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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)

by Denise Gomez

On March 7, 1979, just one day before International Women’s Day, the highly influential American feminist scholar, Kate Millet, appeared in Tehran, in the Iranian Revolution’s afterglow. Invited alongside other prominent feminist scholars and activists to speak at a demonstration organized by Iranian woman activists, Millet was accompanied by her partner and $1,200 worth of recording equipment, but without any working knowledge of Persian. Millett spent her days wandering around with tape recorder in hand, documenting her observations and capturing the voices of protesting Iranian women. After returning to the United States, Millet used her memories and the tapes’ contents to write her 1981 book, Going to Iran. As a result of Millet’s excursion and the subsequent publication of her book, the United States’ media wrongly embraced her as an authoritative figure regarding the Iranian revolution despite her understandable shortcomings as an ally and friend of Iranian women. Mottahedheh’s study of Millet’s visit in Whisper Tapes provides its readers with profound insight into Millet’s travels as an activist, as well as into the liberationist messages of the Iranian revolution.

Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (1982)

Whisper Tapes challenges established ideas about the relationship between Iranian women and their Revolution. Carefully separating the rise of the Islamic Republic and the popular revolutionary movement, Negar Mottahedeh works against the major assumptions of western scholarship, where the arrival of the Iranian Revolution and the arrival of the Islamic Republic happen simultaneously and are seen to be one and the same thing. In this western version, the Iranian Revolution is an inherently Islamic revolution, which insisted on an instant curtailment of women’s rights. Mottahedeh works against this assumption by demonstrating how Iranian women saw their demonstrations and protests as a continuation of the Iranian Revolution itself, as well as a continuation of the Revolution’s principles of freedom and resistance to oppression in all forms. Mottahedeh pushes back on portrayals of the revolution as happening overnight, of opposition to Mohammad Reza Phalavi as monolithic, and of an inherently patriarchal protesting populace who betrayed their feminine revolutionary counterparts.

To situate her book and its actors, Mottahedeh places the Iranian Revolution within the context of, and in solidarity with, the Third World, a geo-political concept that dominated the western intellectual thinking at the time of the revolution. Under this principle, revolutionary cultures and thought flourished, and various marginalized groups positioned themselves to defend each other against all forms of exploitation. Western intellectuals’ left-leaning politics naturally aligned them against Iran’s Shah, and similarly influenced the politics of the western feminist circles. Millet and her French contemporaries, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig, who initially declared their solidarity with the Iranian Revolution, were unsettled by the ensuing proclamations of compulsory veiling. As Iranian women took to the streets in protest against these proclamations, their calls to action were widely ignored by the men who stood by their side during the Anti-Shah demonstrations. As equal participants of the 1979 revolution, women were in a sense betrayed by their fellow revolutionaries. Millet and the French identified with the Iranian women in protest, and understood their revolts against Khomeini’s proclamations as a continuation of a larger struggle against the patriarchy.

Kate Millett, 1977 (via Schlesinger Library)

Mottahedeh revitalizes this story by accessing what Millet could not due to her socially constructed state of “unknowledge” about Iran and its culture. As a result of her lack of knowledge, Millet cannot and does not fully see the movement materializing before her very eyes — but this does not make her experience a counterfeit one. Mottahedeh does not accuse Millet of playing the role of the arrogant westerner here, instead she is treated as a limited observer whose observations were skewed and incomplete. In so many ways, Mottahedeh, a researcher who focuses on various aspects of Iranian resistance and protest, has the expertise and knowledge for understanding the women’s protests that Kate Millet lacked. Mottahedeh’s Whisper Tapes is as much an expansion of her own research as it is an expansion of Millet’s Going to Iran. Mottahedeh’s work does not reject the material of the whisper tapes, it instead contextualizes and broadens Millet’s experience, observations, and recordings. To complete her project, Mottahedeh pulls from many theoretical works, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mladen Dolar but she extracts the majority of her citations from the tapes themselves or Millet’s book about her experiences on the ground. Through this very narrow focus, Mottahedeh is able to remain within the context of the tapes’ spaces and interact with the content of Miller’s tapes more deeply.

