Written by a historian of Iran, this volume is a study of the contentious issues of gender and sexuality in modern Iranian politics (19th century to the present day). Afary (history and women’s studies, Purdue) bases her work on the published literature, sources available only electronically, some interviews, and a brief visit to Tehran in 2005. Many books on this subject already exist, but this new one offers a fresh perspective. Afary’s main theme is that veiling and gender separation in Iran preserved male privileges in homosocial spaces that would otherwise be lost if women entered public spaces. She discusses how the Iranian state revived premodern social conventions by reinforcing them through modern means; she outlines the continuing process of producing modern versions of gender inequality.

The inclusion of profiles of some women, such as Zahra Rahnavard (wife of Mir-Hossein Musavi, the runner-up in the tumultuous 2009 presidential election), is informative. With her emphasis on various forms of male homosexuality in Iran through time, Afary has written a useful companion to Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (CH, Jan’06, 43-3098). The volume contains illustrations, including photographs and cartoons, and a lengthy bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. — L. Beck, Washington University, Saint Louis

Read the full article…

Thanks for your response. I am not sure the problem is either the sexual revolution or Western morality per se. I think it is a matter of demographics, education, greater longevity, the breakdown of the extended family as a result of the capitalist economy, and the changing definitions of feminism and women’s rights at the turn of the 21st century.
First, People are living much longer thanks to better sanitation and health measures. Women are going to school longer and getting married much later. Because of greater longevity and lower fertility, marriages last longer, which means unhappy couples have to endure one another for longer periods!

Second, The delay in the age of marriage also means that we have a new phenomenon in the region, a girl who reaches puberty at 12 to 13 but does not get married until much later, sometimes not until her mid twenties or even early thirties. This significant increase in the number of unmarried women without male guardians has created enormous anxieties as it is unprecedented.

Third, greater longevity means an increase in the number of young divorcees or widows who have many potentially sexually active years ahead of them without the guardianship of a husband, father, or brother. In premodern Iranian society, such young divorcees or widows were immediately absorbed into the extended family and became the second or third wife of a married man. Today, polygamy is much less acceptable and such women often live alone rather than become the second wife of a man (unless the man is very wealthy and the woman of very modest means, in which case it is often kept a secret).

I think all of these factors give the impression to more traditional sectors of society that marriages have become more brittle, that men are less committed to marriage, that women have looser morals, and that society has become more sexualized. But I am not so sure about these generalizations. I don’t think premodern Iranians, or for that matter other Middle Eastern or Western nations, were any less sexual or more ethical than modern ones for the following reasons:

First, in many premodern societies sex with children was common and tolerated. Girls married at or before puberty and indeed this was sanctioned in many religions.

Second, sex on the part of men with boys (pedophilia and not just pederasty) was also an acceptable cultural practice despite various religious prohibitions against sodomy. In Iran, for example, it was common for wealthy men to keep boy concubines. Sex among boys or between men and boys was also common in village communities. In general many premodern societies (including the ancient Greco-Roman world) believed that children had no sexual feelings. In Iran there were prohibitions against penetration (which were also commonly ignored) but sexual molestation of boys was prevalent and a common topic in classical and even early modern Persian poetry.

Third, slavery was an acceptable part of life, and in wealthy families young male and female slaves were common sexual partners. Sex with slaves was of course not limited to Iran and the Middle East, it was also a brutal part of American life in the nineteenth century.

Fourth, today Middle Eastern men are returning to temporary wives and orfi marriages. In premodern times wealthy men took multiple formal and temporary wives and discarded them when no longer of use. Many aspired to this, but only the poor did not have the financial means to practice it. However, as the old Persian saying goes, “As soon as a man owned two shirts, he took a second wife.”

Finally, most female and male victims of rape, incest, and sexual molestation quietly endured their lot and had nowhere to which to turn.

So I find premodern Iranian society (and for that matter most premodern societies) to be highly amoral and violent, in so far as sexuality was concerned.

Middle Easterners often blame modern Western societies for two vices: unmarried women’s right to sexual pleasure and the gay lifestyle. The first, is certainly preferable to the child marriages of the premodern era. As for the modern gay lifestyle, since it involves consensual sex between two adults, and is combined with laws against pedophilia, I find it ethically superior to the old type of covert homosexuality of both the West and the East, which also involved sex with children.

