyed
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the very foundation of social sciences and categorically appropriated the
very idea of “social justice” for itself. There is no public debate, no common
conversation that would enable anything remotely resembling a commu-
nal consciousness surround the question of “social justice.” The slightest
suggestion of any such critical thinking will land a person in a kangaroo
court, facing prison terms for having compromised what the custodians of
the Islamic Republic consider their “national security/amniyat- e melli.”
Although critical thinking and writing are inseparable from any human
gathering anywhere in the world, including and perhaps particularly in
societies in the snare of totalitarianism, the systematic destruction of social
sciences and humanities in Iran is a matter of state policies and their cul-
tural revolution against what they call “the West.”
In this book you will read learned discussions of various forms of
s truggles for social justice in Iran, of the predicament of the working
class and labor movements, the theological underpinning of political
mobilization of the poor, detailed accounts of the cooperative movements,
gender equality, the student movement, new literary archive pertinent to
social justice, and many other equally urgent issues. Do the writing and
reading of these crucial essays constitute an exercise in futility when the
subject of their conversations and contentions, Iranian people themselves,
scarcely know they exist, let alone read and perhaps learn from them?
Signaled by the fact that this book is in English and not in Persian,
though all its authors are Iranian, no organic link can be presumed
between this critical body of literature and the struggle for social justice
in Iran. In one way or another, as evidenced in every single chapter,
those scholars gathered here deeply care, closely follow, and are vastly
informed by the subject of their scholarship—and yet they have opted
to write their thoughts in English, while they are perfectly capable of
doing so in Persian. The location of these senior and junior scholars on
North American or Western European campuses does, in part, explain
their choice of English—a choice effectively decided by the fact that they
are writing, in part, in critical conversation also with their non-Iranian
colleagues on these campuses.
This disconnect, however, is much less pertinent than it may first appear
if we remember that the public space upon which the very idea of “Iran”
as a nation was formed has always been transnational. The first Iranian
novel, Siyahatnameh Ibrahim Beig (1903), was written in Cairo and
published in Istanbul; the first Iranian film, Abi and Rabi (1930), was
made in India. From Calcutta to Istanbul to Cairo to Berlin were the sites
FOREWORD ix
of the most widely circulated and read periodicals of the Constitutional
period. Istanbul, in particular, was the site of the rise of the first generation
of Iranian public intellectuals. Central Asia and the Caucuses were the
domain upon which these intellectuals first came to grips with the very
idea of their homeland outside its emerging frontiers. So writing about
Iran from outside Iran is nothing new, novel, or unusual.
There is, however, one crucial difference between all those cases and a
volume such as this that you are about to read. All those books, films, and
periodicals were in Persian, while this one is in English. This volume, as
a result, as countless others like it, represents a new gestation of Iranian
scholars, critical thinkers, and public intellectuals. They are now all deeply
embedded in the heart of North American and Western European aca-
demic circles. They have mastered the language of their imperial where-
abouts better and more effectively than any other generation before
them. This development, of course, has the disadvantage of not being
read by their contemporaries in Iran. But it has certain number of other
advantages.
These scholars are now living, reading, and writing in a vastly more
cosmopolitan environment than what the Islamic Republic has allowed in
their homeland, and they are conversant with a widening body of litera-
ture beyond Iran as they openly or implicitly engage the work of postco-
lonial critical thinkers just like them from Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
never before so openly present in the horizons of Iranian thinkers when
writing in Persian as now confined to the censorial mandates of the Islamic
Republic. This cosmopolitan worldliness of their prose and the fact that it
is conversant at the heart of the globalized empire lift the dialogical dispo-
sition of their prose to an entirely different domain. They are bringing the
Iranian public sphere to global consciousness, where it can find its sense of
interiority onto a worldly scale.
Generations of writing in Persian addressed Iranians exclusively and
as such had a mournful, contemplative, plaintive, and introverted mono-
logue tone to it. Writing in English for a global audience has the entirely
opposite texture to it: defiant, conversational, embracive, worldly, and as
such in solidarity with others who share a similar trajectory. The English
these scholars write has the intonation of the Persian-speaking world
embedded in it. This English is not “accented” as some have suggested, as
if there is an English without an accent. All spoken and written languages
have an accent of their speakers and writers. But there is an intonation
to the language that has nothing to do with who is speaking or writing
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but everything to do with whom is the speaker and the writer addressing:
who is his or her interlocutor? The interlocutor of these essays is a global
readership, a worldly audience, who knows where Iran is and what are
its issues, but does so in a comparative worldly context otherwise absent
when identical issues are rewritten in Persian and addressed exclusively to
Iranians. That worldly consciousness had always existed in Persian when
spoken in the imperial context of its own history. But that imperial context
today has moved to English, as it may very well travel to Chinese in our
own lifetime.
Yes, a vast segment of the Iranian population not conversant in English
may never get to read this or many other books like it. But millions of
other Iranians can and will. English, as a result, and what postcolonial
critical thinkers from four corners of the world write in it, is the upending
of the imperial language, the way Spanish was wrested in Latin America
from Spain, or English was in India, or Arabic in Islamic lands beyond
the control of the tribal Arabism of their conquerors. Today, English has
become an Iranian language too, as once Persian became an Indian lan-
guage, Arabic an African, or Spanish a Latin American. The book you hold
in your hand reads in English but breathes the desires and struggles of a
nation for social justice in Persian.
New York, NY Hamid Dabashi
May 2016
A
cknowledgments
This book represents the collective endeavor of academics and activists
who share a profound sense of social justice in their approach to the vari-
ous aspects of Iran’s present complex and unjust reality. The book origi-
nates with an international scholarly conference under the rubric of “Iran’s
Struggles For Social Justice: Canadian and International Perspectives”
(http://socialjusticeiniran.com/), organized by the editor of this volume,
and held on July 10–12, 2015 at University of Victoria, in the heavenly
city of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, Canada, in the unceded traditional
territory of the Coast and Straits Salish Peoples, on the ancestral land
of the Lekwungen family group, Checkonien and Sungayka, where the
University of Victoria campus sits on the site of an old Lekwungen village.
The organizers and participants in the Conference acknowledge that they
held their deliberations on Aboriginal territory and are grateful for the
hospitality offered to them.
I would like to thank the individuals whose collective effort created
a smooth and collegial conference: Scott Bryce Aubrey, Kaveh Bavand,
Heather Currie, Mariana Gallegos Dupuis, Susan Kim, and Ardalan
Rezamand. Many thanks are also due to the Department of Sociology
for financial and logistical support, and I would like to personally thank
Sean Hier, Chair of Sociology, and Carole Rains, Departmental Secretary.
Thanks also to Mona Sedky Goode, Margo Matwychuk, and Andrew
Wender for chairing sessions. I would also like to acknowledge the finan-
cial support for this Conference through Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada Connection Grant (611-2014-0393), and
offer my gratitude to Fred Farhad Soofi; Centre for Comparative Studies
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