When listening to Millet’s recordings Mottahedeh noticed a second, background narrative in the political chanting and hushed conversations in Persian, behind the obvious, intended narrative of Millet’s tapes. Describing these surrounding acoustics as an unconscious layer to Millet’s recordings –whisper tapes — Mottahedeh uses these background voices to frame and inform her analysis of Millet’s visit to Iran. These voices both contradict and clarify Millet’s observations and revive the protestors’ aspirations in a way that complicates mainstream ideas of feminist consciousness in post-revolutionary Iran. Instead of tracing Iranian feminist consciousness to individual (anti-)religious sentiments or as reactions to western influence, Mottahedeh suggests the women’s protests emerged as a continuation of the 1979 revolution that called for planetary freedom and justice.

Women and the Iranian Revolution (via BBC)

Whisper Tapes is organized according to the Farsi alphabet, with each “chapter” named after a theme or symbol of the revolution, such as Chapter V, “Servat,” (Wealth) or Chapter XIII “Zan,” (Woman). Although disorienting and disjointed at times, Mottahedeh’s chapters are informed by the tapes’ evidence, which was captured haphazardly and at the mercy of 1979’s technological limitations. However, for Mottahedeh the fragmentary nature of the tapes’ narrative evokes the feeling experienced by listening to the recordings’ “whispered background.”  Furthermore, Mottahedeh inaugurates this account with a section entitled “A Revolutionary Timeline,” where she lays out the revolution’s key dates for a reader’s reference. The introduction and conclusion, titled “Overture” and “Coda,” flank her alphabetically-organized segments, and provide readers with the theoretical, historical, and personal background necessary for digesting the bulk of her content.

Few books resemble Whisper Tapes in its organization, and few studies of the Iranian Revolution so thoroughly and fairly challenge misconceptions born from well-intentioned actions of politically progressive circles. Mottahedeh’s method of listening to the accidental voices of Millet’s background is inventive and produces refreshing scholarship that can be enjoyed, understood, and appreciated by academics and non-specialists together. By revisiting Kate Millet, Mottahedeh accomplishes the elevation and centering of oft-ignored voices.


You might also like:
The Strength of Women in the Iranian Revolution
The Public Archive: Qahvehkhaneh, Reading Iranian Newspapers
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017) 
Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

by Christopher Rose

Argo, Ben Affleck’s latest film, is set against the backdrop of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The audience is dropped abruptly into the action following a imagesemi-animated sequence that explains American involvement in Iran following the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that deposed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.

Viewers are given a quick rundown of the Shah’s lavish lifestyle and told that his attempts to Westernize Iran had met with resistance in this “traditionally Shi’ite country.” This, paired with the Shah’s increasing paranoia and authoritarianism, led to nationwide demonstrations and strikes over the latter half of 1978 that led to the Shah’s departure from the country on January 16, 1979.

The introduction quickly moves through subsequent key events in the Revolution. Within two weeks, the revolution’s figurehead Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned to Iran from exile in France, the Shah’s caretaker government had crumbled, and Iran descended into internal chaos as the various groups that had united under the common cause of deposing the Shah began to fight about what happened next and who would take control.  Islamist forces loyal to Khomeini fought with secularists, Marxists, and a myriad of smaller groups from across the spectrum, all the while attempting to prevent a repeat of the 1953 coup by outside powers.  In late October, the Shah, suffering from liver cancer, was admitted to the United States for treatment in New York. The Iranian government formally requested his extradition to stand trial in Iran for crimes against humanity; the Carter administration refused.

The film opens on November 4, 1979, the day that the American embassy was overrun

imageby a mob that took the embassy employees hostage. Initially, hopes were that Khomeini’s government would step in and release the hostages, as they had done previously, when the embassy was breached during the previous summer,  but government officials instead sanctioned the hostage taking. The embassy employees would eventually be held in captivity for 444 days. The Iranian government agreed to release them on January 20, 1981—inauguration day in the U.S.—and held their plane on the tarmac at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport until after Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as president. This was perceived as a final snub to outgoing president Jimmy Carter, who had stood beside the Shah in Tehran just three years earlier and proclaimed Iran “an island of stability in the Middle East.”

The story of the embassy takeover is practically script-ready for a Hollywood release. Argo focuses on a lesser-known—and recently declassified–subplot that, as the film’s advertising promises, nearly has to be seen to be believed.