As for the frequency of abortion in the US, I believe the problem is prevalent only where there is little sex education. Teen pregnancy, abortion and divorce are more common in conservative southern states of the US, where many parents prohibit sex before marriage and don’t talk to their children about sex, than in liberal northeastern states where sex education is commonly taught in school and many mothers take their teenage daughters to the doctor and get them birth control pills and condoms.

I do agree with you that the sexual revolution has not necessarily empowered women and that finding a marriage partner is much more difficult in the US and in Iran, where arranged marriages are dying out. However, I don’t think American women’s greater experience in premarital sex has undermined marriage and made men rebellious. I think it is the breakdown of the extended family that has contributed to a drop in marriage rates and weaker marriages in the West.

The conjugal bond is a weak one to begin with. It has always been so since the primary purpose of marriage was procreation and having a family rather than love and compatibility. However, marriage was universal in Iran and couples stayed together because the extended family arranged marriages and then helped keep the newlyweds together. When the young couple went through rough patches of life, the in-laws were always there to keep them together. Fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law helped find a job for the young son-in-law. Mothers-in-law and mothers helped the young wife with cooking and child care. When the couple became estranged (often due to multiple pregnancies), the extended family kept relations going until the new couple had grown children of its own. At that point, when the children were married, tradition and obligation required the parents to take care of the new generation and not follow their own pleasure.

Capitalism broke down the extended family as people began to move in search of jobs and family networks became less powerful in terms of economic opportunity. True, the process was liberating on many levels. Young people were no longer obligated to follow the dictates of their parents, join the family profession or marry a person selected by their parents. But the new freedoms were also terrifying as Eric Fromm showed in his Escape from Freedom. Without in-laws and their support, the conjugal unit became more fragile and given the opportunity men left marriages much more easily. This has been a crucial reason for the rise of the Religious Right throughout the world, where Islamist leaders have become surrogate patriarchs and encourage arranged marriages.

Talking to my students in the U.S. I really empathize with them as life can be hard for a young couple. It is not uncommon for people to move from city to city and state to state in search of jobs. A woman no longer necessarily follows her husband in his new job, not just because she enjoys her independence but because there is no guarantee he could maintain his job and support the family. If a woman has a secure and good paying job, she holds onto her job rather than relocate with her husband (or fiance). Child care is extremely expensive in this country. Most in-laws work, many live apart from their children in other states and cannot relocate; hence, they are not available for child care. In the state of California, for example, working women may receive 6-12 weeks of pregnancy leave but often have no job security, pay, or benefits if they opt to stay home longer. Health care is a catastrophe and both husband and wife must work to ensure some health care for the family. Under the weight of all these pressures, modern marriages easily crack. The Republicans with all their talk of “Family Values” did nothing to ameliorate this situation. Most immigrant families (including Iranian-American ones) continue to sacrifice everything for their children, but the daughter who grows up in such a family and watches her mother’ s devotion (and often her father’s infidelities) aspires to a better life, which means that the second generation’s marriage becomes more fragile.

Rather than assuming that our Middle Eastern cultures are more moral than Western ones, and rather than holding onto the unhappy arranged marriages of our foremothers and blaming the more individualistic marriages of modernity, I think it would be more fruitful everywhere to work toward policies that protect women and children inside and outside marriage. I mean policies such as sex education at school, protection from sexually transmitted diseases, safe and available birth control and abortion, laws against domestic violence, better jobs for women, parental leave, decent child care, community property, and better inheritance laws. And yes, perhaps men should also be taught their responsibilities to family and children by state mandated classes on marriage and parenting before and after marriage.

I have very much enjoyed this conversation with you. I have been following your community activism for years and hope our paths cross soon in one of my trips to Egypt.

Yours,
Janet Afary

[Janet Afary concludes a dialogue with Nawal El Saadawi initiated at Double X earlier this month. El Saadawi is an Egyptian writer famous for her outspokenness, particularly on the issue of women’s rights.]

Read Nawal’s post here

I am thrilled to be having this dialogue with you. I read your “Hidden Face of Eve” and other works in English in the 1980s when I came to the United States from Iran to study. I have also used your writings in my courses on women and gender in the Middle East.

Egypt and Iran do indeed have a great deal in common. Both nations have experienced a century-old struggle for democracy (the latest stage of which was the massive protests against voting fraud we’ve just witnessed). Both have had strong secular and leftist political parties, and both have a long history of feminist activity. You were wondering if what we are observing in Iran in recent years is really a sexual revolution. I think it is certainly headed that way when we look at the distance women have traversed.

