My major singly-authored books, in reverse chronological order, are:

• Women in the Middle East: Past and Present, Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, Yale University Press, 2003, Revised Edition 2006.
• Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan. Mazda, Costa Mesa, CA, 1999.
• Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution, Macmillan, London, and New York, NYU Press, 1995 (includes a bibliography of my writings through 1995).
• Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran, Yale University Press, 1981.
• Iran: Religion, Politics and Society, Frank Cass, London, 1980
• Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972.
• An Islamic Response to Imperialism, University of California Press, 1968.
• Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891-92, Frank Cass, London, 1966.

My edited and co-edited Books and Special Issues of Journals are:

• Sub-edited and Introduction, “Innovative Women: Unsung Pioneers of Social Change,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies IV, 3 (Fall 2008).
• Co-ed with Rudi Matthee. Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, June 2002.
• Co-ed with Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi. “Women in Twentieth Century Religious Politics.” Special issue of Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 10, No. 4. (Winter 1999). Authored first article.
• Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution. London: MacMillan, 1995.
• Ed. Debating Gender, Debating Sexuality. New York: N.Y.U. Press, 1995, authored introduction.
• Women in Middle Eastern History, co-ed. Beth Baron, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991.
• Shi’ism and Social Protest, co-ed. Juan Cole, Yale University Press, 1986.
• Religion and Politics in Iran, Yale University Press, 1983.
• Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, co-ed. Michael E. Bonine, Albany, SUNY Press, 1981.
• Women in the Muslim World, co-ed. Lois Beck, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978
• Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions since 1500, University of California Press, 1972.

Articles and chapters published since 1995

• “Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison.” New Left Review. 226 (November/December 1997): 21-40.
• “The New Religious Politics: Where, When, and Why Do ‘Fundamentalisms’ Appear?” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. 1998): 696-723.
• “Iran: Understanding the Enigma,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 2:3 (Sept. 1998), http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/meria/meria98_keddie.html (subscription)
• “The New Religious Politics and Women Worldwide: A Comparative Study.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1999): 11-34.
• “Women and Religious Politics in the Contemporary World.” ISIM Newsletter. 3/99 (July 1999).
• “Women in Iran since 1979.” Social Research. Vol. 67, No. 2 (Summer, 2000); special issue: “Iran: Since the Revolution.” 405-438.
• “The Study of Muslim Women in the Middle East: Achievements and Problems.” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review. Vol. 6 (2000-2001): 26-52.
• Co-ed with Azita Karimkhany. “Women in Iran: An Online Discussion.” Middle East Policy. Vol. 8, No. 4 (December, 2001): 128-143.
• “Shi’ism and Change: Secularism and Myth,” in Shi’ite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions, ed. L. Clarke (Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, 2001).
• “Women in the Limelight: Some Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women’s History since 1800.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. XXXIV, No. 3 (August, 2002).
• “Secularism and its Discontents.” Daedalus. (Summer 2003).
• “L’Iran evolvera, ma da solo.” Aspenia:. No. 22. America Black and White. Aspen Institute: Italia, Rome. (October 2003):185-192. English version, “Iran: change will come from within.” Aspenia International. No. 21/22. Economy & Security. Aspen Institute: Italia, Rome. (December 2003): 150-157.
• “A Woman’s Place: Democratization in the Middle East.” Current History. Vol. 103, No. 669 (January 2004).
• “Trajectories of Secularism in the West and the Middle East.” Global Dialogue. Vol. 6, No.1-2 (Winter-Spring 2004).
• “On History in the Twentieth Century”, letter Daedalus, Summer 2006. Longer version available at “History Writing in the US Since World War II” http://nikkikeddie.blogspot.com/2006/05/history-writing-in-us-since-world-war.html
• “Women in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam.” Women’s History in Global Perspective, Vol. 3, ed. Bonnie G. Smith. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005, 68-110. This is also published as a pamphlet by the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., 2007.
• “Iranian Women’s Status and Struggles since 1979,”Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 60, 2007
• “Nikki Keddie on Iran”, review of Barbara Slavin’s “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation”. http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080725_nikki_keddie_on_iran/
• “Women in the Middle East: Progress and Backlash,” Current History, December 2008. Accessible online at: http://www.currenthistory.com
• “Iranian Imbroglios Revisited,” World Policy Journal XXV, 3 (Fall 2008) 37-40.
• “Iranian Women and 30 Years of the Islamic Republic,” Middle East Institute online February 2009 collection on Iran. Reprinted in several Web publications, including http://www.opendemocracy.net.
• “Revolutionary Iran: National Culture and Transnational Impact,” in Robert W. Hefner, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 6, Muslims and Modernity: Society and Culture since 1800 (in press).

Opinion Pieces and Newspaper Reviews since 2000:

• “Divine Inspiration.” New York Times. (December 16, 2001): Op-ed.
• “Why Reward Iran’s Zealots?” Los Angeles Times. (Feb.17, 2002): Sunday Opinion, Section M.
• “Don’t judge a woman by her cover: life is not all bad in Iran,”The Times (London) (February 9. 2004), http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-994763,00.html
• “War without End Brings Endless Dangers.” History News Service syndication to several newspapers and online services. Published online by History News Network, (Feb. 2002), as “Endless Enemies,” and by the Gulf/2000 Project: http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/.
• “Taking History on Faith,” Review of Reza Aslan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” Washington Post, April 7, 2005, C2.
• “On History in the Twentieth Century,” Daedalus, Summer 2006 (Letter to the Editor)
• “How to Deal with Iran,” an Exchange with Bill Luers, Tom Pickering, and Jim Walsh, New York Review of Books, March 12 2009.

Articles and Book Chapters Before 1995:

