Welcome to, uh, the second iteration.
Um, community centres, Fridays, seminars. I know it's been a packed two weeks, so.
And here my second week. But to me it's, you know, like, for one week.
I don't know about you guys. Um, but, uh, it is my absolute great pleasure to introduce our guest tonight, Professor Magnus Ravi.
Well, I hope there as a friend, as a mentor. I owe her a lot of, like, amazing conversations and, um, a lot of the ways I think about it.
Uh, nowadays, uh, there's a chance. Professor of history and the director for research at the Crown Centre for Media Studies at Nice University,
and she's currently working on a book about the revolutionary generation in Iran titled The Intimate Lives of a Revolution, Iran, 1979.
I believe we will be hearing about a chapter of, uh, this book in the making tonight.
She has received fellowships from the Andrew and Muller Foundation,
the American Council of Learning Societies, and, uh, the American Academy in Berlin.
And her work on the 1979 Revolution has been published in history and has, uh,
International Journal of Media Studies and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
She also writes about Iran on her Substack, uh, called These Are the Two True Things.
I highly recommend you read them, but fascinating. Um, she is currently an academic visitor at the media centre at Saint Anthony's College.
So do, uh, take advantage of this opportunity?
Um, okay. Uh, without trying to do that?
Thank you, ma'am, uh, for that introduction. It's such a great pleasure to be here.
I mean, this whole roll, this this section is just people I know and I love, and so it's such an honour.
Um, I do want to, uh, thank the Middle East Centre for having me as a speaker and also as a visitor.
You might not remember this, but back in 2014, this project was nothing but, you know, a spark in my eye.
And I was just thinking it through. I emailed Eugene, I had never met him before and I said I was in London.
I don't remember why it was, but I remember that email. Usually. I said, can I come to Oxford and give a talk?
And Eugene, who is the fastest email responder in the world, hands down, immediately wrote back to say, who are you?
Then say why? He like, yes, of course. And so the seed of this project in some ways was born at the Middle East Centre.
Um, this building didn't exist, and that's how old I am. And how far goes was.
Um, so I find it. I'm really excited to come back.
Be here among you to talk about a new chapter that I have not talked about anywhere before, and I'll just be playing around with ideas.
So thank you for having me. Um, now, before I start, though, I do want to take a moment and remember Professor Roy Patterson.
Once I had that, um, who passed away this summer. The reason I mention him is that, uh, uh, it's his memorial today at Harvard.
Um, right. Like, in a couple of hours. And, um, so I just thought you're going to see the footprints of his work all over my project.
And I just wanted to take this opportunity to say how grateful I am, um, to have been his students.
And how much is that? All right, let's move on.
Hmm. Revolutions have always been obsessed with families.
This was true for the French Revolution, as it was for the Iranian Revolution.
Revolutionary movements draw from the affective powers of family to mobilise for their cause.
And revolutions meant, when successful, make reshaping the family one of their first post-revolutionary acts.
Take, for example, the French Revolution. Whereas Lynn Hunt has shown the 18th century revolutionaries quote,
had a kind of collective political unconscious that was structured by narratives of family relations,
whereby the disappointing father and the bad mother, Louis the 16th and Marie-Antoinette, were metaphorically dead first and then literally beheaded.
If you want his case. The 1979 revolutionary signalled their ideals of social justice by recasting the nation as a collective
of sisters and brothers Paradise together in their struggle against the Shah and global imperialism.
Yet when it comes to writing and theorising revolutions, the family is not as a metaphor but as a space of ideas of politicisation,
and mobilisation is generally kept out of the interpretive framework.
We focus instead on big thoughts like ideology structures and intellectual underpinnings against the vastness of revolution.
The family is perhaps too small to contain and too intimate, and props for whoever can figure out where I am.
It'll be up enough that you'll have time to not listen to me, but look at it.
But the Intimate Lives of revolutions are exactly what I have been interested in for.
As I mentioned the past decade or so, when I first began to interview Iranians from a wide spectrum of backgrounds about the experiences of 1979.
And my book, as Mariam mentioned, is a history of the social and cultural milieu that shaped the revolutionary generation,
informing the choices that they made. To take part will not take part in the revolution.
As someone you may know, the recurring puzzle of the Iranian Revolution for scholars and even some of the former participants,
is why did so many different political groups take part in mass demonstrations in late 1978 that were indisputably led by clerics at that moment?