A century ago Iranian women of all social classes, religions, and ethnicities entered strictly arranged marriages around the age of puberty. Both of my grandmothers were married at 13, and neither had seen her husband before marriage. Also, while monogamy was the norm among the poorer sectors, most Muslim men took additional wives once their income increased. By 1979, a lot had changed. Courting and a long engagement were more common, at least among urban, educated middle class women.

Today dating is even more common despite continued parental objections and state prohibitions. In an Iranian feminist publication, I saw an interview with an assistant principal in one of the lower middle class schools of south Tehran. The principal said that while young girls of her own generation skipped school to go to parks and cinemas with boys, her students go to their boyfriends’ houses or their own houses. And yes, they sometimes have sex. In some cases, fathers assist sons, and mothers quietly help daughters. When a veiled mother was brought into the principal’s office and told about her daughter’s secret dating, she confessed that to protect her daughter from her father’s wrath and the morality police on the streets, “on occasion I tell her to bring her friend home with her and I go into the kitchen giving them some privacy.”

Among the more cosmopolitan middle classes, virginity is no longer crucial. Greater access to cars has meant greater privacy, allowing more women to become sexually active before marriage. Many women from the more pious middle classes have premarital sex and then a hymen repair operation before getting married. The popularity of the operation has resulted in numerous jokes that in Tehran, there are “no real virgins.”

Change is happening even in rural areas (now 20 percent of the country). Occasionally, engaged couples spend the night away from the village on one pretext or another, and the parents go along with it. Sometimes the couple exchange vows for a temporary marriage (an old Shi’i tradition that had become defunct by the 1970s) to avoid the appearance of impropriety. In Tehran and the big cities, young people might obtain a simple certificate of temporary marriage to avoid the morality police when they go to the Caspian Sea resort for summer vacation. They then annul the vow when they get home.

Ironically, it was some of the policies of the Islamic Republic that accelerated this change. As you know, the regime implemented a series of harsh misogynistic policies aimed at urban middle- and upper-class women in the 1980s. The state encouraged polygamy (multiple formal wives) and temporary marriage, as well as the return of easy divorce. It banned abortion and placed many limits on contraceptive use. These measures served to compensate men who had acquiesced to the rules of the new theocratic state. So, in the name of morality and the preservation of women’s honor, men of all social classes gained easier, cheaper access to sex, both inside and outside of marriage.

However, in the decade the followed, the same state instituted policies that unwittingly educated poor women about their sexuality and emotional needs. The state offered sex segregated literacy classes for women, including married women. Because the state was now “Islamist,” fathers and husbands relented and allowed daughters and wives to go to school or even the university. When birth rates skyrocketed in the 1980s, the state implemented a very successful family planning program, insisting that birth control was not a Western phenomenon but common in early and medieval Islam. Soon contraceptives became widely available, and vendors sold condoms on urban street corners. (Check out this Iranian ad for condoms .) Couples attended required state-sponsored sex education classes before marriage; many young urban and rural women first learned about female orgasm in these classes. These two major changes—greater literacy and sex education—altered the institution of marriage and attitudes about sexuality.

Today in urban and even rural communities, arranged marriages and cousin marriages have become much less common. The laws have not changed—daughters still need their fathers’ legal permission to marry. But marriage is seen less and less as just an institution for procreation, and women have come to expect intimacy and spontaneity along with a greater degree of emotional and sexual closeness.

In watching the protests on the streets of Iran these days, I have been surprised by the fact that popular support for state policies is much weaker. Thirty years ago, the state easily recruited over a hundred thousand women from the more pious sectors of society to confront women’s rights activists. Today, the state has mostly relied on the brutal force of the police and Basij volunteer forces to put down the advocates of democracy. Many women from the more pious sectors and their children were among those who voted for presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his accomplished wife Dr. Zahra Rahnavard. This shows that the old cultural divides of the 1970s, what Nikki Keddie called a “society of two cultures”—one urbane, secular, and modern, the other conservative and pious—have substantially narrowed.