• “Labor,” in The Economy of India; “Labor,” in The Economy of Pakistan; “Labor,” in The Economy of Nepal; “Labor Force,” in A Survey of Nepal Social Life; “Agrarian Reform,” in The Economy of Pakistan; Human Relations Area Files, new Haven, 1956.
• “Labor Problems of Pakistan.” Journal of Asian Studies (May 1957): 575-589. “Western Rule Versus Western Values: Suggestions for a Comparative Study of Asian Intellectual History.” Diogenes 26 (1959): 71-96. Also published in
• French and Arabic versions of Diogenes.
• Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, “The Background of the Constitutional Movement in Azerbaijan.” Translated with notes by Nikki Keddie. Middle East Journal XIV, no. 4 (1960): 456-465. Reprinted in Iran.
• Historical Obstacles to Agrarian Change in Iran. Claremont, California, 1960. Parts reprinted in C. Issawi, Economic History of Iran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
• “Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History IV, no. 3 (April 1962): 265-295
• “Symbol and Sincerity in Islam.” Studia Islamica XIX (1963): 27-63.
• With A. H. Zarrinkoub. “Fida’iyyan-i Islam.” In Encyclopedia of Islam, 1964. “Afghani in Afghanistan.” Middle Eastern Studies I, no. 4 (1965): 322-349.
• “The Origins of the Religious-Radical Alliance in Iran.” Past and Present 34 (July 1966): 70-80.
• “The Pan-Islamic Appeal: Afghani and Abdulhamid II.” Middle Eastern Studies II (October 1966); 46-67.
• “Sayyid Jamal ad-Din’s First 27 years: The Darkest period.” Middle East Journal XX, no. 4 (autumn 1966): 517-533.
• “British Policy and the Iranian Opposition, 1901-1907.” Journal of Modern History XXXIX, no. 3(1967): 266-282.
• “Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Modernism.” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies VI (1968): 53-56.
• “The Iranian Village before and after Land Reform.” Journal of Contemporary History I11, 3 (1968): 69-91. Reprinted in Development and Underdevelopment, edited by H. Bernstein. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974.
• “La rivoluzione constituzionale iraniana del 1905-1911.” Rivista Storica Italiana LXX, 1 (1968): 61-70. English version in “The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911: A Brief Assessment.” Iran Society: Silver Jubilee Volume. Calcutta, 1970.
• “Iranian Politics 1900-1905: Background to Revolution.” Middle Eastern Studies, 5, no. 1: 3-31; no. 2: 151-167; no. 3: 234-250 (1969).
• “Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism.” Journal of Modern History 41 (March 1969): 17-28.
• “The Roots of the Ulama’s Power in Modern Iran.” Studia Islamica, XXIX (1969): 31-53. Reprinted in Scholars, Saints, and Sufis.
• “Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani: A Case of Posthumous Charisma?” In Philosophers and Kings edited by D. Rustow, 148-179. New York: Braziller, 1970.
• “Iran.” in Der Islam Vol. II, edited by G. E. von Grunebaum, 160-217. Frankfurt: Fisher Weltgeschichte, 1971. Also available in Italian and Spanish translations.
• “The Assassination of the Amin as-Sultan (Atabak-i A’zam).” In Iran and Islam edited by C. E. Bosworth, 315-329. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971.
• “The Iranian Power Structure and Social Change 1800-1969: An Overview.” International Journal of Middle East Studies IV (1973): 3-20.
• “The Persian Land Reform 1962-1966 by A. K. S. Lambton.” Middle Eastern Studies VII, no. 3 (1971): 373-378.
• “Capitalism, Social Control, and Stratification in Iranian Villages before and after Land Reform.” In Rural Politics and Social Change in the Middle East edited by R. Antoun and I. Harik, 364-431. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1972.
• “The Economic History of Iran 1800-1914 and its Political Impact.” Iranian Studies VI, nos 2-3 (1972): 58-78.
• “Intellectuals in the Middle East: A Brief Historical Consideration.” Daedalus (summer 1972): 39-57.
• “An Assessment of American, British, and French Works since 1940 on Modern Iranian History.” Iranian Studies VI, nos 2-3 (1972): 255-271.
• “Is There a Middle East?” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies IV (1973): 255-271.
• Four articles, with my photographs: “New Life for Old Monuments.” “Preserving Persepolis.” “The Masjed-e Jom’eh of Isfahan.” “Delving under Old Paint.” Kayhan International Tehran, 26-27 February; 4-5 March 1974.
• Four articles, with my photographs: “Carpets as Handicrafts.” “Making Carpets at Home.” “The Crafts Renaissance.” “The Handicrafts Future.” Kayhan International, Tehran, 20 May; 22 May; 23 May; 28 May 1974.
• “History and Economic Development.” In The Social Sciences and Economic Development edited by K. Farmanfarmanian, 40-57. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
• With J. Dhamija. “Namads.” A Survey of Persian Handicraft, edited by J. and S. Gluck, 277-288. Tehran: Bank Melli, 1977.
• “Culture Traits, Fantasy, and Reality in the Life of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani.” Iranian Studies IX, nos 2-3 (1976): 89-120.
• “Development in the Middle East – A Comparison between Turkey, Iran and Egypt.” Communications and Development Tehran, I, nos 2-3, 1977. “Islam et Politique en Iran.” Le Monde Diplomatique. Paris, August 1977.
• “The Midas Touch: Black Gold, Economics, and Politics in Iran Today.” Iranian Studies X, no. 4 (1977-de facto 1979): 243-266. German translation in Revolution in Iran and Afghanistan. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980.
• “Iran, 1797-1941.” In Commoners, Climbers, and Notables, edited by C. A. O. van Nieuwenhujze, 122-139. Leiden: Brill, 1977.
• “Class Structure and Political Power in Iran since 1796.” In State and Society in Iran, edited by A. Banani, 305-330. Iranian Studies, Boston, 1979.
• “Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies X, no. 2 (1979): 225-240.
• “Oil, Economic Policy, and Social Conflict in Iran.” Race and Class XXI, 1 (1979): 13-29.
• “Iran: The Roots of Revolution.” Gazelle Review 6 (1979): 26-33.
• “Iran: Is ‘Modernization’ the Message?” Middle East Review XI, no. 3 (1979): 55-56.
• “Islam and Politics: New Factors in the Equation.” Los Angeles Times, Opinion lead, Dec. 2, 1979 (2 pages, 7 pages typescript). “Khomeini’s Fundamentalism is as Revolutionary as His politics,” Los Angeles Times, Opinion first page, Jan. 13, 1980 (2 pages, 7 pages typescript). (The newspaper articles’ titles are not mine.)
• “Socioeconomic Change in the Middle East since 1800: A Comparative Analysis.” In The Islamic Middle East, 700-1900, edited by A. L. Udovitch. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1981.
• “The History of the Muslim Middle East.” In The Past Before Us: Contemporary,. Historical Writing in the United States, edited for the American Historical Association by Michael Kammen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
• “Pre-Capitalist Structures in the Middle East.” Journal of Arab Affairs I, no. 2 (April 1982): 189-208. French version, “Structures precapitalistes clans le Moyen-Orient.” In Structures et cultures precapitalistes, edited by Rene Gallissot. Paris, 1981.
• “Iran: Change in Islam; Islam and Change.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 11 (1980): 527-542. German translation in Religion and Politik im Iran, edited by K. Greussing. Frankfurt, 1981.
• “Iran: Islam and Revolution.” In Iran in der Krise. Bonn: under the auspices of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 1980. ,
• “L’ayatollah est-il un integriste?” Le Monde 22 August 1980.
• “Understanding the Iranian Revolution.” The Center Magazine (May-June 1980): 38-46.
• “The Iranian Revolution and U.S. Policy.” SAIS Review (winter 1981-82): 13-26. With Lois Beck, The Qashqa’i People of Iran. Los Angeles: UCLA Museum of Cultural History, 1981. Includes color and black and white photographs by Nikki Keddie.
• “Revolution of Terror.” Los Angeles Times 17 January 1982. Reprinted in the International Herald Tribune and the London Guardian.
• “Money and Ethics in Middle East Studies.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin XVI, 1 (July 1982): 1-8.
• “Comments on Skocpol.” Theory and Society 1 1 (1982): 285-292. [Commenting on Theda Skocpol, "Rentier State and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution," pages 265-283 of same issue, at request of editors.]
• Co-signed with others, Obituaries of G. E. von Grunebaum in the American Historical Review 1972. And University of California In Memorium. “Khomeini’s Opponents See Success for Their Crusade.” Los Angeles Times 4 October 1981.
• “Will Iran’s Bloody Factional Fighting Escalate Into Civil War?” Los Angeles Times 5 July 1981.
• “Iran: Religious Orthodoxy and Heresy in Political Culture.” In Religion and Society: Asia and the Middle East, edited by C. Caldarola. The Hague, 1982.
• “Islamic Revival as Third Worldism.” In Le Cuisinier et le Philosophe: Hommage a Maxime Rodinson, edited by J.-P. Digard, 275-281. Paris: Masonneuve et Larose, 1982.
• “The Minorities Question in Iran.” The /ran-Iraq War: Old Weapons, New Conflicts, edited by Shaheen Ayubi and Shirin Tahir-Kheli, 85-108. New York: Praeger, 1983.
• “Iran’s Revolutionaries Flirt with Moderation.” Los Angeles Times 13 February 1983.
• “Iranian Revolutions in Comparative Perspective.” American Historical Review 88, no. 3 (June 1983): 579-598.
• “Afgani, Jamal-al Din.” In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by E. Yarshater, 481-486. “Must the Cold War Keep Growing Colder?” Los Angeles Times, 27 December 1983.
• “Material Culture and Geography: Toward a Holistic History of the Middle East.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (October 1984): 709-735. Reprinted and revised in Comparing Muslim Societies, edited by Juan R. I. Cole. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
• “Islamic Revival in the Middle East: A Comparison of Iran and Egypt.” In Arab Society, edited by Samih K. Farsoun, 65-83. London: Croom Helm, 1985. “Islamic Revival in Comparative Perspective.” In Iran Since Revolution, edited by Barry Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
• “Khomeini’s Rule.” London Review of Books 7, 4, 7, (March 1985): 7-8. “The Islamic Opposition.” The Middle East (August 1985): 42-43.
• “West Sumatra’s Minangkabau.” The World and I no.7 (1986): 148-157. “Senegal: The Islam of Sufi Orders.” The World and I no. 8 (1986): 182-187. “The Qashqa’i of Southern Iran.” The World and / no. 1 1 (1986): 474-497. “Ideologie et institutions dans les societes musulmanes post-coloniales.” Politique etrangere 51, no. 2 (summer 1986): 447-464.
• “Religion, Ethnic Minorities, and the State in Iran.” In The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, edited by Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner, 157-166. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
• “Shi’ism and Revolution.” In Religion, Rebellion, Revolution, edited by Bruce Lincoln, 157-182. London: Macmillan, 1985.
• “Islam and Society in Minangkabau and in the Middle East: Comparative Reflections.” Sojourn 2, no. 1 (1987): 1-23.
• “The Islamist Movement in Tunisia.” The Maghreb Review 11, no. I (January-February 1986): 26-39.
• “Ideology, Society and the State in Post-Colonial Muslim Societies.” In State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, edited by Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi, 9-30. London: Macmillan, 1988.
• “Iranian Imbroglios: Who’s Irrational?” World Policy Journal 1 (winter 1987-88): 29- 54.
• “The Rights of Women in Contemporary Islam.” In Human Rights and the World’s Religions, edited by Leroy S. Rouner, 76-93. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
• “The Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen): History and Society.” In Sojourners and Settlers: The Yemeni Immigrant Experience, edited by Jonathan Friedlander. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1988. With several photographs by the author from the related exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution and seven other museums.
• “The Iranian Revolution in Comparative Perspective.” In Islam, Politics and Social Movements, edited by Ira Lapidus and Edmund Burke III. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
• “The Past and Present of Women in the Muslim World.” Journal of World History I, no. I (1990): 77-108.
• With M. Amanat, “Iranian Politics 1852-1922.” In Cambridge History of Iran, vol. VII, edited by Peter Avery and Gavin Hambly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• “The Revolt of Islam and its Roots.” In Political Dynamics: Global Research Perceptives, edited by Dankwart Rustow and K. Erickson. New York: Harper, 1991.
• “Reflections on the Influence of the Iranian Revolution.” In Iran, the Middle East, and the Decade of the I990s, 33-37. New Jersey: Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, 1991.
• “Obstacles to Early Industrialization in the Middle East.” In Between Development and Underdevelopment, edited by Jean Batou, 143-156. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991.
• “Can Revolutions be Predicted: Can Their Causes be Understood?” CONTENTION I, no. 2 (1992): 159-182. Two responses by author on this subject published in issues I, no. 3 (1992) and II, no. 2 (1993).
• “Why Has Iran Been Revolutionary?” In Reconstruction and Regional Diplomacy in the Persian Gulf, edited by H. Amirahmadi and N. Entessar, 19-32. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• “The End of the Cold War and the Middle East.” Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (winter 1992): 95-103. Reprinted in The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications, edited by Michael J. Hogan. New York: Cambridge University press, 1992.
• With Farah Monian, “Militancy and Religion in Contemporary Iran.” In Fundamentalisms and the State, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• “The Fall of the Soviet Union and the Start of the New Middle East.” Working Papers no. 22. Los Angeles: Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, 1992.
• “The Shi’a of Pakistan: Reflections and Problems for Further Research.” Working Papers no. 23. Los Angeles: Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA, 1993.
• “The French Revolution and the Middle East.” In The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, edited Joseph Klatis and Michael Haltzel. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994.
• “The Revolt of Islam 1700-1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 3 (1994).
• Several encyclopedia articles, in Colliers Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Iranica and Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World.
• Many book reviews in Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, the American Historical Review, Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, The Journal of Economic History, Political Science Quarterly, Current History, Journal of Asian Studies, Far Eastern Quarterly, Journal of the American Oriental Society (review article from a conference paper, “The Contributions of Vladimir Gordlevsky to the History of the Seljuk Turks”), The Historian, MERIP Reports, etc.