What made the communists, the Maoists, the nationalist, the secular answer the call to rise up by people such as I love Khomeini.
The underlying question for many is a plaintive were we didn't.
Were we naive? Was the revolution stolen?
So by focusing on the lives of the revolutionary generation up to the moment of the revolution in February of 1979,
my book argues that the vast and seemingly contradictory alliance that brought
the revolution about not only made sense to its participants at the time,
but was the essence of the revolution itself. The decision to take part in the demonstrations of late 1978 was made years or even decades before,
not in the streets, but in the intimacy that exists between a reader and a book,
the kitchen sink conversations between families and friends, and love between comrades,
and the emotions and joy of fear that are evoked by revolutionary struggles and post-revolutionary despair.
These were often deemed too obvious to elaborate on by my interviewees.
I want to know this, they would ask. Everybody knows this.
I mean, we knew that, they would say. And to paraphrase the wonderful German novelist Jenny,
harken back the trick to capturing the experiences of the revolutionary generation, it turns out, is to make the obvious unhappiness.
So today, let's do that together.
I'd like to turn our attention to the family and the crucial, transformative role that it played in the shaping of Iran's revolutionary generation.
Specifically, I'm going to talk about two aspects of the family in the late Pablo Iran.
First, the family as a if not this phase of politicisation in the 1960s and 70s,
I had too much politicisation was not that hard to say at the time, but it did so many times.
Um, so that's the first one as the space and second, the multigenerational family as one of the few multi ideological spaces at the time.
And what that can tell us about Iran's multi ideological revolutionary alliance underlying all this, I'm going to talk about a paradox.
I think a strange paradox,
namely that the specificity of pandemic repression between 1963 to 1977 turned the family into a crucial node for a radical mass social movement,
a revolution at a time when the family itself remained a bastion of social conservatism.
So to illustrate these plants, and in the interest of time, um,
I'm just going to be sharing with you a tiny, very small number of what my each of you talked about.
But I wanted to let you know that I change, as I agreed upon with the the names, the hometowns of any identifying markers.
And I'll talk about a little bit of what you guys. But first, because if I don't say it, you're going to ask me in Q&A.
What do I mean by generation? So the definition of generation that I use here is a variation of that employed by R.F. foster in the magnificent book.
You must be in this book, this thesis about revolutionaries at the turn of the 20th century.
And what he says is that they are mainly a group of groups, not necessarily made up of people born at the same time,
who conceive of themselves as bonded together by cultural mentality and social circumstances.
And here, as you can tell from how I read it, the operating term is they conceive of themselves as a generation,
i.e. in the sense and I'm quoting here, in which they are not born but made a generation.
And if you study anything remotely connected to revolutions, you'll hear reflection of theta Scotch,
the sentence about the Iranian revolution, that it did not come and was made.
Foster is not in conversation with that, but I found with an interesting parallel.
Um, so he continues a generation made not only by conscious processes of identification and rejection in the lives of the protagonists,
but also retrospectively in their megabase and then their control of the larger territory of official and social memory.
So, building on this idea, when I talk about the revolutionary generation in Iran,
I am speaking predominantly of a generation made in the 1960s and 70s when they became
politicised and eventually such even mobilised for oppositional activities and generation,
to quote, foster it again, having given their attention to critically assess the status quo conceived of themselves as bent on transformation.
This notion of a generation made rather than worn.
Feeds into the concept of family that I use, because you will also ask me about family if I know.
Um, and the idea of the family goes beyond the nuclear family to encompass relatives such as uncles,
aunts, cousins and households i.e. non blood members who live in the same household with people.
In other words, we're talking here about kinship networks of trust.
So just to give a short little landscape also kind of numbers are perfect way to procrastinate.
According to the 1976 census data, there were roughly 5 million households in Iran in both urban and rural areas.
Some of the numbers for those who live you can read at Persian are up here.
So of these households, about 5.5% were defined as a household of one.
And about 25%, which is the largest percentage, were households of seven people or more.
Not surprisingly, if you can read the numbers, you will see that there was no real development surprise,
no real difference in the average size of a household between a rural and urban areas.
I was really shocked.
Now this is happening in a population that from 1966 to 1976, grew by roughly 23%, and the urban population jumped by about a third.
So that's on the eve of the revolution. Half of Iran's public population was living in cities by taxi.
Through all of this, Polanyi bonds family values and structures from dating to general rules to even whether you watch television or not,
remained quite conservative. In 1967, on a series of top down legal changes called Family Protection Law were enacted.
