Payam Morgan
NES 485
The Review of:
The Last Great Revolution
Turmoil and Transformation in Iran
Robin Wright, the author of The Last Great Revolution, Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, has reported from more than 120 countries as a correspondence of many major newspapers and magazines such as Los Angeles Times, CBS New, etc. However, she won the National Magazine Award for her reports on Iran for The New Yorker. She has written many books on Iran such as In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade. Her book of The Last Great Revolution has been commented by Christiane Amanpour, the CNN Chief-International-Correspondence as a book that “helps shatter the stereotype of Iran.” Also, the New York Times Book Review describes her work as one that presents “a reasoned critique of a climatic 20th century event.”
Remarkably, Wright divides the revolution into three different phases. In her book the first phase is from the beginning of the Islamic Republic to the early 1990;s when Ali Akbar Rafsanji gets elected to the presidency office which marks the end of the first and the beginning of the second phase. The third and final phase starts from the presidential election of 1997—in which seventy percent of the Iranians voted for changes and reforms through electing Mohammad Khatami as the president—till now.
Wright starts the book with a quote from Pascal, which is much better understood when Iran’s social structure and its history is taken into consideration. The quote is:
“The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instill religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace. Attempting to instill it with force and threats is not religion, but terror.”
The quote is to some extent both a conclusion and an introduction to the current state of Iran. The irony of using both the word “grace” and “terror” shows the ironies that also exist in Iran from the use of religion in the government. Through out the book she uses this irony to show the opposition of ideas and movements in Iran and all the ironies and conflicts that exist in every aspect of Iranian lives.
Interestingly, she takes this idea of incongruity further and she starts each chapter with two quotes of different and often opposite views of an idea. One of the remarkable openings of the chapters belongs to chapter three. Wright uses a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini and the current president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. The irony of old and new, deceased and alive and also the opposite content of each quote are the captivating issues revealed here. The quote from Ayatollah Khomeini states “There is no fun in Islam.” On the contrary, the quote from the President remarks on the most steady system that will have the characteristics of the “least limitations to freedom of expression” and to articulate one’s “thoughts without fear of prosecution.”
Remarkably, these are the opening citations of a chapter that is about Cultural changes of Iran. Wright’s usage of this irony and incongruity shows the huge changes brought to Iran’s culture through the revolution. In the beginning of the revolution almost all the Iranians in one form or another were the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini and accepted his ideologies; however, almost twenty years after the revolution in 1997, seventy percent of the population supported Mohammad Khatami.
The Author starts the chapter of Cultural Revolution by articulating a story of a slaughterhouse that has been transformed into a cultural center called “Bahman” which is the Persian month in which the revolution was finalized and the monarchy had toppled. Beyond the facts that encompass this story the readers can see the symbolism that is hidden behind the context. The Iranian revolution started by the opposition of the people against the last shah and its military in the streets of different cities. The forces of shah killed many people; however, after the revolution, the revolutionary forces persecuted many of the people related to shah or his system who didn’t flee the country. The eight years of the Iran-Iraq war brought another wave of killing and loss. The opening of this cultural center and transforming a slaughterhouse correlates with the time that second phase or as Wright describes “the second republic” started. This symbolizes the beginning of this new “republic” and the start of change.
She takes the use of irony further to describe the cultural evolution in Iran. She depicts the walls of the Bahman cultural center of having big paintings of the supreme leader and ayatollah Khomeini; however, there is a painting of Charlie Chaplin. The cultural center is now showing foreign works such as The Bear, Cat on a Hot Tin roof, etc. After a decade of xenophobia, Wright describes the Bahman as a cultural center that “symbolized the compromise struck between the Islamic regime and its public in the early 1990’s” and a center that “reflected one of the earliest attempts to prod the Islamic Republic into a postrevolutionary phase and return the country to normalcy” after a decade of war and political turmoil.
Ironically, the Islamic revolution not only “did spur an Islamic consciousness,” it also affected the ideology of different minority religious groups and their practices. The author depicts this fact through an example recounting the live of the Jews in Iran. The author reports the opinion of a Jewish woman that says “‘the regime became more religious and so did we… before the revolution attendance at synagogues was sometimes sparse… but now the synagogues are full…. I think we are actually a stronger community.’” Although the nature of the revolution was Islamic, the religious minorities have greater freedoms in some respects. “They could produce wine, whether or not they were related, men and women could not only sit in the same room, they could also dance together… boys and girls could mix freely at meeting of Jewish youth groups.”
The author uses irony even in her conclusion that wraps all the ideas presented in her book. She tells the readers that “if bettering the lot of the oppressed was a prime goal, then the Islamic Republic did passably well in some areas such as education and child health. But it also failed seriously in others, such as the overall standard of living.” She supports her ideas by giving various data and examples of each throughout the book. She describes the jump in literacy rate from 58% in 1979 to 82% in 1999 and an overall 4 million university graduates per year in 1999. On the contrary, she depicts the state of the current Iranian economy that has a 40 percent inflation rate and a currency that fell in value from 74 rials for a dollar before the revolution to about 8000 rials after the revolution.
The author through the use of irony shows the difference among the ideas and different aspects that exist in the lives of Iranians and their history. These conflicts started the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 and it made the fuel for the Islamic Revolution of 1979. All these incongruities have divided the power in the government and have made the counteracting positive and negative forces present in each system and it has created a suitable climate “for revolutions within the revolution—in women’s rights, the arts and social customs, among the young and most important within Islam itself.” The author also depicts all these transformations as the tools that have enabled the Iranians to take “the bigger steps in defining a modern Islamic democracy than any other Muslim country.”