Iran's Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State

Offering a new perspective on Iran’s politics and culture in the 1960s and 1970s, Ali Mirsepassi challenges the prevailing view of pre-revolutionary Iran, documenting how the cultural elites of the Pahlavi state promoted a series of striking gharbzadegi or “Westoxif i cation” discourses. Intended as ideological alternatives to modern and Western-inspired cultural attitudes, these inf l uenced Persian identity politics and projected Iranian modernity as a “mistaken modernity,” despite the regime’s own ferocious modernization programme. Focusing on the cultural transformations that def i ned the period, Mirsepassi sheds new light on the Pahlavi state as an ideological gambler, inadvertently empowering its fundamentalist enemies and spreading a “Quiet Revolution” through secular and religious civil society. Proposing a new theoretical framework for understanding the anti-modern discourses of Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ali Shari’ati, Iran’s Quiet Revolution is a radical reinterpretation of twentieth-century Iranian political history that makes sense of these events within the creative, yet tragic, Iranian nation-making experience.