However, let me add that more modern gender and sexual norms have had many negative consequences as well: exceedingly high rates of unprotected sex, marital unhappiness, unemployment, prostitution, drug addiction, and suicide. Although premarital sex is becoming more common among urban youth, the young men feel little responsibility or obligation toward the young women they sleep with. Few use contraceptives, and the burden of avoiding pregnancy falls mostly on the women. Young women also have no legal protection from sexual molestation and rape, unless they admit to the authorities that they engaged in premarital sex, in which case the woman’s punishment is harsher than that of the male perpetrator. The young women we see fighting on the streets of Iran for freedom and democracy are fighting not just for an abstract concept of liberation (azadi) but for greater individual, social, and economic rights and laws that would reflect the realities of their lives.

Thanks for initiating this dialogue. I see similar trends in the Arab Middle East, particularly with regard to women’s education and employment, though not birth control and sex education, and like to know how the institution of marriage in evolving in Egypt.

Janet

[Part I of a dialogue between Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, and Janet Afary. El Saadawi is famous in the Arab world for her outspokenness, particularly on the issue of women’s rights.]

(Read Nawal’s initial question here)

By Malise Ruthven

A cliché of Iran’s revolutionary rhetoric is that the United States is the Great Satan bent on destroying the Islamic Republic. While there is a genuine historical grievance over the CIA- sponsored “countercoup” that overthrew the nationalist Mossadegh government in 1953, the anti-Americanism that characterized Khomeini’s writings and still surfaces in Tehran street demonstrations seems closer to psychopathology than rational politics. Such frenzied antagonism, as Amanat suggests, owes more to Zoroastrian dualism than mainstream Quranic theology. In the Muslim scripture Satan (shaytan) is a less than Miltonic figure. He is just one demon among others, who has the role of tempter or ethical tester.

In the Zoroastrian schema, however, eternal conflict rages between supporters of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Wisdom, and those of the evil Ahriman. The cosmic battle is unending. One of Ahriman’s titles, the Demon of the Demons, is strikingly comparable to the Great Satan. Unlike the rather docile shaytan of Quranic tradition, his scope of operations and powers are immense. Amanat argues that during the early Islamic centuries Iranian Shiism absorbed the Zoroastrian view of a world divided between pure believers and polluting infidels, with bodies subject to constant danger. In the folk versions of Shiism that still persist, the human body is subject to all kinds of satanic onslaughts and must be constantly guarded against the enemy’s insidious plots. In a patriarchal social order it is, inevitably, women who bear the brunt of such guardianship.

Muslims were sometimes shocked when first encountering unveiled females. Their horror was registered by a Persian visitor to Europe in 1838, who, scandalized by the way that women handled “unclean” puppies, decided that women must be using their pets as sex toys:

The husbands of such women are very happy and content with this arrangement…. Women are so sexually aggressive in this country that no man, no matter what his potency and skill, can hope to satisfy them.

The East–West battle over gender is brilliantly described by Janet Afary in her groundbreaking survey Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. As in other patrilineal societies the woman is the “door of entry to the group.” Improper behavior on her part can expose her community and family to all sorts of hidden dangers. Systems such as these

exercise a double standard wherein a woman’s infidelity (but not a man’s) is seen to allow tangible and damaging impurities to infiltrate the family, both physically and morally…. A woman’s sexual and reproductive functions turned her body into a contested site of potential and real ritual contamination. The concept of namus (honor) and the need to control women’s chastity may be related to this fear of sexual contamination.

The sexual double standard was effectively institutionalized in all the mainstream Islamic traditions: men were permitted up to four legal wives and the right of divorce by repudiation (talaq). However, in pre-modern Iran (prior to the 1920s) male prerogatives were enhanced by the practice of temporary marriage (sigheh), which was exclusive to Shiism, and by the availability of concubines, which persisted after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Sigheh was a sexual charter for men: the ease with which it was contracted meant that consensual affairs between men (married or unmarried) and single women could hardly ever be labeled fornication, and therefore subject to Islamic penalties.

Gender segregation—common to most Islamic societies—contributed to the prevalence of other practices that are rarely discussed in social histories of Islam: boy concubinage and pedophilia. Although liwat or lavat (sodomy) is condemned in the Quran (the word alludes to the Old Testament story of Lot), homosexual relationships between older men and boys were tolerated, not least because they posed a lesser threat to the patriarchal order than unregulated heterosexual interactions.