“The Minorities Question in Iran,” first reprinted in my 1995 book, Iran and the Muslim World.

You can view “The Minorities Question” in your browser on this page, or download the  PDF version that is more readily printable.

Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution

Nikki R. Keddie
Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles
New York University Press, 1995
Washington Square, New York

The Minorities Question in Iran*

In the Middle East as in the West, the concept of a “minority”, covering both religious and ethnic minorities within a state, is a modern one. Today, ethnic minorities are important in much of the Middle East. In the pre-twentieth-century Middle East, however, as in the pre-eighteenth-century West, the only minorities generally considered important were religious ones, who might be either unbelievers (in the Muslim world divided into protected “People of the Book” monotheists with scriptures – and unprotected polytheists) or heretics, whose beliefs related to the dominant religion but were judged to diverge so seriously and dangerously as to merit punishment, sometimes death. The only religious minority sometimes tolerated in the West were the Jews, who were, however, increasingly expelled and forced to move to Eastern Europe or to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. Peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants as well as tolerance and legal emancipation for Western Jews are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomena. The twentieth-century Holocaust, the continuation of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslims prejudices in the West (where Muslim populations are now significant – for example, about 3 million in the United States), and revived intra-Christian tensions in parts of the West should warn Westerners against thinking that religious prejudices and persecutions happen only elsewhere.

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN THE MUSLIM MIDDLE EAST

For centuries, the Muslim world showed greater tolerance of minority religions (sometimes including theoretically forbidden “polytheistic” religions like Hinduism) than the West. In return for a special tax and sporadic and only rarely unbearable marks of second-class status, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Mandeans (Sabeans) were allowed to follow their religions and be governed (on matters not involving conflict with Muslims) by their own laws. Both Shi’a Iran, which was never part of the Ottoman Empire, and Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, long part of that Sunni Empire, housed significant communities of Jews, Sabeans, and Christians of various denominations; and Iran also had Zoroastrians. Both also contained smaller religious groups influenced by Islam, chiefly among a minority of their ethnic Kurdish and Turkish populations: notably the Yezidis, whose syncretic religion of ancient origin was wrongly stigmatized as “devil worship,” and the Ahl-i Haqq or Ali Ilahis, who are said to incorporate pre-Islamic Kurdish or Turkish beliefs and to deify the first Shi’ite imam, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. Both Iraq and Iran have large Twelver Shi’a and Sunni communities, and both have also had Sevener Shi’as (Isma’ilis), who have now dwindled to a small minority.