These changes aim to kerb the power of the men in the family, primarily by making arbitrary date for the much more difficult.
This was done also partly by changing the legal position of women, i.e. providing more legal rights to them,
but without social work to transform their positions in society, which in essence means that the structure of the family was kept intact.
So while divorce rates decreased in the first half of the 1970s because of the family protection law,
female informants in urban areas saw a decline in the 1970s from 9.9% female employment rate in 1966.
We go down to 7.5% in 1971.
I am again after this modernising series of laws.
And then it raises up again to 9% by 1977, which is the same rate it had been in the 1950s.
Among complex socioeconomic reasons. Taryn Plano, whose wonderful book on everyone should read again, gifts for the straw.
What stands out to me is the power that states encouragement of women to become homemakers, even as it's even as a habit is modernising efforts.
Part of this comes from the man at the top, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who presented himself as, quote, the undisputed head of the family and the nation.
He infamously told Oriana Fallaci in an interview in 1973, I am the six years after the family protection law that quote,
in a man's life, women can only if they're beautiful and graceful and know how to say feminine.
And this woman's live business, for instance, what do you feminists what?
What do you want? Equality, you say? Indeed.
I don't want to seem rude, but you may be equal in the eyes of the law.
But not, I beg your pardon for saying so in the bill.
So how was it going back to the first of the paradox that I mentioned at the time.
How was it that despite the persistence of conservative gender values and traditional family structures,
the family became the primary side of politicisation and dissent against the state?
To be understand the how and why. I begin with a question that I asked everyone that I interviewed.
How did you become political? How did you become CSC?
Their answers shared a pattern. It was rarely one thing.
It was not linear and it wasn't even consistent.
But more than a specific political idea, it was the presence of politics in their family that more often than not, triggered a political awakening.
Take, for example, that. This is not that.
This is a child. But I didn't want you to keep looking at the previous pictures.
I just put this because you can't know that it's. So take, for example, that Max, who was 19 when the revolution happened,
and since then he has actually spent many years in prisons in the Islamic Republic for continuing his political activism.
Ramos is from a small provincial town near Tehran, from what he himself calls an ordinary religious family.
And what he means by that was my family went to the cinema.
They lived a normal life like everybody else, but they weren't religious.
His political activism itself also always remained within the religious spectrum of revolutionary thought,
which he defines when I ask him what is a religious revolutionary?
He defines as demanding justice and believing in this, you know, how did you become political?
I asked him as we sat in a very noisy park. It was 1974, he said without skipping a beat.
Well, I had been interested in history since I was a kid.
My father had had political and political inclinations, but did not like politics.
He was religious and even educated Khomeini, but would always say to me, serve the people, but don't become political.
Rana's maternal uncle had been a member of Iran's Communist Party today,
but the shock and disappointment of the 1953 clue that toppled Mohammad in Mossad there had turned him against it off.
He was a realist. That told me. In 1974, when I was 14, he had read the popular allegorical story The Little Rat Blackfish,
where the eponymous fish goes out into the world, kills a fish eating heron to liberate all the others, and dies in the process.
That is, does not do the story justice, but the book ends with 12,000 fish hearing this heroic tale from their grandmother.
And what little redfish now dreaming of the sea?
Well, that black says to me. I understood then that the shock was bad.
He kept reading political books, which would then get to his mother to hide from him.
I was scared of my father, so my mom would be a go between two stock fights between me and my father more than anyone else.
My mother has paid the price for me becoming political.
Now, as you may have noticed, that has answers to my question was all over the place.
You read a book? His uncle used to be a communist. His father was religious.
He was scared of his father. His mom was protective.
But the picture that he paints perfectly captures how the intimate space of the family, imbued with politics, can lead to a political awakening.
This was respected in so many of the other interviews that I did, so I'll just mention one more,
which was with Wally, a budding artist in the 1970s who actually believed in her political awareness.
She made a point of saying, I didn't do political activity, but I was for the revolution.
So she attributed it to her family and talked about it almost as if it was just like, inevitable.
It was a natural phenomenon. A well known to this figure had been her second cousin.
Several of her uncles had been important tribal leaders who had been killed by the father,
better shot when they had opposed the forced settlement of tribes.
Overall, six members of her extended family had been killed by one person that be king or another.
Her revolutionary inclinations, she told me, had the malaria roots.