The U.S. embassy occupied a city block in downtown Tehran. The main breach on the day of the takeover took place at the main entrance, where the chancery and administrative offices were located. The consular section was located in another section of the compound, which had a direct entrance to the street.  Six members of the embassy staff were able to simply walk out the door before the consular section was breached, blending into normal traffic to escape.  After several days of being harbored and then denied refuge in the British and New Zealand embassies, the American embassy employees were granted safe harbor in the residence of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (played by Victor Garber).

The six employees were eventually able to flee Iran through a CIA-Canadian joint intelligence endeavor that involved posing the six as members of a film crew doing a location scout for a science fiction movie called Argo. The Canadian government issued them passports and CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck), working with operatives in the film industry, set up a cover office in Hollywood (staffed by an effervescent John Goodman and Alan Arkin, who provide much needed comic relief).  Fake ads were placed in trade publications, and a lavish press event announcing the film was held, giving the cover story legitimacy.  Mendez then flew to Tehran (in reality, Mendez was accompanied by an aide, not depicted in the film) and, to complete the disguise, escorted the staff on a location scout of the Tehran bazaar.  Finally, in a business as usual-style, the crew went to the airport to board a Swissair flight to Zurich.

The film adds gratuitous tension to the escape scene, adding in a race against Iranian

imageintelligence officials who uncover the true identity of the “film crew” just as they prepare to board the plane, an unnecessary assault against a female gate agent who lacks the keys to reopen the gate once the plane is ready for departure, and an over the top chase scene involving revolutionary guards in late 1970s Chevrolets who manage to keep pace with a 747 thrusting down the runway for takeoff.  

Argo is the story of the Americans’ ordeal and their relatively miraculous escape—and in this it delivers.  It is unfortunate, however, that the film presents these dramatic events against a simplified backdrop that diminishes the complexity of the Iranian political scene at the time.

What is missing is much of the backstory that explains why the Americans are in this predicament in the first place.  With the current state of Iranian-US relations, contemporary audiences may not question the hostility of Iranians toward Americans as depicted in the film, but the filmmakers never quite explain that this was the very moment when the cozy relationship between the U.S. and a key ally turned incredibly sour.

More important, however, is the absence of any Iranian perspective. Only one Iranian

imagecharacter in the film rises above the level of caricature, Sahar (Sheila Vand), the Taylor’s housekeeper. Her discomfort with the presence of the Americans in the household is eventually outweighed by her discomfort with the local komiteh—the ubiquitous neighborhood “committees” that sprang up after the Revolution to police the capital block by block—who become suspicious of the ambassador’s long-term “guests.”  Sahar is eventually shown fleeing to neighboring Iraq, but it’s never quite explained why she needs to flee and what the repercussions of her remaining in Iran would have been. The scene is, instead, played tongue in cheek, meant to encourage audiences to roll their eyes at the thought of Iraq representing “safety.”

Argo also misses the opportunity to show that this is the period when many Iranians began to distrust the Revolutionary government.  The 1979 Revolution brought together many disparate groups with different political agendas united by a common goal: deposing the hated Shah. Each group had wildly differing views of what should happen next: Khomeini’s forces, which were eventually successful, wanted to establish an Islamic Republic. Others wanted liberal democracy, still others a Marxist state allied with the Soviet Union, and some fringe groups wanted Iran to splinter along ethnic and linguistic lines. The backdrop of the events portrayed in Argo is the consolidation of Khomeini’s rule and the liquidation of its opponents.

There are brief glimpses of these tensions: during the Embassy siege, Cora Lijek (Clea DuVall) insists that the Iranians in the waiting room be allowed to leave first. “They’ll get in serious trouble if they’re caught applying for U.S. visas,” she explains, but the comment is lost among the turbulence of the moment and never revisited. That Iran is a bad place to be an American is reiterated repeatedly, but never quite explained.

Millions of Iranians fled the country during the revolution when they realized that what they initially took to the streets for—replacing the authoritarian rule of the Shah with a government that better represented them—would fail to bear fruit.

image

While it could be argued that this is not the story Argo set out to tell—and, indeed the story that Argo does tell is well spun—the film has missed an opportunity to remind its viewers that the story of Iran’s revolution is a tragic tale with many victims besides the American hostages. It misses the opportunity to humanize the Iranian people as they slowly come to realize that they have deposed one dictator for another, and that this continues to be the state of affairs in that country.