In the Iraq-Iran area, the main struggle having religious overtones has been between its two largest communities, the Sunnis and the Twelver Shi’as. Like the “religious wars” between Catholics and Protestants in early Modern Europe, however, Sunni-Shi’a struggles were not purely confessional in origin. They largely reflected struggles between an Iran that was made Shi’ite by the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century and the Sunni Ottomans, who failed to conquer Shi’a Iran (whereas they succeeded in most Sunni lands they attacked). The Ottoman Empire and its successor Arab states were politically identified with Sunnism, and Iran with Shi’ism. Both were (and mostly still are) thought of by their adepts as true Islam, from which the other group had deviated. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sunni-Shi’a struggles declined, and there were moves for a Pan-Islamic unity of the Muslim world against the threat of Western infidel conquest or control. Most believers do not change their ideals quickly, however, and Sunni-Shi’a hostilities remain below the surface, especially ready to break out when on community feels oppressed or persecuted by the other.

Persecution of non-Muslim religions has occurred sporadically in the Muslim Middle East, resulting, for instance, in the medieval emigration of most Zoroastrians from Iran to India and some forced conversions of Jews. Persecution was less severe than in the premodern West, but because modern economic and intellectual trends began later in the Middle East than in the West, so did new types of religious toleration. Westerners have seized upon examples of religious persecution by Muslims not only with the aim of righting injustice, but often with the less admirable aim of claiming that Muslims are unfit to govern themselves without Western control or guidance.

In the West, and later in the Middle East, the rise of commercial and industrial capitalism has encouraged the growth both of national markets and nation-states, which can function most efficiently by treating at least most male citizens more equitably than in past regimes – subjecting them to the same laws and opening “a career to talents” through standardized educational systems that train good bureaucrats, soldiers, businessmen, workers, and professionals. Moreover, modernizing rulers of nation-states want to encourage the loyalty of all citizens to the nation, and this, too, moves them to minimize differences among religious communities and to reduce residential, educational, legal, and other barriers between them.

In parts of the Middle East, there is now a countertrend to such playing down of religious differences, partly in reaction to Western policies and to the rapidity and methods with which all sorts of Westernizing measures (often harmful to the rural and urban masses and the petty bourgeoisie) have been introduced. Among these measures are steps to treat religious groups as equal, and some Muslims believe such measures to be against the Quran and Islamic law; for, taken literally, Islamic teaching prescribes a protected status for religious minorities, but not absolute equality. The status of the Jews has worsened in Arab countries since the foundation of Israel; and mass migration of Jews from Muslim (especially Arab) countries mirrors the emigration of Arab Palestinians from their former homeland. Hence, the idea of religious equality is a recent one in the Muslim Middle East, although modernizing leaders have tended to favor it while often excepting groups considered dangerous to the state or having ties with foreign enemies.

LINGUISTIC AND “ETHNIC” DIFFERENCES

While religious differences have become less marked, linguistic or “ethnic” differences have assumed much more importance in the modern period than they had in premodern times (another change that began earlier in the West). In premodern polities, it was rarely a matter of concern that groups of people within one’s borders spoke languages different from that of the majority – if indeed there was a majority language. In order to function in state positions, a man would have to know the dominant language – whether German in the Austrian Empire or Ottoman Turkish in the Ottoman Empire – but persons from many ethnic groups learned these languages, and no need was felt to educate anyone but the elite in the dominant language. Compact linguistic groups in premodern countries might feel a common cultural identity, but this was not as universal as their nationalist descendants now suppose. In the case of Middle Eastern politico-economic groups called

“tribal,” which tended to believe in descent from a common ancestor (at least of their leaders), cohesive feelings might be quite strong and form one basis for autonomous or independent polities. These small polities, however, did not have true linguistic or tribal boundaries but, like larger states, were based on how much territory could be taken and held, regardless of what languages were intermixed in those territories. In the Ottoman Empire and Iran, even in periods of strong central government, tribes usually had considerable local autonomy; often, tribal leaders were used as tax collectors and heads of tribal levies or as mediators with the central government.

In Iran and Iraq, linguistic minorities were largely tribal – a word that has no agreed-upon definition, but which in Iran and the Ottoman Empire usually involved self-identification by a word translated as “tribe” and denoted some political cohesion under recognized leaders, belief in descent of tribal leaders from a common ancestor, general linguistic unity (outsiders adopted into the tribe usually learned its language), and often a largely, though not exclusively, pastoral economy whose organization was a major determinant of economic and political life. Tribes also tended to concentrate in arid or mountainous areas, often far from the control of the central government. The upkeep of flocks in such areas usually requires some form of movement: ranging from the transhumance characteristic of some Kurds (that is, they settle in villages, but the shepherds take sheep to higher pasture in the summer) to the biannual migrations (in spring and fall) characteristic of many Iranian tribes, including the well-known Qashqai and Bakhtiari confederations. The Qashqais, Bakhtiaris, and Kurds are sometimes loosely referred to as tribes; however, neither anthropologists not the people themselves call such large and loosely connected groups tribes, but retain that word for smaller, more cohesive groups. The Qashqais, Bakhtiaris, and former Khamseh of Iran are or were confederations, formed during certain periods in Iraq and Iran largely to deal with the central government and each other. The Kurds, living in several countries, now constitute a huge conglomeration of tribes and nontribal peoples united by language and culture. Neither tribes nor confederations are as stable as is often thought: in both cases, membership and loyalties shift according to politico-economic circumstances. Individuals or small groups often join or leave tribes, tribes can switch confederations, and new tribes or confederations can arise and die out.

Not all linguistic minorities are tribal. Among the Azerbaijani Turks of northwestern Iran – who, if one counts those who have migrated to Tehran and elsewhere, may number as high as 9-10 million, or about a quarter of Iran’s population – only the Shahsevan in Azerbaijan are tribal-nomadic. Some pre-nineteenth-century Azerbaijanis had feelings of Turkish cultural identity, and there were poets who wrote in what is now called Azerbaijani (although this was intelligible to Turks elsewhere). What we would now call nationalism did not exist among them or among other minority or majority linguistic groups in the Middle East. In premodern times, even the largest minority group, the Kurds, with their several million people bordering each other chiefly in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, desired (and for a time under the Ottomans partly achieved) at most an autonomous status – with forms of rule based on political and religious elders – not a modern nation state.

NATIONALISM, MINORITIES, AND CLASS

None of this is surprising except to those who wish to read nationalism into a premodern, prenationalist past. Modern economic ties, transport, and production systems are prerequisites to nation states that would try to control distant minority populations. Imposition of central political and economic control and exploitation, a majority language, and unfamiliar customs, accompanied by suppression of local cultures and of nomadism – nomads being not only “unmodern” but also potentially dangerous warriors – are factors in the rise of counter-nationalisms among linguistic minorities. Some minorities, notably the Kurds and the Azerbaijanis, number in the millions and cover large territories. Many central governments fear making concessions to minority demands, which, they think, might eventually lead to loss of government control. On the other hand, such minorities and their sympathizers argue that complete nonrecognition of minority rights feeds rebellious sentiments.

