Iran: Into the Heart of the Islamic Republic

Ramita Navai's deep look at eight ordinary Tehranis offers a window into the nature of the Iranian state.

Ramita Navai, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran (PublicAffairs, September 2, 2014), 320pp., $26.99.

It’s a bit cliched to call Iran a land of paradox. We get it, you might say. It’s a complicated place—but every place is complicated if you look close enough. Yet Iran’s complexity still stands out: more than almost any other country in the world, it’s torn between opposing identities, opposing visions and even opposing histories. It’s home to a panoply of ethnicities. It’s a Middle Eastern country whose language shares roots with the European tongues, not Arabic or Hebrew. Its leaders are virulent opponents of Israel and America, yet Iran has more Jews than any other Muslim country and more favorable popular attitudes toward the United States than any of its neighbors. It’s been a great empire—and one of empire’s great victims. It’s a Shia country that had many of its greatest achievements under Sunni—and non-Muslim—rulers. Its government is held together by both devotion and corruption. There’s even a burger joint named after a hunger striker.

And there is paradox in the very heart of the Islamic Republic. The revolution that brought it into being had a deeply conservative aspect. Ruhollah Khomeini first achieved notoriety for his denunciation of the Shah’s modernizing reforms in the early 1960s; his early allies included traditionalist clerics and landowners furious at their lost privileges. In the language of the French Revolution, Khomeini and his allies were one part of the ancien régime; throw in the devout urban merchants that joined in, and recall all the leftists that Khomeini discarded after they’d helped him tear down the Shah, and the revolutionary core looks rather reactionary. Indeed, political Islam in general, and the Islamic Republic in particular, tends to represent itself as an alternative to modernity—or even as a return from it.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/iran-the-heart-the-islamic-republic-11212