This familial roots of politicisation is what Karen Kent, with calls the quote, family traditions of resistance in the context of Latin America.
She proposes this term instead of drawing reference political cultures of opposition,
which is how people usually talk about this because, she says, the former can,
quote, explain why a particular person picked up a tradition of resistance,
whereas another, raised in the same culture but in a different family did not.
End quote. Importantly, can't work notes and you have it here.
Clearly, others socialised in networks such as schools or churches help to explain why some sees the cultures of opposition that are valuable to them.
But families are probably the most important socialising networks because of their universality and intimacy.
They are almost always ignored by revolutionary theorists,
and in presenting the myriad stories of women guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua, El Salvador, chatbots and Cuba,
Kaplan demonstrates how young women became politicised in Christian communities and labour organisations and peasant organisations and student groups.
In addition to the family, these spaces provided platforms and networks that transition them into guerrilla groups and armed resistance.
They were, she notes, and I'm quoting here, here, safe spaces for recruiting as well as well,
as well as opportunities for girls to acquire basic organising skills and wealth.
But by the late 1960s, in Iran, safe spaces for recruitment had dwindled to almost entirely.
Networks of AI, family and friends.
Due to the specific form and extent of the pandemic.
State's repressive policies. Between 1963, when a perfect storm of events, the White Revolution and capitulation,
the seminary protests of the 15th of 42 that eventually Khomeini's exile set the monarchy off on a new stage of repression.
And then 19 between 1963 and then 1977, when there was a relative relaxation,
the Pahlavi state more or less clamped down on any and all types of political or sociopolitical spaces.
Famously, certain words such as well, let's work, which means rose,
was banned in public for fear that the speaker was referring to a conservative, Sophie,
who became a household name with his passionate courtroom defence of himself and his comrades, was televised before he was sentenced and put to death.
Those years were also the years when the to the party, which was crucial for the politicisation of an earlier generation,
as I mentioned, and even some of the revolutionary generation was driven underground and abroad.
What remained of the two dead, though, for the purposes of our story, um,
were older family members with lives, spark and the younger generation with stories about their past.
And by giving them copies of such Soviet classics as Nikolai Ostrovsky is How the Steel Was Tempered and Maxim Gorky's Mother.
Even though these books at some point were understood to have been banned,
and the prison sentences for just having them was increased to 2 to 4 years.
So a lot was at stake in just getting the book. While many in the revolutionary generation were born into the tail end of the
two that a National Front party hardly activities like others around the globe,
the revolutionary generation came to embrace global, um,
guerrilla warfare and their set the armed struggle movement in Iran announced its birth in the and the mountains of the forests of Cat,
a village on the Caspian Sea where a group of guerrilla fighters attacked the local police station.
It was a failure.
Yet despite the stretch, the tragic end of the incident, the death of two policemen, the eventual execution of all 13 guerrilla fighters well,
not up, but and the village was its complicity in turning them into the authorities.
Sympathies for the guerrilla movements spread like wildfire among university students.
In response, the monarchy shifted gears into a new level of repression, and the security apparatus suffered,
expanded its everyday surveillance of students and their families, recruiting informants in almost all segments of Iranian society.
By 1977, most the most of the leaders and rank and file of the guerrilla organisations were either killed or were in prison.
The small remaining devoted numbers went deep, deep underground until the fall of 1978, when the revolution spilled into the streets.
Now, just as a side note or not a side note, this doesn't mean that there was no political activity,
um, at the time, but it's important to remember that what did exist couched itself in other names.
So it was there were protests in the late 1960s, but they were under the guise of student interest.
They were, for example, the students protested about tuition or um, um, dining hall food,
which is like, you know, a universal place on every student life, as anybody who knows.
Um, and so it was either that or there would be some kind of religious pretext.
But after you can even those public points of protest completely vanished from sight.
So the end result of the range of severity of repression was that the kinds of community spaces available for politicisation,
the care campus writes about in regards to Latin America, were not available to the revolutionary generation in Iran.
Iran's active revolutionary struggles were, for the most part, isolated underground or abroad, and thus disconnected from society.
What did remain were the spaces of families, so these relatively safe and intimate spaces operated on multiple levels.
I really talked about the way in which you can have conversations that you could not have in public and in the homes,
but homes were also where activists hid banal yet subversive objects, such as books.
So this name may be familiar to some of you. Mohammad Ali, who was the Islamic Republic's second president.
He was killed in the bombing in 1982.
