This paper examines the presentation of the history of Iran in the Iranian textbooks and how this representation correlates with students’ perceptions of the country’s past. Using methods of discourse analysis, the author reviews the images of the past that are offered explicitly or implicitly in the textbooks through inclusion and exclusion of certain eras and/or events, as well as through a variety of interpretations and normative descriptions,. Since an essential element of a comprehensive textbook analysis study is the response of the targeted audience of the books, qualitative interviews with students are going to be conducted to understand how they perceive Iran’s history and, more importantly, whether they consider the textbooks as legitimate sources of historical information. For long, textbooks have been considered as an important part of the modern educational systems and text analysis studies have been conducted extensively on their content and pedagogy. Furthermore, textbooks are considered to be an essential element in any design by a political system to protect social or national cohesion, to shape the narratives of the past, and to create a particular national identity in the younger generations. In addition, analysis of the textbook accounts of the history of a country following major political transformations has been of special interest for educational researchers and historians as it provides rich data for better understanding of how the new system is trying to create the new identity by formulating and representing new interpretations of the past. However, such studies are generally absent from the literature that studies Iran’s educational system. Three decades after the revolution of 1979, it remains long overdue to study Iran’s textbooks to see how they are influencing students’ perspectives towards their own past and their national identity. This paper is intended to be one of the first attempts to address this gap in the scholarship. For this study, the analysis is focused on middle school history textbooks as they cover the history of Iran before the 1979 revolution. The interviews are conducted with students who have finished middle school and therefore have already been exposed to the textbooks under study. The findings of the text analysis show that the images of the country before the revolution are mostly negative with a focus on the failures of the monarchies. Also the role of religious figures in different eras of history is presented as the most influential in the country's development.

The reforms made to Pahlavi era elementary textbooks by the Islamic Republic of Iran have been well-documented in the literature. This project is the first to analyze changes made to textbooks exclusively within the postrevolutionary period. Drawing on original research carried out during 2008-2009 in the archives of Iran's Ministry of Education, I show that the religious and political messages found in postrevolutionary elementary Farsi textbooks (Grades 1-5) have been highly unstable and inconsistent over the past 30 years. The curriculum contains four distinct phases, most notably the radical Islamicization of primers in the period 1987-1989, a full eight years after the revolution and not during the Cultural Revolution of 1980-1983 as is routinely asserted by scholars. More than just primers, these textbooks serve as the foundation of the state's project to produce the New Islamic Citizen by providing young students with their first exposure to the ideology of the Revolution and the official values of the Islamic Republic. This research demonstrates that internal struggles to consolidate the revolution as well as to institutionalize the postrevolutionary Ministry of Education continued well after the 1979 Revolution. I conclude that schooling can provide a powerful lens for understanding competition and shifting power between political groups in the Islamic Republic, and should not be seen as functional ideological apparatuses.

Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari and Abdolkarim Soroush have taken an unexpected hermeneutic turn in how they deal with the concept of revelation (wahy). This turn, which began germinating nine years ago in Soroush’s book “Bast-e Tajrobe-ye Nabavi (the Expansion of the Prophetic Experience)”, questions the unqualified and categorical orthodoxy of the Qur’an as “kalam Allah” and makes an effort to problematize the finality of revelation (wahy). In August of 2007, Shabestari also began publishing a series of six articles on the topic. Both Shabestari and Soroush, although using different methodologies and arguments, have suggested that the Qur’an however inspired and conceived by God, is itself already “at some level” an interpretation by the prophet and not the divine word. In effect, Shabestari and Soroush, in an attempt to reconcile modernity and tradition anthropomorphize the message and in doing so, try to make the Qur’an less authoritative. I argue that neither Shabestari nor Soroush present us with workable models and therefore fail at what they set out to do. What they have accomplished is a dialogue that dared to question the orthodoxy, a dialogue that resulted in an academic conference on the topic in Qom, an event that by its very existence, and despite the theocracy’s monolithic nature, acknowledges the peaceful co-existence and tolerant interaction of multiple Islams within Iran. This coexistence is nothing new, but the boundaries have never been pushed this far and response has never been this enlightened. This radical kind of Islam, questions the givenness of the Qur’an, making the text less foundational in epistemological terms. While the Qur’an as the mediated word of God (through the prophet) has already clarified what is supposed to be “significant” in Islam, in choosing to consider the word of God as Muhammad’s interpretation of wahy, Soroush and Shabestari are preparing the means by which to construct a new system of religious significance for themselves. In Soroush and Shabestari’s redefinitions of the Qur’an, it now becomes less problematic for the already humanly-produced text to undergo another signification process which is more in tune with current historical and cultural needs. The doors of ijtihad become open to otherwise unimagined degrees. Most importantly, in current day Iran, “creative ijtihad” seems to operate in a far less restricted arena and does so with the tacit agreement of the orthodoxy.

Since the 1970s, scholars of contentious politics have employed political process and opportunity structure models to analyze the emergence, trajectory, and outcome of the interactions between states and social movements (most notably Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow). These studies aptly identify state policies as the most critical factor in shaping the responses of social movements. Yet these studies have been limited by their almost exclusive focus on the interactions between states and contenders within Western democracies. In this paper, I re-theorize and extend the political opportunity structure model by applying it to an authoritarian context, namely post-revolutionary Iran. Drawing on new data that I gathered from census figures, state and oppositional newspapers, and interviews with dissidents and state officials, I offer answers to the following questions: first, why and under what circumstances does an authoritarian state allow certain forms and degrees of contention despite the state’s continued repressive capacity? Secondly, what are the outcomes of the strategic interactions between this state and its contenders? At this juncture, I examine the interactions between state repression and oppositional currents and illustrate that despite the state’s violent repression of dissidents during the 1980s, the decline of social movements, and the demobilization of many well-organized and armed opponent groups, contenders returned to the political scene in the early 1990s with new forms of activism. Unlike activists during the 1980s, they implemented and continue to utilize non-violent tactics and innovative repertoires. I demonstrate that novel forms of protests were partially tolerated and unintentionally facilitated by the state due to its devastating loss of legitimacy in the aftermath of its failure to achieve its objectives in the Iran-Iraq War, its massive abuse of human rights in the 1980s, sweeping demographic changes, and the fragmentation of the ruling elite after the death in June 1989 of the charismatic leader and only unifying figure of the Islamic regime, Ayatollah Khomeini. The fragmentation of the ruling elite, the complex structure of political systems in Iran, and the existence of many formal and informal competing centers of power provided the contenders with new space and opportunity for mobilization. The weakening of the state’s legitimacy and its standing impelled it to open partially in order to stabilize its position. I conclude that such opening increases the opportunity for the emergence of non-violent social protests for participation and mobilization, which ultimately may promote democratic transformation in the long run.