In 1914 Mirza Kuchek Khan launched the longest and most popular armed guerilla movement in Iran's history, the Jangali revolt. Over the next few years, Kuchek Khan and his followers battled Tsarist and British forces as, from 1914 until 1917, he led the Jangalis in a military and propaganda campaign against the presence of foreign powers in Iran, their colonial ambitions and their manipulation of the central government. Subsequently, he formed a tentative alliance with Bolshevik revolutionaries culminating in the declaration of a soviet republic in Gilan in June 1920. As long as the Soviets supported the Jangali movement, neither the British nor the Iranian government could make headway. Thus the revolt proved successful enough to force the British briefly to abandon their positions in Resht and Enzeli. However, internal dissent, the withdrawal of Soviet support with the British-Soviet rapprochement in 1921, and communal fear of further unrest stemming from the Russian Civil War, combined to weaken the Jangali. Finally, in late 1921, forces under Reza Khan successfully suppressed the remainder of the movement. Much of the historiography of this period was conducted by Soviet scholars interested in the collaboration of the increasingly radicalized Jangalis with Russian and Iranian Bolsheviks. As such, it was tailored to suit or justify Soviet ideology. More recent scholarship tends to incorporate the Jangali movement within general studies of tribes, rebellions and politics of the period. Therefore, it fails to recognize the unique opportunity that the study of Kuchek Khan’s revolt presents, namely, an analysis of radical nationalism and politically engaged Shi‘ism in the figure of Kuchek Khan and the Jangali revolt. This paper intends to correct this oversight through the analysis of the political and social aims of the Jangali movement. It seeks to determine the reasons for the movement’s longevity as well as the causes that ultimately undermined the revolt. It will also assess the significance of Kuchek Khan to the broad-based support that sustained the movement in Gilan and beyond. The sources employed will include the weekly newspaper Jangal, produced in 1917-1918, the collected letters of Mirza Kuchek Khan, assorted memoirs, and other materials.

During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) Iranians took part in a national debate over whether or not a constitution and a consultative assembly would free them from years of monarchical absolutism and a judiciary system that was grounded in Islamic law [sharia‘] in the hands of Shi‘ite clerics. They wished to free themselves from years of injustice and corruption that supposedly kept Iranians from attaining meaningful liberty and prosperity. Among Constitutionalists, a number of Shi‘ite clerics participated in this discourse which at a glance seem to have been unlikely allies. Mullah Muhammad Kazim Khurasani, the highest-ranking Shi‘ite leader in Najaf at the time who led the clerics, supported the constitution and the parliament by grounding his argument on freedoms that the interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence [fiqh] granted him. Careful not to violate any Islamic value or doctrine, Khurasani supported the Constitutionalists despite opposition from some prominent clerics. He based his argument on the fact that Iranians needed such change, if they were to prosper in the future. He viewed his support as part of his role as a Source of Imitation [marja‘] for many Iranians. That’s what the twelve Shi‘ite imams would have done, he argued, and since he represented the twelfth imam (al-mahdi, who was in hiding only to return at the end of time), he was obligated to protect the rights of the people by supporting new ventures that would improve their conditions. In offering such conclusion for the first time, in addition to the standard scholarship on the era, I examine Khurasani’s Sufficiency of Principles [Kifayat al-usul] (in Arabic), a seminary text that is still taught as part of the seminary curriculum, and his letters (in Persian) to the Qajar royalty including the crown prince, Muhammad Ali (1902), and subsequent letters to Muzaffar al-din Shah until 1907 in addition to correspondents to other constitutional and anti-constitutional leaders, including Fazlullah Nuri and Ayatullahs Bihbahani (the two brothers); and to the Parliament. Through examining and comparing his jurisprudential writings with his political prose addressed to different groups before and during the Constitutional Revolution, this study suggests that a) Khurasani was a pivotal character in success of the Revolution, and, b) he succeeded in his endeavor by not violating Islamic values, but pragmatically interpreting specifically Iranian Shi‘ite doctrines which deemed it necessary for him as a source of imitation to support Iranians in their efforts of establishing these essential institutions.

