As proxy wars between Iran and a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have escalated in the past decade, journalists and commentators have talked of “ancient” Arab-Persian animosities and inevitable Sunni-Shi’i conflict. This paper examines the alliance forged between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the 1970s to suggest an alternative and more politically contingent reading of Iran’s recent relations with Arab states and societies. Drawing on memoirs by former Iranian and Egyptian officials, Iranian and Egyptian newspapers, and US and British diplomatic reporting, this paper highlights the fundamentally anti-leftist and anti-Soviet character of this brief Egyptian-Iranian partnership. As such, it points to the role of competing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary visions of the post-colonial state in the shifting relations of Iran and Arab regimes. In the 1960s, the Shah viewed Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser as a vehicle for Soviet influence and social revolution in the Middle East, while Egypt’s state media condemned the Shah as an imperialist lackey. Relations between the two countries improved rapidly after Nasser’s death in 1970. Egypt’s new President Anwar Sadat shared with the Shah a fear that internal opposition movements drew strength from the backing of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s Arab partners, and the transnational Arab left. The two leaders forged an alliance around neutralizing these forces. This paper argues that the Iran-Egypt partnership of the 1970s facilitated dramatic improvements in Iran’s relations with a number of Arab states. Sadat viewed Iran as a counter-revolutionary enforcer and undertook diplomatic campaigns to convince Arab leaders to accept Iranian intervention outside of its borders. Sadat facilitated the Shah’s rapprochement with Iraq, culminating in the 1975 Algiers Accord, and pushed Iran and Saudi Arabia to overcome their divergent interests. The Shah-Sadat alliance also operated at a global level. As revealed in newly declassified US and British documents, the two leaders coordinated support for anti-communist groups across Africa, including in Ethiopia, Somali, Zaire, and Rhodesia, and used their partnership to gain greater influence and agency vis-à-vis both the US and the Soviet Union. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 rejected the Shah’s counter-revolutionary role in the Middle East. The success of Sadat and the Shah in making Imperial Iran a pillar of a status-quo regional order provides needed perspective on why certain Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have demonstrated implacable hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran from its inception.

Historians frequently slight the independent Hamid al-Din Imamate of North Yemen (1918 – 1962). Much of the current historical literature dwells on the idea that the Imams viewed the outside world with skepticism and suspicion, if not outright hostility. Thus, North Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century has become an example of state sponsored isolationism. Although recent scholarship by Paul Dresch, Uzi Rabi, John Willis and others has begun to reassess the Imamate’s place in the history of modern Yemen, these studies have had a domestic focus. Far too many accounts still accept that the Imamate pursued a policy of isolationism. This paper builds on recent scholarship, but considers the Imamate from the perspective of diplomatic history in the post World War II period. While I do rely on secondary sources to establish a framework and chronology, my conclusions come from an examination of published primary sources in the form of declassified American diplomatic documents from between 1946 and 1954. These documents, including Foreign Service Officer dispatches, memoranda, reports and telegrams, were collected and edited by Ibrahim al-Rashid. To my knowledge, no one has yet utilized them to try and glean a better understanding of Yemeni foreign policy. Examining this body of evidence, I conclude that the label of “isolationist” – so frequently levied against Hamid al-Din Yemen – is patently wrong. In fact, the Imamate sought US economic support in the postwar period and utilized the United States’ superpower status to bolster its successful bid for membership in the United Nations. Once at the UN, Yemen was quick to stake a position on global affairs by voting against the partition of Palestine in the fall of 1947. Furthermore, the American diplomatic sources contain Imam Yahya’s (d. 1948) direct cable to President Truman, expressing his displeasure when the partition resolution passed. Beyond shedding light on the US-Yemeni relationship, a close reading of the American diplomatic sources shows that the Imamate as a whole, particularly under Imam Ahmad (d. 1962), embraced a cautious, but pragmatic foreign policy. This policy combined gradual modernization in Yemen, the promise of future reform – personified by the promotion of the relatively liberal prince Muhammad al-Badr (d. 1996) as heir-apparent – and discreet engagement with Yemeni dissidents abroad in an effort to lessen opposition. Taken together, these sources debunk the “isolationist” label and instead show a conservative regime navigating a complicated geopolitical environment on its own terms.

In the mid-20th century, the Pahlavi government began an exciting initiative as part of its state-building activities: eliminating illiteracy. This initiative involved the formation of the Literacy Corps and the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (also known as Kanun), the construction of youth libraries across the country, and partnerships with foreign entities to produce youth literature. The most impactful of these foreign partners was the Franklin Book Program, an American non-profit funded by the U.S. State Department. This program supported indigenous production of literature, with the goal of increasing education worldwide. On the surface, such a goal appears benevolent and laudable. However, set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the ideological underpinnings of the Franklin Book Program become more complicated. This project argues that the Franklin Book Program was a powerful player in the ideological battle for capitalist and communist influence in Iran during the Cold War. In this project, I seek to analyze the significant role that the Franklin Book Program played in the emergence of children’s literature in Iran. I approach this study through the lens of both political economy and cultural studies, as I parse out the financial and political structures, as well as the ideological motivations, that supported the production and distribution of children’s literature. I will examine how the Franklin Book Program (in partnership with the Kanun), garnered the attention of Iran’s youth by translating American and European literature into Persian, publishing Iranian ancient myth-inspired tales, and developing Persian-language youth-oriented periodicals. Following Matt Sienkiewicz’s argument concerning the motivations behind USAID’s funding of media in Palestine and Afghanistan, I suggest that the content produced with the Franklin Book Program’s finances was secondary to the organization’s primary goal. Drawing on the annual reports and internal correspondence of the Franklin Books Program, I argue that first and foremost, the organization sought to aid the economic development of Iran through education, and that this attempt should be viewed through a capitalist framework. In essence, the program sought to establish capitalist structures and mindsets within the Iranian publishing arena. In addition, by analyzing secondary literature and oral histories, I have been able to map the channels of distribution for this material all over Iran, adding an illustrative visual element to this intriguing history.

Shahr-i Naw (SN) was Tehran’s red-light district from 1909, and it functioned as a giant sex market with around 1,500 prostitutes living and working there until the 1979 Revolution. SN’s existence as “Tehran’s red-light district before the 1979 Revolution” has been only briefly mentioned in some scholarly work; however, the district has not been analyzed as a gendered and politically relevant urban construction in the context of modern Iranian history. This paper is specifically concerned with the 1953 Coup and the two ways that it is related to the history of SN: first, some of SN’s women were among the participants of the Coup, and second, a wall was built around SN immediately after the Coup. Through a series of archival documents, I reflect on the engineered presence of SN’s women in the Coup. I explain how having a female population could represent the Coup as a spontaneous national uprising. I interpret this incident as a political utilization of SN’s women. In this sense, I argue that SN’s women were not merely providers of sexual labor, but were, at times, used to support the state officials’ objectives by their constructed identities as “prostitutes.” As for the wall around the district, I argue that the wall functioned as a tranquilizer for the anxious environment of Tehran after the Coup. It embodied a political boundary between the Mussadiq’s administration and the post-Coup Zahidi’s administration.