Although the West has had few nomadic tribes, it has had a similar history of majorities and minorities. As in the Middle East, religious affiliation in the West was more important than language at least until the late seventeenth century, and many states were formed with no regard for linguistic boundaries. The nineteenth century rise of nationalism – reflected in the unification of Germany and Italy, the revolts of the Balkan Christians of the Ottoman Empire, and the nationalist principles imposed after World War I in Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman territories – seemed to enshrine the ideals of the nation state. Yet, nationality remains a vexed question in the West as in the Middle East. Politically and economically dominant and exploitative nationalisms have given rise to counter-nationalisms, as with the Basques, the Northern Irish, Yugoslav nationalities, French Canadians, and others. In both West and East, once ethnic nationalism became widespread it was inevitable that ethnic grievances would grow: there are no agreed-upon ethnic boundaries, and even if there were, no state will give up territory or true autonomous rights without a bitter struggle.

Minorities are often economically oppressed or neglected, and this is a further cause of their discontent. In Iraq, most Kurds and Arab Shi’as (actually an oppressed majority) have long been manipulated by Sunni Arab-dominated governments. In Iran, tribal nomads were traditionally a partially advantaged group; military prowess enabled their political leaders to dominate local peasants, and nearly all important Iranian rulers from the tenth century until 1921 were tribal in origin. Under Reza Shah (1925-41), however, the tribes were disarmed and settled without provision for an adequate livelihood. Though some migration recommenced in 1941, the policies of Mohammad Reza Shah (1941-79), including land reform, weakened the economic position of the nomads. The Kurds were largely bypassed in Iran’s economic development program, and the Lurs; Arabs, and Baluchis remained even poorer than the Kurds. Nontribal Azerbaijan lost its former economic prominence when Reza Shah centralized economic activities in Tehran, and migration out of Azerbaijan during and after World War II caused Azerbaijan’s economic importance to decline greatly.

Although a complete analysis would require discussion of changing class positions within each minority, here only a few partial generalizations regarding class can be essayed. In Ottoman Iraq, the main ruling groups were Sunni Arab or Turkish, and Sunni Arabs have retained dominant positions, although some privileged Shi’as and Kurds have entered important governmental and military positions. Nomadic tribes were powerful before modern centralization, but their leaders were made into big landlords only after Ottoman and, particularly, twentieth-century British policies encouraged the registering of communal lands to tribal sheikhs. This policy favored Sunni sheikhs, although a few Shi’as also benefited; Sunnis as well as Shi’as were among those turned into landless tenants, but the Shi’as were especially hurt. Jews and Christians were mostly poor, but some were involved in trade, moneylending, and crafts. With the exodus of Jews after 1948, their place in trade was largely taken up by Shi’as. Sunni Arabs and Kurds and Shi’a Arabs thus occupy a variety of class positions, but Shi’as and Kurds have been relatively disfavored economically both in the premodern and, in their poor majority, the modern period.[1] Like many modernizing, centralizing governments, both the Ba’th regime in Iraq and the Pahlavis in Iran have favored the middle to upper class of the dominant religion and nationality.

In Iran as in Iraq, a minority within the tribes benefited economically from modernization, getting more control of land, positions, and even capital for urban enterprise. Far more tribespeople, however, lost control of land and flocks, often becoming part of the migrant subproletariat that has streamed into towns in recent decades. Tehran, even more than Baghdad, became the center of economic life and industry, and distant ethnic groups suffered from economic neglect and political control by administrators and entrepreneurs from the center. Some members of religious minorities, including some Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is, benefited for a time from foreign intervention against persecution and from Pahlavi secularism, so that their largely impoverished economic position improved. But all these minorities had their poor as well as their middle class and wealthy. Under the Islamic Republic, they suffer various degrees of discrimination. Minorities, thus, have economic as well as cultural reasons to resist the policies of central governments, which, whether they call themselves monarchical, Islamic Republican, or Ba’th Socialist, seem unwilling to meet even those needs and demands of minorities that should not be considered threatening.

From the foregoing historical review, it should be evident that both Iran and Iraq, with their ethnically and religiously diverse populations, face challenging “minority problems.” This chapter will focus on those problems in the country I know best, Iran, but many of the insights herein can be helpful in understanding Iraq’s similar – though certainly not identical – minority problems.[2]

IRANIAN ETHNIC MINORITIES

Although, for purposes of discussion, it would be convenient to separate Iran’s minorities into religious and linguistic categories, this is a very difficult task, for some minorities – most Kurds, the Turkomans the Baluchis, and some Arabs – are both religious and political minorities. Another logical division, however, is possible: all the compact ethnic groups in Iran are predominantly Muslim, whether Shi’a or Sunni, and so Muslim ethnic minorities can be treated as one group, while the non-Muslim Jews, Christians, Baha’is, and smaller religious minorities can be treated separately. Except for the Sabeans, none of these religious minorities makes up a compact group, and none has made autonomist demands; most are scattered in urban areas, having only a small rural component. The non-Muslim groups are represented in bazaar crafts and trade as well as in more modern, middle-class positions.

To begin with the Muslim ethnic minorities, their significance in Iranian politics is closely related to their numbers, their mode of life, and their location within Iran. No exact figures on their numbers are available; official figures greatly underestimate the size particularly of the largest groups, the Azerbaijanis and the Kurds, while some recent estimates from these groups somewhat overestimate their numbers. More accurate data, based on 1960s sources and the consolidation of some groups that I separate, have been provided by Ervand Abrahamian (see Table 1). These estimates do not correspond exactly to mine, given below, but are far more accurate than the official figures, which, for example, always have native Persian speakers in the majority.[3] The recent scholarly literature is in agreement that this group is almost surely a slight minority in the Iranian population – approximately 45 per cent of 40 million; or about 18 million people. Recent estimates of the number of Azerbaijani Turks, which usually include those who have migrated from Azerbaijan but still speak Azerbaijani as a first language, range

from 6 to 13 million; and 9 to 10 million, or almost a quarter of Iran’s population, seems a reasonable estimate. Iranian Kurds are now generally estimated at about 4 million. Baluchis may number about 1.5 million and Arabs, 1 million. The major tribal confederations number in the hundreds of thousands. Since native Persian speakers, whom I will henceforth refer to as Persians, are now believed to be a slight minority in Iran, it, like Iraq, is seen to be a country without a compact majority. Persians, however, occupy the central plateau, predominate in cities and in government, have linguistic hegemony throughout Iran, and do not face a unified opposition or ethnic minorities.

Three general types of Muslim ethnic groups may be distinguished. I will exclude the gypsies, scattered throughout Iran, on whom little research has been done but who often attach themselves to tribes in special occupations (for example, as tinkers or musicians). First, there are settled, mainly nontribal peoples who live on or near the Iranian Plateau, are in frequent contact with Persians, and are Shi’ite in religion. These include chiefly the Azerbaijanis and secondarily the Gilaki-speaking peoples of Gilan and Mazandaran, whose language, like Persian, is Indo-European and most of whom also speak Persian easily. Although Gilanis and Azerbaijanis have at times been rebellious, they are closer to the Persians in life style and loyalties than most of the tribal minorities. There is even some disagreement over whether the Gilakis constitute a true ethnic group.