So in his case, um, the dual role of the family in terms of what contained it and what it could hide collected.
So in the early 1970s, AJ had his, um, books and pamphlets in his sister's house not exposed to Haskell.
So, you know, they were going to come and get them. Um, he hid them in his sister's basement, which was close to his aunt, and he could go get them.
And he knew that his nephew, who was a university student, had come across one of these books or pamphlets, actually, that he had, um, hid there.
And it was a pamphlet by the Marxist Islamist organisation, which I had.
So the nephew had read it, really liked it, and had handed it to his friends at the university.
Eventually it had made its way to the wrong person, and the Savak arrested the friends, then the nephew, and then at that.
So those sort of other things. So even if you have a very cursory familiarity with the scholarship on the Iranian Revolution,
you could rightly say to me and point about the rich foreign literature that has highlighted, he adds, mosques,
professional associations, associations such as Writers Guild and Lawyers guilds, labour unions particularly in the oil industry,
university seminaries and the bazaar as crucial nodes in the formation of the revolutionary movement.
But many of these analysis, if you pay attention, actually are focussed on the events of 1977 and afterwards when,
as the soft person notes, everybody was mobilising.
Take, for example, the lawyers and Ryker's associations.
They were formed or in the case of the writers associations, reformed in 1977.
And it was only then that they became important spaces for mobilisation.
And the most important example of it is the ten Nights of Poetry at the Guitar Institute, which was, as many of you know,
um, organised by the newly reconstituted Writers Association when thousands of people showed up in the rain.
It was I one day I will write about the fact that it is not photographed.
Um, this and one other photograph is literally the only photographs.
We have sound, but we don't have visuals of it. Um, people stood in the rain for ten days.
And just to hear some of the most famous writers criticise publicly censorship in the shots regime and then lived to tell the tale.
Another very important point when we talk about what scholars usually talk about, which is the mosque,
seminaries, the universities, is that many of these spaces were already under laid with family and kinship ties.
So an I think, again, study of the bazaar, for example, notes that family ties were, quote, a critical mechanism that brought diverse groups together.
Commercial ties were reinforced by family connections.
And then the bazaar, of course, has ties to the clerical networks, as demonstrated in Roy Moore and his mantle of the prophet.
And What's That? It also shows how neighbourhoods that he adds in the neighbourhoods, which he calls, quote,
the only non-government sponsored organisation known to urban members of the lower and middle lower class,
and Quote was formed on the basis of neighbourly contact or more often of villages and regional origins,
where members of the family all settled from the same village, in the same neighbourhood.
Now one consequence of the shrinking of associational political spaces to tiny circles of trust is that,
by necessity, these other associational political spaces become homogenised spaces of thought.
In other words, even if you think about friendship circles in this period,
you would not have a diversity of opinion in your friendship circles because the question was, can you trust this person and to trust this person?
There was this belief that then everybody needed to believe in the same way to go forward.
The stakes were too high. Otherwise, families, on the other hand, serve the spaces in which the revolution's multiple strands of thought,
from secular Marxist to communist to Islamic Marxist,
to traditionalists, to traditional national, religious to nationalist, religious to revolutionary, religious all commingled.
And because it's a family we didn't have to like. So let me give you an example of one of my interviewees, Ajibade,
who was 13 years old when he had his first brush with somebody who entered his
family home and in a port town in south Iran and arrested his 18 year old brother.
So survive arrest, little act as a brother.
His brother was a member of the Secular Society organisation and had been
secretly making flyers using photocopying machines and their father's office,
which was an office that belonged to a very important ministry official.
So I had found out and hauled away to prison.
Now I read to me that because of his brother, he had grown up reading leftist literature,
and he considered himself to be a Marxist in his early teens.
But he had another brother who had actually turned to the Marxist Islamist guerrilla organisation, the Mujahideen.
And then the eldest brother was, quote, either left and or religious.
A year after his brother's arrest, and I was sent away to some really fancy high school in some bigger city.
There he discovered a different type of revolutionary tax and the Marxist ones that he had been reading Islamic ones written by people like Matea,
Blaziken again, WhatsApp, Hadi and Ali Khamenei,
the current supreme leader whose book about the life of the eighth Street Islam I told me was, quote,
full of lessons for the struggle and quote expert joined the school's Islamic association, Anjuman Islami.
He became religious then and he began to pray. And then what was a pattern for this generation?