Given the current state of Iranian-western relations, dehumanizing Iranians and ignoring the complexities of Iranian society and history only furthers misunderstanding.

You might also like:

An article by Tony Mendez entitled, “A Classic Case of Deception: How the CIA Went Hollywood” describing his recollections of the operation.

 
A BBC interview with one of the hostages.
 

Photo Credits:

US embassy employee Barry Rosen after being taken hostage in 1979 (Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Film still of Ben Affleck portraying CIA agent Tony Mendez

Ruhollah Khomeini returning to Iran, February 1, 1979 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Anti-Shah protestors demonstrating in Tehran, December 27, 1978 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines: See Wikipedia:Non-free content.

The Strength of Women in the Iranian Revolution

by Claudia Espinoza

Read the Full Research Paper
See the complete list of Claudia’s primary and secondary sources

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 affected the lives of all Iranian citizens, especially women. Claudia Espinoza illustrates how Ayatollah Khomeini’s new theocratic government implemented segregationist policies that drastically changed the dress code, legal rights, and professional opportunities available to Iranian women. Espinoza emphasizes that while women’s overall role in Iranian society was and remains restricted relative to Western standards, some women have embraced the traditional, desexualized aethetic ushered in by revolutionary reform.

image

Women in east Iran watch Allied supply trucks en route to the Soviet Union during World War II.

image
An Iranian newspaper clip from 1968 reads: “A quarter of Iran’s Nuclear Energy scientists are women.” The picture shows some female Iranian PhDs posing in front of Tehran’s research reactor.

image
Anti-Shah demonstrators marching near a shopping street in Tehran in December 1978.

image
Supporters strain to catch a glimpse of the Ayatollah Khomeini at the Refah School in Tehran in February 1979.

image
Two Iranian women wear different versions of the hijab scarf: one is a single scarf that reveals the women’s hair. The other consists of two scarves that cover the woman’s hair entirely.

Individual Historical Paper
Senior Division
Teachers: Linda E. Kleeman, Mari Glamser, Stephen Martin

Photo credits:
Photographer unknown, “Near East Iran – truck convoy of US Supplies for USSR,” 5 June 1943
Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum via Wikimedia Commons
Photographer unknown, Untitled, 1968
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
David Burnett, “Anti-Shah demonstrators marching near a shopping street in Tehran,” 27 December 1978
Courtesy of Parsine.com via Wikimedia Commons
David Burnett, “Supporters strain to catch a glimpse of the Ayatollah Khomeini at the Refah School in Tehran,” 3 February 1979
Courtesy of Parsine.com
Hamed Saber, “S+F-N”, 13 July 2007
Courtesy of Hamed Saber/Flickr Creative Commons

Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

In the wake of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, many try to predict whether Islam can exist together harmoniously with democracy. imageIn this book, Bayat successfully dismantles the presumptions that constitute this discourse, by stating in the beginning that “the question is not whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy, or by extension, modernity, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make them compatible.” In order to answer this question Making Islam Democratic closely examines the different trajectories of two countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds: Iran and Egypt. Specifically Bayat asks why Iran produced an Islamic revolution, while Egypt developed only an Islamic Movement.

Bayat first analyzes Iran as a “revolution without movement,” arguing that as a result of years of a repressive political system the clergy failed to build social infrastructures and thought that the way to gain political influence would be to “recruit” the intellectual elites to their side. While they were successful in creating national-religious discourse among the intellectual elites, they “lost” the masses to other ideologies, such as Socialism, Marxism, and Secularism. The public heavily consumed western cultural products, magazines, movies, and books. During the revolution in 1979, the different sectors “were pushed into the arms of Shi’a clergy” to lead the revolution, but sectarianism remained present and vital.In Egypt, on the other hand, the Islamic parties could not participate in the political game, but succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the population by establishing a wide system of education, healthcare, banking and social welfare that benefitted the poor and traditional population of Egypt. The decision of the Egyptian ‘ulema (Muslim jurists) not to attempt to take over the government but rather to win the population allowed them work and prosper with government consent, and was therefore able to influence and Islamize society, which became significant later (as recently seen). This model can be useful to some extent in looking at other instances such as Turkey and Jordan.

Bayat has succeeded in writing a clear and jargon-free book. He supports his argument on profound research in these two telling case studies. This book eloquently refutes many common beliefs and anxieties about Islam and democracy.

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