Second, along the border, there are sizable ethnic groups, largely tribal and pastoral in origin: the Kurds, Turkomans, Baluchis, and Arabs. These are distinguished from the other tribal groups by being Sunni in religion either in part (the Arabs), in great majority (the Kurds), or completely (the Turkomans and Baluchis). In light of the zeal with which the Safavid dynasty (1501-1722) tried to convert to Shi’a Islam all Iranians, including tribespeople who spoke neither Persian nor Turkish, this Sunnism is one sign of the somewhat tenuous past connection of those four peoples with the Iranian state. These peoples are also distinguished by having a large, related ethnic group across the border. (This is also true of Azerbaijanis. but they appear today to have few ties to Soviet Azerbaijanis.) Some Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis have at different times shared in struggles with their related ethnic group across the border, and members of all four groups have at times spoken out for autonomy. As the largest and most widespread group, having a significant Shi’a population, the Kurds to some degree share characteristics with the first group, Azerbaijanis, and Gilakis. Thus settled Kurds, especially Shi’as, sometimes become very Persianized and even enter into Tehran politics, which is less characteristic of the more clearly demarcated Baluchis, Turkomans, and Arabs.

The third group comprises tribes and tribal confederations that are Shi’ite, do not have ethnic kin across borders, and generally are smaller and less menacing to the center than the other two groups, even though they have (especially the Qashqais) fought the government at times. Below I consider features of the above three groups that are most relevant to Iran today.

Settled, Nontribal Peoples

I will limit myself here to the politically important Azerbaijanis. Ever since the mid-eleventh-century invasion by the Seljuq Turks, Iran has been ruled mainly by Turkish-speaking dynasties of tribal-nomadic origin, and it is the heavy presence of invading Turkish tribes and rulers that accounts for the Azerbaijanis Turkish speech. For centuries, Azerbaijan’s capital, Tabriz, was the capital of major dynasties as well as its largest and most important commercial city. The Safavids moved the capital to Isfahan, and the Turkic Qajars (1796-1925) moved it to Tehran. In the later nineteenth century. Tabriz’s commercial importance declined with changes in international trade routes. More calamitous was the effect of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s centralization of economic activity in Tehran and the fall of trade with the Soviet Union, which depressed Azerbaijani trade and industry and caused Azerbaijani migration south. Whereas in the early twentieth century, especially during the constitutional revolution of 1905-11, in which Tabrizis played a heroic role, Turkish newspapers and literature circulated freely, the Pahlavi shahs allowed only Persian to be taught and printed in Iran. After World War I there was a local rebellion in Azerbaijan under Sheikh Muhammad Khiabani, whose autonomist government instituted a number of reforms, demanded fairer financial and cultural treatment by the center, and renamed the province Azadistan (“Land of Freedom”). This movement was militarily suppressed in late 1921, as was another Azerbaijani revolt a few years later.

These movements and the constitutional revolution demonstrated strong sentiments in Azerbaijan for greater democracy, equality of treatment, and freedom from both governmental and foreign oppression. That the Azerbaijanis long led Iran in the struggle for democratic rights is not surprising, since their language put them into close contact with advanced Turkish thinkers in Russian Caucasia and the Ottoman Empire, and since the impact of commercial capitalism was felt first in Azerbaijan. Also, before the Russian Revolution, many Azerbaijanis migrated back and forth to jobs in Transcaucasia, including the Baku oil fields, where they came into contact with Caucasian workers with radical or socialist ideas. A Social Democratic party was formed in Tabriz as early as the constitutional revolution.

An awareness of this democratic and radical background is important to understanding the autonomous Azerbaijani government of 1945-46, led by Ja’far Pishevari and his Democratic party. That government is often presented as simply a consequence of the Soviet presence in Azerbaijan, but the main role of Soviet troops then was to keep out central government troops. The Azerbaijanis had sufficient cultural and economic grievances and enough radical and democratic background to support in considerable numbers Pishevari’s government, though there is no scholarly agreement on the degree obits popularity or on the kind of welcome given central troops when they returned and overthrew it.[4]

The new government began teaching Azerbaijani in the schools and set up Azerbaijan’s first university, which taught in Azerbaijani. Some socioeconomic reforms, including land reforms, were instituted, causing a flight of landlords southward. Some measures were popular and others unpopular, but the aims of political and cultural autonomy and a fairer share of revenues and economic life were widely shared. Soon after Soviet troops withdrew, the central government abrogated the agreement it had made with Pishevari on autonomist rights and sent in troops to overthrow his government and its reforms, often brutally.

Under Mohammad Reza Shah, no autonomist demands or local language teaching were allowed to any group, and even though Azerbaijan received some new economic projects and was favored in land reform, autonomist or nationalist feelings remained strong. Despite such concern for autonomy and against rigid centralization, no significant group in Azerbaijan has advocated breaking with Iran, and many Azerbaijanis have been important in the central government and in Tehran’s intellectual. economic, and professional life. After the 1979 revolution, many Azerbaijanis identified with the liberal and learned Ayatollah Shariatmadari, himself an Azerbaijani, who was more popular among them than Khomeini. A largely Azerbaijani Islamic political party was set up, but Shariatmadari was too cautious to sanction it. This party urged a boycott of the new theocratic constitution in the December 1979 referendum. Large numbers of Azerbaijanis did boycott the referendum, and when the local radio station distorted this fact it was seized and Tabriz saw a minor revolt. Shariatmadari did not defend the revolt and acquiesced in the dissolution of the party, after which there were no more such dramatic movements. Nonetheless, most Azerbaijanis probably still prefer Shariatmadari (under virtual house arrest in Qom since 1980) to Khomeini and continue to want some sort of autonomy. Many are involved in radical antigovernment movements, whose chief strength (notably the minority faction of the Marxist Feda’iyan and the Islamic socialist Mujahedin) lies in the north, from Mazanderan through Gilan, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan (where they help specifically Kurdish parties). Azerbaijan is a source of support for many Mujahedin militants.

Given a government willing to compromise and allow local rights as great as (though not necessarily identical to) those enjoyed by U.S. states or Canadian provinces, the Azerbaijan question in Iran should be soluble, since Azerbaijani ties to the Persians and to the center are great. Strict centralization and the prohibition of local printing, broadcasting, and political parties, however, can increase discontent. It should be added, though, that several twentieth century intellectuals of Azerbaijani origin, notably Ahmad Kasravi and Hasan Taqizadeh, favored Persianization of Azerbaijan and all Iran. Moreover, since 1979 many pro-Khomeini mullahs from Azerbaijan hold top positions in Iran’s ruling party and help govern Iran. Azerbaijanis, then, have held a wide variety of political views and positions.