Afary’s book exposes the absurdity of claims by ideologues such as Ali Akbar Natiq-Nuri, a former Iranian minister of the interior and presidential candidate, who blame the West for “spreading corruption and obscenity, propagating debauchery and homosexuality.” She provides plenty of evidence to show that the prohibition against liwat was honored in the breach. Beardless boys, not yet being men, could be “penetrated without losing their essential manliness, so long as they did not register pleasure in the act, which would suggest a pathology liable to continue into adulthood.” In a society where beards were de rigueur, the beardless European male was often thought to be an amrad (catamite). Institutionalized pederasty was part of a wider culture in which family security balanced or compensated for the turbulence prevailing in the public domain.

Under the Qajar dynasty, which took power in the 1790s, Iran had a rigidly hierarchical social order, with clearly defined class and ethnic boundaries, a coherent religious establishment, and above all a pattern of family obligations that fostered strong communal identities. Marriage—including child marriage—was nearly universal, with parents choosing spouses for children of both sexes.

The available records can only hint at the sexual culture that flourished in the privacy of homes:

Reported crimes were low in a world where girls, boys, and women endured or quietly resisted incest, sexual molestation, and rape.

Yet contrary to assumptions about the emancipatory effects of Westernization, urban women in pre-modern Iran enjoyed a considerable amount of personal freedom. In the 1850s the wife of Britain’s ambassador observed that women of all classes

enjoy abundance of liberty, more so, I think, than among us. The complete envelopment of the face and person disguises them effectively from the nearest relatives, and destroying, when convenient, all distinction of rank, gives unrestrained freedom.

Afary points to references in the indigenous literature to pimps and love-brokers and to the secret affairs of married, divorced, or widowed women. In a patriarchal order where honor was defined by women’s conduct, with sexual transgressions of respectable women severely punished, it was the veil itself that provided opportunities for resistance.

Afary’s perspective throws useful, if unfamiliar light on the impact and consequences of the social reforms instituted by Reza Shah Pahlevi—the Cossack general who rose to supreme power in the chaotic aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The changes he imposed—European-style dress codes for men that reduced ethnic or religious distinctions, compulsory unveiling for women, and the desegregation of gender, along with measures such as raising the age of marriage to eighteen and improvements in public hygiene—were modeled on the perceived advantages enjoyed by people in the industrialized West. Mired in their medieval fortress mentality, religious leaders adamantly resisted, waging propaganda against vaccination, protesting against the installation of faucets in public bathhouses, and forbidding the use of alcohol for sterilization. The religious establishment instinctively recognized that in enacting reforms in the realms of hygiene and dress, the state was appropriating their powers as the guardians of purity.

These reforms accelerated divisions that were cultural as well as social. A new middle class, exposed to modern education, comprising less than 10 percent of the country’s labor force, became increasingly secular in outlook and distant from the dominant religious culture, while the majority—the rural peasantry and the small traders of the urban bazaars—remained attached to the instructions of their mullahs. The outcome may be described as an era of profound psychic discomfort for a majority of Iranians going about their daily lives. “Modernity,” Afary concludes,

instituted a double life for pious Muslims. Outwardly, they behaved as modern citizens of the state, ignoring religious hierarchies and engaging not just in business and trade with women and non-Muslims, as they had always done, but also mingled socially, shaking hands and sharing tea or meals with them. Inwardly, many bazaaris harbored a constant sense of anxiety since they continued to believe that a pious Shi’i Muslim who ignored the proper rituals of purification after encounters with najes (polluted) individuals had “nullified” his prayers and supplications to God and the Imams.

Initially Khomeini’s revolution upended the Pahlavi reforms, leading to a drastic reversal in women’s rights. The compulsory hijab (veil) was imposed for women in public, with even slight violations bringing severe punishment (seventy-four lashes or a year’s imprisonment), though since the face is exposed, it no longer gives the advantage of anonymity. Women and men no longer enjoy equality under the law, with evidence from a man worth twice that of a woman. Lashing, amputation, and stoning have been applied by the courts, with the latter punishment reserved for women convicted of adultery. The courts apply lighter sentences than previously for husbands, fathers, and brothers accused of “honor killings.” There are even regulations against public displays of affection.

Under Khomeini child marriage was allowed once more, with the age of marriage reduced from eighteen to nine for girls (revised, after protests, to thirteen) and fifteen for boys. New laws encouraged polygamy and prevented women from leaving abusive husbands. The husband’s right of unilateral divorce (limited under the Shah’s reforms) was reinstated. New policies encouraged temporary marriage as a “morally sanctioned substitute for Western dating,” with trial sigheh marriages recommended for high school students and sex workers invited to enter short-term marriage contracts with returning war veterans.