The Iranian reform era (1997-2004) presents a case rich with possibilities for cultural analysis in view of the salience of explicitly religious and nationalist ideological contention that centered on conflicting interpretations of Islam and the meaning of the Iranian Revolution during this period. Analyses that address the political culture of the reform era have tended to emphasize the role that the legacy of the Iranian Revolution played in empowering opposition elements seeking revision of the status quo, or else in buttressing the position of the conservative regime elements seeking to maintain it. While these analyses identify nationalist Islam and memory of the Revolution as cultural resources utilized by opposing sides in the contentious politics of the reform period, they do not fully explain why opposition groups were unsuccessful in their attempts to use these resources effectively to advance their political agendas. This paper uses a comparative methodology to offer a fuller explanation of the Iranian clerical elite’s success in dividing and dispersing political opposition during the reform period lasting between 1997-2004. Using the cases of Solidarity-era Poland and Revolutionary-era Iran, I carry out a structured comparison in order to identify key variables and causal processes that influenced outcomes in the case of reform-era Iran. I argue that reformist groups were unable to develop powerful unifying symbols to contest public space and push out the Khomeinists, because the wider Iranian political arena was dominated by the cultural legacy of the Iranian Revolution. The reformists were compelled to advance their civil society agenda using the language of nationalist Islam, the Revolution, and Khomeini himself, because these symbols, while subject to conflicting interpretations, nonetheless formed the essential foundation of contemporary Iranian political identity. Rejection and stigmatization of these symbols was (and remains) unthinkable, especially because the Western roots of the reformists’ liberalizing program left them exposed to accusations of foreign influence. Thus, reformists were compelled to operate within, rather than in opposition to, the hegemonic cultural discourse of the regime – in effect reinforcing the legitimacy of the institutions controlled by the conservative clergy. The study relies on a qualitative analysis of the writings, public statements, and speeches of Iranian leaders and opposition figures, translations of parliamentary debates, Iranian media reports, and the relevant secondary literatures.

The central aim of my paper is to delineate a kind of intellectual zeitgeist haunting the Iranian landscape and, arguably, informing the political development of what was to become the revolution of 1979. My central argument in this paper is that, in much of the modern Iranian literature preceding the ‘79 revolution, political sovereignty is characterized as an absolute and totalizing force against which the figure of the revolutionary is posited as the privileged site of individual agency. To begin with, I have isolated two dominant conceptualizations of how some key authors characterize political sovereignty in Iran: as the unmitigated will and whim of the sovereign (texts: Bozorg Alavi’s Her Eyes and Scrap Papers from Prison; speeches by Ayatollah Khomeini); and sovereignty located through assignation of culpability (texts: Alavi’s texts cited earlier; Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Occidentosis and The School Principal; Khomeini’s various speeches; Sadeq Hedayat’s Haji Agha). Set against totalizing narratives of power, we find few outlets for agency in many of these writings. Though the “Iranian people” are evoked constantly, there is virtually no accounting of individual agency within this static invocation of the masses. There is little discussion of how ordinary individuals move within the existent institutional structures, nor about how configurations of power are mitigated regularly in small, commonplace ways. What we do find, however, is the representation of resistance as thoroughly exceptional and as the vocation of a few select individuals. I will outline a series of multi-layered and interpenetrating tropes that operate around the figure of the revolutionary as the hero par excellence: the revolutionary as intellectual; the revolutionary as morally upright; the intellectual as necessarily male. Through these delineations, I argue that because the revolutionary is singularly situated against the machinery of the state, the very possibility of emancipation remains categorically intertwined with him. That is to say, in setting up a strict binary between the revolutionary and the state, many of these texts seem to posit the revolutionary as an idealized countersovereignty. Yet because we don’t often find in these writings the delineation of a force which is projected to replace the power of the state, the result is a literature which aggrandizes the revolutionary-agent who labors to overturn the power of the sovereign, but who is not projected to represent an alternative mode of institutional sovereignty.