Border Tribal Groups

The Turkomans

The smallest of the Sunni border tribal peoples, the Turkomans had a nineteenth-century reputation for raiding and enslavement of Shi’as (whom they saw as unbelievers and hence liable to be made slaves). It has been claimed that some Iranian Turkomans retained their nomadic life style largely for political reasons, since it put them in a position to retain considerable political autonomy.[5] They were already partly pacified before Reza Shah, but it was he who forced them, like other tribes, to settle and give up their arms. Living in good agricultural territory, a minority of them have grown rich since World War II through the mechanized cultivation of cotton. Not surprisingly, given their relative prosperity, they were not among the groups most hostile to Mohammad Reza Shah, and soon after the 1979 revolution, they began to show concern about economic issues and felt that Sunnis were being discriminated against by an increasingly Shi’ite state. From 1979 until today, several armed revolts by the Turkomans, often related to peasant attempts to take land, have been put down. It seems clear that many remain discontented with what they see as an uncompromisingly Shi’ite government, not to mention the political, economic, and cultural grievances they have against the new regime.

The Baluchis

Living in southeastern Iran, as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, most Baluchis are, like most Turkomans, physically distinguishable from most Persians, from whom they are largely separated by desert. Although the Baluch language is related to Persian, the two are not mutually intelligible, and over the centuries there has not been much contact or intermixture. Some Baluchis feel closer to their fellow Sunni Baluchis in Pakistan and Afghanistan than to ethnic Persians. Like other border tribal groups, the Baluchis have in the past been largely a nomadic people, though some have by now settled.

Baluchistan, the poorest and most backward region of Iran (partly because of its great aridity, the southwest is generally Iran’s poorest area) constitutes part of the province of Baluchistan-Sistan, the inhabitants of Sistan being mainly Shi’as. After the Islamic Revolution, Baluchis complained that they were being ruled by the Shi’a Sistan minority and began revolts that continue to this day. Some Baluchis were rather favorably disposed toward the late shah, partly because he brought some economic improvements to the area. But even in Mohammad Reza Shah’s time, there were a few Baluch nationalist revolts and movements. As with the Kurds and Arabs, Baluch dreams of breaking off and forming a new state with their ethnic kin across the border do not seem feasible, unless there is to be a series of international wars and rebellions in the Middle East, for no country is willing to give up such a large chunk of territory without a bitter fight. More feasible are the demands of the Baluchis and other ethnic minorities for local autonomy, including internal self-rule, teaching of their own language, and religious equality. In recent decades, Baluchistan has looked much like a colony of Tehran, from where nearly all its officials come, and this politico-economic control by the Tehran elite is one cause of local resentment.[6]

The Arabs

The Arabs of Khuzistan are the least studied of the large ethnic minorities, in part because few scholars were able to study them (or the Kurds) and in part because the Arabs have become intermixed with the many ethnic Persians, Azerbaijanis, and non-Arab tribal peoples that have moved into Khuzistan since the discovery of oil there in 1908. Khuzistan is by far Iran’s greatest oil-producing province, holds its largest refinery (Abadan), and hence is the province Iran would be least likely to put in danger of loss or secession without a great struggle. Consequently – and also because the urban Arab population is now so intermixed with non-Arabs, who are now in the majority in Khuzistan – the Arab issue is not entirely comparable with that concerning the Kurds, Turkomans, and Baluchis. There is no large Arab-majority region that could be put together as an autonomous region having a significant Arab urban center. Both before and after the 1979 revolution, there were some Arabs who demanded autonomy, but owing to demographic changes, demand may be unrealistic. More possible would be official recognition of the use of the Arabic language along with Persian, a greater place for local Arabs in government, and economic programs for the Arabs, many of whom live in exceptionally depressed conditions. Though many Arabs work in the oil industry, agribusiness, and elsewhere, most hold lower-paying jobs than non-Arabs.

Outside Iran, Arab propaganda maintains that before Reza Shah there existed an independent state of Arabistan, which was annexed by Reza Shah. In fact, Khuzistan (then called Arabistan) was always part of Qajar Iran, as can be determined from nineteenth-century maps and histories, or by the fact that the British, despite their support for Khuzistan Arab leaders, made their chief oil concession agreements covering “Arabistan” with the government of Iran. Before Reza Shah, the Arab tribes, like so many tribes far from Tehran, had considerable local autonomy, and their chief tie to the center was to pay taxes. Sheikh Khazal, the chief Arab tribal leader of the early twentieth century, got support from the British, who made subordinate oil agreements both with him and with Bakhtiari leaders in order to keep the oil areas trouble-free. In 1924, some Arab tribal leaders even had illusions of securing independence from the domain of Reza Khan, but he was able to move in troops to putdown a Khazal-led southern tribal independence movement, and the British gave the Arabs no aid. After this the ethnic mix of the region changed rapidly with the growth of the oil industry and, more recently, with related industrial and agricultural projects. Unlike Baluchistan and Kurdistan, Khuzistan is a rich province, but the Arabs have by no means shared proportionally in those riches.

Many writings state that the Arabs are Sunni, but the only bases for this assertion seem to be that most Arabs in the world are Sunni, that some Arabs in Khuzistan clearly are Sunni, and the Shi’a Arabs follow some customs that Persians associate with Sunnism. In the absence of scholarly work or census surveys, it is impossible to estimate the percentages of Shi’as and Sunnis among the Arabs, but the evidence suggests that the great majority of Iranian Arabs are Shi’ite. First, the Arabs border on a part of Iraq that is, and has long been, almost entirely Shi’ite, and it would be surprising to find a Sunni pocket in such an area, especially since, second, they live in the Shi’ite state of Iran.

Arab autonomist sentiment has been encouraged by Arabs outside Iran, especially by Iraqis, but was effectively suppressed under Pahlavis. After the revolution of 1979, the Arabs, like many ethnic minorities, expected to be permitted more autonomy and, like the others, were disappointed. The new Iranian government allowed for locally elected councils, but neither in its laws nor its constitution would it set up ethnic regions or allow much use of local languages in education and official bodies. Arab protests occurred and sabotage of oil pipelines was blamed on Arab nationalists. Such events probably encouraged the Iraqi government to believe that Iran’s Arabs would cross over en masse when they launched their invasion; but, in fact, Arab defection was slight. This suggests that Iranian Arab identification with Iran is greater than one might gather from some Arab nationalist statements. (The same is probably true of other ethnic minorities. whose leaders ask for autonomy, not independence.) It also suggests once more that Iran’s Arabs are mostly Shi’as and do not relish incorporation into a Sunni-secular Iraqi state disliked by many of its own Shi’a subjects.[7]

The Kurds

The largest and most important of Iran’s partly tribal ethnic minorities are the Kurds, a group that has had the most significant conflict with the central government. Kurdish, like Baluchi, is an Iranian language related to Persian, and Mohammad Reza Shah sometimes tried to use this fact to stress Persian-Kurdish brotherhood, albeit without great success. The Kurds are said to constitute the largest contiguous ethnic group in the world (chiefly in eastern Turkey and Iraq and in western Iran) that has never had its own nation-state, although large parts of Kurdistan were autonomous under the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds are a more ancient people in their area than the Arabs or Turks; and this, together with the fact that they number in the many millions (about 10 million internationally- some say more) and predominate in a large territory, has given them a basis for a nationalist movement with varying goals that dates back to the late nineteenth century. In the first treaty dismembering the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Ottoman Kurds were given their own polity, but that treaty was so ruinous to Turkey that it had to be completely redrafted after a successful Turkish nationalist war led by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). The first treaty, however, undoubtedly encouraged a nationalist legacy among Kurds everywhere. Reza Shah dealt with Kurdish uprisings as severely as he did those among other tribal groups.