His turn to religiosity put him on a collision course with his father, who was also religious after all.
He told me his real name was after his father's favourite mosque and their hometown.
The clash between son and father came down to the role each assigned to clerics for his father.
A cleric was a Friday prayer leader at the local mosque.
For I felt it was for me the type of political diversity reflected in eggplants and so,
so many other families was not replicated in other associational spaces such as universities, mosques and guilds.
As I mentioned, for trust to work in those spaces, you need to be certain that everybody belong to the same type of political thought.
But the family, rooted as it was in the ideals of stability and strong kinship ties,
and the fact that the structure remained conservative in that period,
allowed for the mixing of multiple ideologies, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord.
And I personally, for example, the political differences, which was religious,
revolutionary religion, agnosticism, and Marxism did not tear his family apart.
Well, we were good with each other, and the difference between being Muslim or being a leftist had no effect on our feelings towards each other.
What did tear them apart, it turns out, was the death of their mother and the fact that the father remarried.
And another thing that tore them apart was not revolutionary politics, but post-revolutionary politics.
And I'm happy to talk about that. Who are in the company? And just to give you a sense, after the revolution,
the leftist brother was executed during the power struggle between the Khomeini factions and leftist groups.
Another brother of the agnostic one tried to enter post-revolutionary local politics.
But, um was told he can't because he refused to renounce his executed brother.
Brother, who had been declared an enemy of the god. And Ajibade eventually moved to Tekken and rose through the ranks of the Islamic Republic.
Um. I have another story, but I'm just going to keep that because I do want to talk to you guys again.
But there's a sense that it just doesn't give you a sense of in this other story.
I just wanted to show you that it doesn't have to be actually, um, a peaceful everybody getting along,
that these ideological differences could tear the family apart, but in tearing the family apart, never put the people in the family in danger.
So the idea of trust in the family maintained itself.
But those who now person everybody back at, uh, several times.
As you may have noticed, several examples I have presented over the course of my talk contain families whose
points of conflict was not secular versus religious or Islamist versus leftist,
but religious versus religious. This part could be fact reflects a trend that one which I had highlighted in mantle,
the prophet back in 1985, namely, the evolution of the role of the Mullah or the cleric in 1960s Iran.
When the figure of the mullah, a village man of scant education,
preoccupied with his income and narrow minded rulings that the law was replaced with what metalhead calls the activist seminary student,
the activist held up it, who, quote, now became someone whose concerns you could seriously listen to and who seemed to have your well-being at heart.
But, well, what I did located this in the question of rural urban migration.
I'd like to suggest that a deeper dive into the family demonstrates that the following
line for the different meanings of religion or mass heavy was not just migration,
but it was also generational.
So one interviewee speculated to me that the social policies of limiting the role of the cleric in the everyday life of Iranians in the 30s and
40s was so successful that the generation that came to an age in the 1960s and 70s barely had any contact with a cleric in their everyday life.
What they knew instead was the emergent figure of the activist or revolutionary cleric,
who they situated as being closer to other Global South figures of struggle.
Then the whole lot of your. Uh, it.
Hi. Let me. Oh, wow.
I think I skipped a picture. All right. And so. So let me wrap up by asking an elephant question often posed by my colleagues in political science.
So what I love about plasma is another way of asking.
That is, why is it important to tease out the multi ideological space of the multigenerational family?
By the fall of 1978, the political landscape of Iran has fundamentally altered.
Spaces made barren of politics suddenly bloomed in opposition to the Shah.
From oil workers to the bazaars to schools, students, universities and the streets.
Iranians came forth to call for the end to the popularity dynasty.
Some commentators said the people only knew what they didn't want.
They didn't know what they want. Some, like some colonel, said what they wanted was a utopia, an ideal called the Islamic government.
Regardless of where you lie on this. By winter, what had been what had been a struggle for decades became undeniably a revolution where communists,
market, Marxist-Leninist, Islamic, Marxist, secular nationalists and religious nationalists coalesced under the leadership of I told us, Khomeini,
and for a brief moment, society mirrored the family as a space for contrasting diverse political thought.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that revolutions devour their children.
Though frankly, that truth is that it kills its parents.
Those who gave birth to it. This is true for the French Revolution, as it was for the Iranian Revolution, much like the Reign of Terror in France.
That left not just the king, but also the revolution's parents, like Danton and Hobbes.
Beer Atlas. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in April of 1979, a bloody period of purges began.
