Corwin Modern Iran

From the Last Shah to the Women's Revolution - A Century of Oil, Upheaval, and Resistance
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 979-8-95019223-4
Verlag: Absorbing History
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 10, 225 Seiten

Reihe: Iranian History

The essential modern history of Iran - from empire's collapse to women's uprising.

For decades, Iran has sat at the center of global headlines - nuclear negotiations, revolution, war, sanctions, protest - yet remains deeply misunderstood by the outside world. changes that.

In this sweeping, authoritative, and compulsively readable history, readers are taken from the dying days of the Qajar dynasty through the iron modernization of Reza Shah, the CIA-backed coup that overthrew democracy in 1953, the Shah's doomed White Revolution, and the 1979 revolution that remade the Middle East. The story continues through the hostage crisis, the devastating eight-year war with Iraq, the rise and fall of the reformists, the nuclear standoffs, and finally the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising - the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic in its history.

This is not a book of dry dates and political abstractions. It is the story of a proud, brilliant, and turbulent nation - its rulers and its dissidents, its oil and its ideology, its ancient civilization and its unfinished revolutions.

Perfect for:

- Readers of , , and

- Anyone following Iran's role in today's Middle East

- Students and scholars of twentieth-century history and geopolitics

- The Iranian diaspora seeking to understand their nation's full story

is the book this moment demands - urgent, essential, and impossible to put down.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Corwin, Samuel

Leseproben

Introduction

A Country That Will Not Stay Still

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The Question Behind the Headlines

On the morning of January 16, 1979, a small twin-engine jet lifted off from Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. On board were Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, and his wife, Farah. He carried a small box of Iranian soil. He was crying. Two weeks later, on February 1, a chartered Air France 747 set down on the same runway. The man who walked off, slowly, supported on the arm of a steward, was a seventy-six-year-old cleric in a black turban who had not seen his country in fourteen years. A French reporter, leaning into the aisle of the plane on the flight in, had asked Ruhollah Khomeini what he felt about returning home. , he is said to have answered. Nothing.

Between those two flights, a country of thirty-five million people changed governments, ideologies, alphabets of public life, and ideas about itself. The change was not gradual. It was not negotiated. A monarchy that traced its self-image back to Cyrus the Great was replaced, within a matter of weeks, by a clerical republic that traced its authority back to the Twelfth Imam. Women who had gone to work that January in pencil skirts were, by spring, choosing whether to cover their hair before stepping out the door. The American embassy on Takht-e Jamshid Avenue, where diplomats had played tennis the previous autumn, would by November be a hostage compound watched on television sets from Houston to Hamburg.

The question this book tries to answer is a simple one, though the answer is not. How did this happen? Not in the narrow sense of who toppled whom in what week of what year, though those questions matter. The larger puzzle is how a country can swing so far, so fast, and then, having swung, refuse to settle. Iran did not become the Islamic Republic and then go quiet. It produced the war with Iraq, the reform movement of the 1990s, the Green Movement of 2009, the protests of 2017 and 2019, and the uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Each of these convulsions has been described, at the time, as the beginning of the end. None has been.

To understand Iran today, the place to begin is not 1979. It is 1921, when a tall, illiterate Cossack officer named Reza Khan rode into Tehran at the head of three thousand men and discovered that the capital would not resist him. Almost everything that followed - the modernization, the oil, the coup, the White Revolution, the protests, the return of the cleric, the long aftermath - flows from decisions taken in the four decades between his march and his son's flight. The story is continuous. The mirrors only seem to break.

Why Iran, Why Now

There are easier countries to write about. Iran demands a reader willing to hold contradictions in mind simultaneously: a society that produced one of the most ambitious modernization programs of the twentieth century and also the world's first modern theocracy; a state that calls America the Great Satan and whose citizens, when polled, consistently rank among the most pro-American populations in the Middle East; a regime that suppresses public dissent and tolerates, within limits, a press livelier than anything in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf.

The country also sits at the center of nearly every story the world has been telling itself about the twenty-first century. Oil markets move when Iranian tankers move. The map of the Middle East - from Lebanon to Yemen to the Gaza Strip - has been redrawn, in part, by Iranian decisions about whom to arm and whom to fund. The nuclear question, which has consumed five American presidents, is a question about Iran. The reorganization of global energy after the war in Ukraine is, in part, a story about which buyers will and will not take Iranian crude. None of these threads can be followed without a working understanding of where the Islamic Republic came from and what it thinks it is doing.