In sum, Afary suggests that the sexual doctrines instituted by Khomeini vastly increased the authority of men and the state “over women’s sexual and reproductive capacities.” This was not a

minor side effect of the [revolution]. Rather, it formed an important, though often unspoken, reason for male support or acquiescence in the face of Islamization.

At the same time, change is moving in the opposite direction. Paradoxically, the revolution released many young women from their family ties, which is why many found it attractive or expedient to join Islamist movements. During the war with Iraq, women were encouraged to enlist in the armed forces, with Khomeini urging women to “defend their Islamic and national honor” and to complete “the military, partisan, and guerrilla training appropriate for a resurgent Muslim nation.” Female volunteers reported that years spent on the front, alongside their “brother warriors” were the best in their lives.

Statistics reveal a picture that differs strikingly from the legal texts. Despite the formal reintroduction of child marriage, the mean age of first marriages for young women has continued to rise from around nineteen before the revolution to twenty-four today—with nearly 80 percent married after the age of twenty. The revolution has maintained the momentum of the Shah’s literacy campaigns, with literacy rates exceeding 95 percent for both sexes. With young women from rural families seeing education as the path to economic independence, a majority of college students are now women. “Companionate marriage,” with couples freely choosing their partners, is becoming the norm. Modern social forces are universal. Despite its reactionary rhetoric, the Islamic revolution is being remorselessly carried on their tide.

It is far too early to draw any hard conclusions about the ongoing uprising in Iran, but one thing seems clear enough: Once again, Iran has confounded the expectations and assumptions of many a Western Iran expert when it comes to what Iranians want, what they are prepared to do to get it, and how their leaders respond to unprecedented events. All the more reason then to encourage the study of Iran’s politics, economy, society, history, and literature. Below, in no particular order, is a selection of books that will get you started in understanding the intriguing, elusive, and wondrous puzzle that is Iran:

1. Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Afary does a spectacular job explaining, as well as detailing, sexual attitudes and practices from the 19th to the 21st century. Her account gives an excellent feel for how Iranian society works and how that has changed under the impact of modern times. Plus, her detailed research makes the account much more credible than some of the highly readable stories from Iranian-Americans about personal life in modern Iran.

>>> Read more

It is far too early to draw any hard conclusions about the ongoing uprising in Iran, but one thing seems clear enough: Once again, Iran has confounded the expectations and assumptions of many a Western Iran expert when it comes to what Iranians want, what they are prepared to do to get it, and how their leaders respond to unprecedented events. All the more reason then to encourage the study of Iran’s politics, economy, society, history, and literature. Below, in no particular order, is a selection of books that will get you started in understanding the intriguing, elusive, and wondrous puzzle that is Iran:

1. Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Afary does a spectacular job explaining, as well as detailing, sexual attitudes and practices from the 19th to the 21st century. Her account gives an excellent feel for how Iranian society works and how that has changed under the impact of modern times. Plus, her detailed research makes the account much more credible than some of the highly readable stories from Iranian-Americans about personal life in modern Iran.

2. Arang Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Keshavarzian shows how the bazaar exercised its political and economic influence under the shah. He then lays out the paradox that the revolution in which the bazaar was so central brought in a government that has systematically weakened the bazaar to the point that the bazaar is no longer a significant political player. His style is at times a bit dense, but Keshavarzian is no obscurantist academic: He provides lots of colorful details.

3. Manucher Farmanfarmaian and Roxane Farmanfarmaian, Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince (Random House, 1997). The Farmanfarmaians paint in rich detail how the Pahlavi dynasty changed Iran from a very traditional society into a complicated semimodern one. They use their family’s story as a way to weave in the political and intellectual history of Iran from the 1940s through the 1970s.

4. Yonah Alexander and Milton Hoenig, The New Iranian Leadership: Ahmadinejad, Terrorism, Nuclear Ambition, and the Middle East (Praeger Security International, 2008). The prolific Alexander has edited some less-than-stellar books, but this volume is a first-rate reference manual for those wanting the dates, numbers, and other facts about Iran’s nuclear, missile, chemical, and terrorist programs. No one in his right mind would read the book from page 1 to the end, but it’s a great reference source.

5. Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York University Press, 1999). Perhaps the best book to give a feel of the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, with hundreds of wonderful color reproductions of the propaganda — from postage stamps to agitprop plays to the ubiquitous political posters. Great fun to flip through, and the text is well worth reading.

6. John Parker, Persian Dreams: Moscow and Tehran Since the Fall of the Shah (Potomac Books, 2009). Admittedly a bit specialized topic, but a superb analysis of how Iran looks from Moscow. It provides rich detail of how Russian domestic politics shapes Moscow’s interest in and perception of the Islamic Republic. Parker brings out how different are Western and Russian narratives about Iran: They have entirely varying reads on what have been the significant turning points and what matters most in Iran’s foreign policy.

7. Richard Tapper, editor, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2002). These fourteen essays situate the fascinating Iranian film industry in its cultural, social, and political settings. The essay authors provide enough reviews of individual films to bring their points to life, but their focus is very definitely on the sociopolitical rather than artistic aspects of Iranian film.

8. And of course, for anyone who loves literature, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003) is a rewarding account of those who are so deeply committed to great books that they can overcome the tremendous obstacles to free intellectual life under the Islamic Republic.

Read the full petition of Academics Concerned About the Assault on Iranian Universities

Janet Afary, a distinguished professor of history and women’s studies at Purdue University, will be the first holder of the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Global Religions and Modernisms in the Department of Religious Studies. A prolific scholar, she studies the national history of Iran and the modern history of Shi’ism from a perspective that encompasses global processes and practices, linking religion and modernity to a broad social context.

Michael Curtin, a renowned media and cultural studies scholar and director of global studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been named the Mellichamp Professor of Global and Media Representation in the Department of Film and Media Studies. Curtin’s groundbreaking research explores how globalization has impacted media industries and cultures. His recent books develop a new model for conducting transnational investigations in the field of global media studies that moves beyond the national analysis that have prevailed for more than a century.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a professor of global sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will hold the Mellichamp Chair in Transnational Civil Society Networks with a joint appointment in sociology and global studies. Nederveen Pieterse is internationally recognized in several fields related to the study of global civil society, including the sociology of development, the political economy of globalization, the cultural dimensions of globalization, and race and ethnicity.

“These scholars are each important and exciting individually, but together they represent a powerful cluster in the area of global civil society that will help us to understand the present and the future of globalization,” said David Marshall, dean of humanities and fine arts and executive dean of the college.

The faculty appointments are effective July 1. Recruitment is under way to fill a fourth Mellichamp Academic Initiative Chair focusing on global authority and governance.

Melvin Oliver, SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, praised the process by which interdisciplinary and interdepartmental groups of faculty from many different departments in the humanities and social sciences organized the cluster recruitment that resulted in attracting such distinguished scholars to the campus.

Afary, who holds a Ph.D. in modern Middle East history from the University of Michigan, is the author of “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran” (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which focuses on gender and sexuality and draws on her experience of growing up in Iran and her involvement with Iranian women of different ages and social strata. She is also the author of “The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism” (Columbia University Press, 1996), which is considered the definitive book on the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution; and with co-author Kevin Anderson, the award-winning “Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism” (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Curtin compares the histories and fortunes of Hollywood, Hong Kong, Lagos, Miami, and Bombay in his upcoming book titled “Media Capital: A Cultural Geography of Globalization.” He is also the author of “Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience, the Globalization of Chinese Film and TV” (University of California Press, 2007), an examination of the Chinese television industry; and co-author, with Jane Shattuc, of “The American Television Industry,” which is under review. Curtain has a doctorate in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nederveen Pieterse’s scholarship spans a wide range of central issues posed by global studies. His most recent books are “Is There Hope for Uncle Sam? Beyond the American Bubble” (Zed Books, 2008); “Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an Octopus” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); “Globalization or Empire?” (Routledge, 2004); and “Global Melange: Globalization and Culture” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

The Mellichamp professorships were established with an innovative gift from Duncan Mellichamp, an emeritus UCSB professor of chemical engineering, and his wife, Suzanne, to build centers of excellence in strategically selected programmatic areas of rising importance.

Endowed chairs are highly prized academic positions that enable a university to develop more fully a field of study through the recruitment of top scholars and to provide ongoing financial support for enhanced research and instruction.