The Khomeini strand of revolution killed, imprisoned, drove out, and silenced almost every other part of the revolution's coalition.
The violence of this period, and the despair and disappointment that ensued, seeps deeply into the revolution's historiography,
and those engaged in writing about the revolution turned again and again to the same question
why and how did so many strands of thought willingly coalesce around Khomeini and his ilk?
Answers have ranged from the left was duped to everyone was naive, to the cunning of the religious groups,
to the tragedy of the left, to only the Islamists ever really mattered from day one.
But as I hope I have been able to demonstrate to you today, foregrounded the space of the family,
and tracing the role it played in the evolution of the revolutionary generation,
can begin to tug at this forehead again, not revealing how the lines between these diverse strands of thought had always been
porous and the connections between them as intimate as the space of the family and.
Notification. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for, uh, this amazing talk show was to think through and points out I have, um,
quite a few questions, uh, that have been, uh, um, take advantage of this chair, ask the first question, and then it's important.
Uh. You did mention this, um, in different parts of your talk, uh, when, uh,
once when you were talking about how, uh, the, uh, the talk about the hat and the personas and qualities,
mostly about, uh, for the 77 and also when you're talking about the, uh, the group that became known as, uh, Islamist activists.
Um, um, it's rather sort of, uh, about, um, after the revolution.
But I wonder if the family structure and the name of that structure differed different between between this group,
um, the, uh, later colleagues, um, is the familiar say that more the traditionalists, whatever, uh, we call them,
uh,
who were embedded with the neighbourhood communities with the hearts and were with the families supporting such activities for their younger members,
with them being also active within these black neighbourhood communities.
Uh, the, uh, slightly more secular group that that first those who had just come to Tehran from an area that possibly smaller places to,
um, just like study, you are living in dorms and so on and so forth.
So basically an embedded family to to be a part of the family, which I like to tell you why.
I guess that would be mostly these modest information, um, uh, other types of families.
Um, that's such a good question. Um, so, I mean, obviously they're all a different team, right?
So this is the problem when you talk about something like generations,
which is why I actually wanted to make sure that we defined what we're talking about as how people consider themselves,
because otherwise you're going to make other generalisations. And so it's so in that sense of course.
But let's look at whether these are distinctions.
But just as in two things are just enacting the same kind of processes.
But they look just that's going to be versus they're being completely different processes.
Right. Um, and that's something that we just, I, I would have to look at.
But I'm really glad you mentioned the dorms. Um, I'm let me say, actually, one more thing about the embedded families are the two different things.
I mean, you, the two, the families are embedded is very similarly to what you talked about with hats.
If anything,
I just scratched the surface of the fights of the religious families within themselves because for I didn't read about I didn't tell you guys about,
like, having that, um, not very high median story, which is a family of many, as happens with the mother.
So there's a family, there's a masterpiece. The father is not religious, he's not religious.
So he's the most active part of the national park. But the son who's much younger is medical school is.
Almost scientific person, but is religious.
The other son, the narrator, is funny, and the mother is the one who cannot stand that her political son is religious,
because that is not what religion matter. And she, in the sentence he uses,
is that she was intolerant and that the break happens when the family over the
intolerance of the religious mother towards the religiosity of the children.
So I think what I'm trying to do is to ask us all to be a little bit more careful when we're thinking about neighbourhoods, families,
religiosity, that the 1960s, 70s generation had discovered something that was different from their parents and their parents did not.
There were so many stories in the in which, like the well, the religious dad says to the kid,
I didn't read this, but I thought I told you guys about like.
But I paused, so I find his friends are in front of a mosque and they've been sort of mobilised by the mosque.
They come in from the mosque, the structure being, um, anti Shah, uh, slogans, and the military jeep comes and they all run away.
And some girls, he runs away because his dad, who's extremely religious and says this happened and the father says,
what does the Shah have to do for you to stop doing this?
How much do I have to tell you that no good will come out of following us?
Right. So there is nothing but the doormats that you mentioned.
I really glad you mentioned it.
And I wonder if what is important is very, very important because going back to the family that broke up with the mother,
that story was told because what they wanted to say was that sometimes you hid within the safe space of the family, but you hid from the family.
And those who came from provinces to other university in the to dorms did not have to do that.
Absolutely did not have to do that. But their circles then of trust were not multi ideological because there's a
sense of trust where their friendships and friendships were not linked to.
Pretty much. So you have you have absolute. Thank you so much.