Readings: Adib-Moghaddam's "Iran In World Politics"

This past Sunday was particularly hot, and both jet lag & yesterday night required that for once I'd take it easy, so I simply ended up reading another book related to the trip

Last week Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's "Iran In World Politics"(Columbia University Press, 2008), a scholarly affair that has just been published. I had never heard of the author, an iranian currently at the University of London.

This book was featured quite prominently in the bookstore where I found it (Montreal's "Indigo Livres Musique & Cafe" bookstore), but interestingly no real review seems to exist on the web yet.

A somewhat pretentious introduction positions this book (which is in reality a collection of four long essays) as an "out of the box" research output, i.e. a work challenging the status quo in terms of consideration of Iran politics, especially from an international standpoint. This might be true for a North American audience, but on the other hand I did not find this work to be as provocative as promised

The first essay deals with the formation of the collective sentiment of nationalism rooted in the Islamic revolution of 1979. The phenomenon is de-structured in a "theoretical" manner inspired by the Frankfurt school of philosophy (Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer). This essay attempt to explain how the Islamic Revolution, and the subsequent movements, were perceived "from inside", i.e which kind of self-awareness existed in Iran in the 70s.

The second essay employs a similar apparatus for the Iran-Iraq war. Also in this case the discussion tends to become focused (sometimes fastidiously) on the "relative perception" of the actors. I personally did not find anything shocking in the discussion of how Saddam's status in world politics in the 80s was favored by the West, especially the US, as these piece of information have become common knowledge in the last few years. Similarly, the fact that the Iran-Iraq was falls outside any (true or false) Persian-Arab rivalry, is equally nothing new, as Saddam's Baathist regime was itself superimposed to Iraq.

The third essay deals with the spin on Iran provided by the neo-con in the US. This essay is a bit more factual, and one can find a few interesting reconstructions of the neo-conservative mantra. Whoever has been following US politics in the last 5-10 years in some level of detail will find nothing extraordinarily new, as the main characters here are the usual suspects, e.g. Richard Perle, David Frum (the celebrity speechwriter who invented the "axis of evil" expression), and many others of the same clique.

The last essay provides a glimpse of the complexities of the Iranian society to demonstrate the existence of a pluralist society in Iran, with democratic and reformist tensions. The main goal is to show that Iran is not a "monolithic" and bellicose country as often portraied in the context of certain political discourses.

The main target of this book appears to be the ordinary Westerner, whose knowledge of Iran may very well be limited to the occasional Bush declaration. On the other hand the style of this book, and its extensive usage of academic "conceptualization" are such that it is very difficult to see it becoming massively popular in the West (not to mention that it presume some level of background knowledge on the last few decades of Iran). Definitely not an entry-level type of work.

(written in Rome)