The tumult in Iran since the June 12 presidential election is, without a doubt, the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. No other occurrence — not the Iran-Iraq war, not the 1989 turmoil that sidelined Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, until then the designated successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and led to revamping the constitution, not the rise of reformist politics in the late 1990s — has shaken the system so deeply.
Bakalian, Anny and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
Bashkin, Orit. The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Benedict, Helen. The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).
In March 2007, when President (and General) Pervez Musharraf suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Pakistani lawyers took to the streets in large numbers. It was a dangerous street where they were met with batons, barbed wire, tear gas, bullets and bombs. If their immediate demand was Chaudhry’s return to the bench, the incipient goal of their movement was restoration and respect for the rule of law. Over the last two years, protesting lawyers fundamentally transformed the political landscape in Pakistan.
The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 soldiers battling 5,000 guerrillas; and more than a thousand dead, mainly militants according to available counts but also soldiers and of course civilians.
Abdel-Latif, Omayma. In the Shadow of the Brothers: The Women of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2008).
Al-Ali, Nadje and Nicola Pratt. What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. 2003-2007 Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans (Washington, DC, December 2008).
I recently visited a small Turkish village that seemed in many ways similar to the 1950s Iraqi village Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, known to her friends as B.J., described in her now classic ethnography, Guests of the Sheikh, from the muddy lanes to the daily lives of its men and women. Having just learned of B.J.’s death on December 2, 2008 at age 81, I thought a lot about her while I was there, about how we are all part of a chain of experience that links one generation to the next and about how my own experience of fieldwork — and how I try to live my life, teach, and mentor my students — is still inspired by her example. A few days after I returned to Istanbul, I went to an exhibit of Orientalist paintings and came face to face with a life-size portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wife of the British consul to the Ottoman Empire who in 1716-1718 lived in Istanbul, learned Turkish and wrote about her experiences visiting the Ottoman harems with enormous sensitivity and ethnographic detail, the first foreign woman to do so. B.J. was a link in that line of compassionate, humanistic observers of the Near East going back to Lady Montague and forward to the rich and dense circle of fellow travelers forged among the many women that B.J. mentored.
“Simplicity has disappeared,” laments Minoo Shahbazi, energetic at 50, and animated in the cheap manteau and black scarf she wears beneath her chador. Look at her 16-year old son, she says: “He likes to wear famous brand-name clothes. Obviously, I do not agree. He is very different from me.”
It is characteristic of modern social revolutions to seek moral improvement of the population, as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”; in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other clerical leaders, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not only a seizure of political power, but also the moment of revival of Islamic morality, which had been systematically weakened by the secular Pahlavi regime. The clerics set out to build in Iran “a spotless society.” [1]
Baluchistan, a region long associated with instability and armed conflict, straddles the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan is home to the largest number of Baluch, at 5 million, and the largest province of Baluchistan, at 43 percent of the country’s land mass. In Iran, the Baluch, who are mainly Sunni Muslims, share the province of Sistan and Baluchistan with ethnically different Persians and Sistanis, who are mainly Shi‘i Muslims. There are Shi‘i Baluch, as well, living in Makran, as the southernmost part of the province is known, especially in a region called Bazman. The province comprises 11.5 percent of Iranian land and has around 2.5 million inhabitants, around 4 percent of the national population.
Since the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the burning economic issue in Iran has been the privatization of public assets and, more recently, the elimination of subsidies for a vast array of goods and services. Leading figures, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have called the privatization program “an economic revolution.” [1] But it is not only the economy that private ownership is supposed to rescue. There seems to be a consensus across the political and ideological spectrum that public ownership of economic assets is the cause of a host of social and political ills, from authoritarianism to corruption and nepotism.