And yet the country is consistently misread. In American public discussion, Iran tends to appear as either a cartoon villain or a cartoon victim: the regime that chants death to America, or the brave young women cutting their hair on Instagram. Both images are real. Neither is the country. Iran is also a ninety-year-old grandmother in Isfahan who remembers the day British and Soviet troops marched in during the war, and a software engineer in Karaj who has emigrated twice and come back once, and a Friday prayer leader in Mashhad who genuinely believes the revolution has not yet gone far enough. The country contains all of them, and they do not, on most matters, agree.

The case for writing about Iran now, rather than waiting for the dust to settle, is that the dust will not settle. The Islamic Republic has outlasted nearly every prediction of its collapse. It has also failed to become what its founders said it would be. The gap between official Iran and lived Iran has grown wider, not narrower, over four decades. Somewhere inside that gap is the country's next chapter, and it cannot be read from the outside without a clear sense of how the last hundred years actually went.

Two Revolutions, One Country

Most accounts of modern Iran treat 1979 as the hinge: everything before is prelude, everything after is consequence. This is a tidy way to organize a syllabus, and it misses the point. Iran in the twentieth century had two revolutions, not one. They were carried out by different people, in the name of different gods, and they pointed in opposite directions. But they shared a method, and they shared a target.

The first revolution belongs to Reza Shah. It began with the coup of 1921 and accelerated after he took the throne in 1925. In fifteen years, he built a national army where there had been tribal militias, a unified legal code where there had been clerical courts, a railway from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian where there had been mule tracks, and a state university in Tehran where there had been seminaries. He banned the veil for women by decree in 1936. He forced men into European hats. He sent students to France and Germany. He pulled the title of back from a fading Qajar dynasty and made it mean something again, by which he meant something modern, secular, and centralized. He was, in every important sense, a revolutionary - a man who used the apparatus of monarchy to break the social order that monarchy had traditionally rested on.

His son continued the work, more cautiously at first, more recklessly later. The White Revolution of 1963, which redistributed land, gave women the vote, and pushed literacy into the villages, was the Pahlavi project in its second wave. It was also the moment when the alliance between the throne and the Shia clergy, already strained, fractured for good. A provincial cleric named Khomeini denounced the reforms from a seminary in Qom. He was arrested, exiled, and forgotten by everyone except his students.

The second revolution belongs to those students, and to the millions who joined them in the streets in 1978. It was carried out against the Pahlavis, and it took as its symbols everything the Pahlavis had tried to suppress: the turban, the chador, the Arabic prayer, the village mullah. But it used the tools the Pahlavis had built. The mass conscript army, the national radio network, the centralized bureaucracy, the universities full of newly literate young men from the provinces - all of these were Reza Shah's creations, and all of them were turned, in the winter of 1978-79, against his son. Khomeini did not destroy the Pahlavi state. He inherited it, and put a different ideology on top.

This is why the country has been so hard to settle. Both revolutions tried to remake Iranian society from above, by decree, against the grain of long habit. Both succeeded in altering the surface and failed to alter what was underneath. The chador came off, then went back on, then was contested again. The clergy was pushed out of politics, then put in charge of politics, then pushed back by Iranians who had grown tired of clerical rule. The pendulum has not stopped because nobody has yet managed to make the country agree with itself.

A Note on Names, Dates, and Sympathies

Persian names appear in the spellings most familiar to English readers - Khomeini rather than Khumayni, Mosaddegh rather than Musaddiq - even where specialists might prefer otherwise. Where a figure is better known by a title than a name, the title is used. The last Shah is the Shah; his father is Reza Shah. The two are not the same man, and confusing them is one of the easiest ways to misread the century.

Dates are given in the Gregorian calendar. Iran uses two other calendars officially - the Solar Hijri, which is the national civil calendar, and the Lunar Hijri, which governs religious observance - and important events are sometimes remembered by their Iranian dates. The revolution culminated in Bahman of 1357, not February of 1979, and Iranians who lived through it tend to use the first dating, not the second. Where the Iranian date carries meaning that the Gregorian does not, both are given.

On the harder question of sympathies: no honest book about modern Iran can pretend to have none. The Pahlavis built things worth building and broke things worth keeping. The revolutionaries of 1979 freed Iranians from a police state and built a different one. The Americans, British, and Russians who took turns interfering in Iranian affairs across the twentieth century were not the cause of every Iranian misfortune, and they were not innocent bystanders either. A reader looking for heroes will be disappointed. A reader looking for villains will find too many.

What this book does try to do is take Iranians seriously as the...