As in Azerbaijan, autonomy feelings came to the fore in World War II. Although neither the Soviets nor the British were in control of most of Kurdistan then, the Kurdish autonomist movement (centering in the town of Mahabad) got some Soviet aid in its buildup towards the declaration of an autonomous Kurdish Republic, which lasted through 1946. Even more than in Azerbaijan, the autonomist movement reflected local sentiment: it was headed by a popular leader, Qazi Mohammad; had a broad-based political party, the Komeleh (later called the Kurdish Democratic party); and got help from the strong Iraqi Kurdish Barzani tribe, led by Mulla Mustafa. Like the Azerbaijan movement, it was put down with great violence soon after Soviet troops left Iran.

By the 1970s, Mohammad Reza Shah felt confident of his control of Kurdistan, as of all Iran, and used Iranian Kurdistan as a conduit for arms and a place of refuge for Iraqi Kurds, then fighting their own government for autonomy. The shah did this, with “secret” U.S. aid (partly managed by the CIA), in order to end Iraqi threats to Iran, chiefly Iraq’s demand to control the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab river border. Iraqi Kurds, particularly conservative leaders like Mulla Mustafa Barzani, were mistaken in their belief that Iranian aid would continue after the shah achieved his own goal (which he did in the 1975 Treaty of Algiers). One of the last things the shah wanted was an autonomous Kurdish state on his border that might rekindle autonomist movements among Iranian Kurds. Some Kurds put their trust in U.S. aid, but were likewise disillusioned. The 1975 treaty caused thousands of Iraqi Kurds to take refuge in Iran and spelled the end of both Iranian and U.S. aid to Iraqi Kurds. The whole incident may have rekindled autonomist feelings in Iranian Kurdistan (a territory far larger than either the Mahabad Republic or the province called Kurdistan), but such feelings were probably strong in any case, particularly among non-Shi’a Kurds – their Sunni majority – and the Ahl-i Haqq minority. Some urban Shi’a Kurds identified more with the central government; indeed, urban Kurds have produced leaders of Iranian nationalist movements and parties.

Kurds, like Azerbaijanis, participated significantly in the 1979 revolution, and like them, hoped to achieve autonomist and democratic goals. Several political parties grew up in Kurdistan after the revolution, nearly all of them leftist to some degree. The most important is the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP), led by a formerly exiled intellectual, Abdulrahman Qassemlu. Another important leader is the Sunni religious leader of Mahabad, Sheikh Ezzedin Husaini. Kurdish autonomy is also supported, both within and outside Kurdistan, by nationwide leftist and liberal groups who oppose the government – chiefly the Mujahedin, the Feda’iyan, the “Maoist” Peykar, and the former National Democratic Front of Hedayatollah Matin-Daftari – and by some liberal leaders. The Kurdish Komeleh party, to the left of the KDP, also fights for autonomy; the KDP and others explicitly support the rights of the many non-Kurds in the Kurdish-majority region.

In March 1979, a Kurdish delegation went to Qom to present the Kurds’ demands to Ayatollah Khomeini, who said they were unacceptable. Small clashes began soon after, and the Kurds overwhelmingly boycotted the referendum for an Islamic Republic. Mediation attempts failed, despite the good will of a few mediators like Ayatollah Taleqani (d. September 1979), and in mid-August the army was ordered to attack the Kurdish towns, which were taken after a struggle, though resisters moved into the mountains and countryside. Under Kurdish and other pressures, the Iranian government, in December 1979, announced a program granting limited autonomy to minorities. For the first time, cultural and linguistic rights for minorities were recognized (though these were scarcely put into practice). No changes, however, were made in provincial borders, which are not ethnically relevant, and the Kurds remained scattered throughout several provinces of mixed population. This program was neither accepted by activist Kurds nor modified by the government, and the fighting continued sporadically during 1980 and 1981. Although the Iranian army and government control the main towns of Kurdistan, this is not true of much rural and mountain territory, where effective autonomy has been achieved for the present. It is widely believed that Iraq has aided Iran’s Kurds since the Iraqi attack on Iran, making many Iranians suspicious of Kurds (as of Iran’s Arabs). Iran’s Kurds are unlikely to repeat the error of Iraqi Kurdish leaders by relying heavily on aid from a country fundamentally hostile to true Kurdish autonomy. The Kurdish question in all countries is complicated by the fact that – even though Iran’s Kurdish leaders since 1979 have insisted they want autonomy, not separation – some Kurdish leaders in the world, past and present, have advocated an independent Kurdish state. While no non-Khuzistani minority is likely to fight for separation so long as Iran has a huge oil income from Khuzistan (constituting most of the government’s income), this incentive to unity will end after the oil runs out (perhaps early in the twenty-first century). Nonetheless, indications are that the majority of Iran’s Kurds want autonomy, not separation, and that military suppression of Kurdish autonomists will not bring a long-term solution to Iran’s Kurdish questions. [8]

Shi’a Tribes and Tribal Confederations

There is space here to deal only with the larger groups and to make a few generalizations. Since 1978, as in Iran’s most distant past, the weakening of the central government has meant a reassertion of virtual autonomy by many of Iran’s tribes, accompanied today by some revival of nomadism, movement onto lands of settled people (some of which were taken from tribal peoples under the shah’s land reform), and increased internal struggles within some tribes and confederations, notably the two major ones, the Qashqais and the Bakhtiaris.

The Qashqais

The Turkic-speaking Qashqais of Fars have long been involved in politics, including some pro-German (because anti-British) activities in both world wars and revolts against the government in the 1940s and 1950s, the latter after the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadeq, whom they supported. Mohammad Reza Shah then exiled their paramount chief, Naser Khan, and his brothers, and later certain state functions of other tribal khans were removed and the tribes put under gendarmerie control. In 1962 the murder of a land reform official in Fars province was used as a pretext to crack down on the whole confederation, and control measures became even more severe. The Qashqais were consequently hostile to the shah (as they had been to his father, who had decreed tribal sedentarization) and welcomed the 1979 revolution. They used the revolution to regain considerable autonomy and the use of some lands lost to non-Qashqais during the land reform, and Naser Khan returned from the United States to a tumultuous welcome. Internal struggles have surfaced, however, in part between young Qashqais (sometimes affiliated with the leftist-minority Fedayan) and the khans and their affiliates.[9] Like other tribal groups, the Qashqais are class-divided, the strata ranging from the rich to the propertyless, and their struggles reflect these divisions.

The Bakhtiaris

The Bakhtiaris, who speak a dialect of Luri, an Indo-European language, have also long been involved in politics, but in a different way. During the revolution of 1906-11 they were the only large tribal group to back the constitutionalists. (Many tribal soldiers were used by Mohammad Ali Shah against the constitutionalists.) After Mohammad Ali Shah’s coup d’etat against Parliament and the constitution, the Bakhtiaris cooperated with urban guerilla forces from the north to overthrow him in 1909. A few Bakhtiari leaders were sincere constitutionalists, but most simply wanted to increase Bakhtiari power. In fact, after 1909 several Bakhtiari leaders entered the cabinet or received provincial governorships. The Bakhtiaris (and certain Kurdish tribes) are the only tribes with an urban elite that would produce leaders so heavily involved in Tehran politics under Pahlavi rule. The first head of the Savak secret police Taimur Bakhtiar, who turned against the shah and was then killed in a ‚Äúhunting accident” in his Iraqi exile; