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Intellectual Freedom in Iran Following

the Islamic Revolution

Quentin Cantu

3/11/2010

The Revolution Will Be Stratified, Shortly

  • Popular support

  • Landowners' support

  • Bazzari support

  • Fundamentalist clergy owns it

The Intellectual Pickle, Post-Revolution

  • Support the anti-imperialist platform
  • vs
  • Criticizes what's already wrong (militancy, Islamic reforms)
  • Changiz Pahlavan, Shahrok Meskub

The Cultural Revolution, Persian Style

  • Regime lashes out against intellectuals

  • April 1980 - Tehran Teachers' Training College ransacked

  • June 4, 1980 - All universities shut down

  • Shiraz, Tabriz, Tehran, Mashad, and Isfahan Universities purged

  • Death, injury counts unknown

The Beginning of a Tense Relationship

  • Splitting the ranks of intellectuals

  • Thousands forced into exile

  • Necessary to expel all Western traces of influence

  • "The intelligentsia should not push aside the clergy who are backed by the masses and say 'we want an Islam without clerics.' It is like saying we want Islam without politics. That goes against reason."

-Ayatollah Khomeini

Islamized Education and its Discontents

  • 1983 - Universities reopen, more attuned to the Revolution

  • Syllabi, student groups, professors, even classes, modified to be in accordance with government line

  • Committee for the Islamization of Universities kept constant vigil

  • Nafizi

War on Two Fronts

  • Iraq forces invade Iran in September of 1980

  • Intellectuals completely sidelined

  • Where is the Iranian intellectual discourse about the war?

The End of War, the Beginning of...

  • Iran-Iraq war ends in August 1988

  • Khomeini dies June 1989, replaced by then President Khamenei

  • Regime's stance towards intellectuals unchanged

Intellectual Death under Khamenei

  • Authors, playwrights, screenwriters, and scholars disappear

  • Saidi Sirjani

Chain Murders showed the lengths the regime was willing to go to silence dissent

Bus incident involving 21 prominent authors

  • CPJ: Khamenei one of the the top 10 greatest enemies of freedom of expression

Today

  • Faculty resignations over electoral fraud

  • Basij purges of dormitories

  • Response of intellectual diaspora

The Years Leading Up to the Revolution

  • "Gharbzadegi" as a unifying force

  • Opposition to the Shah

  • Religion as a force for change
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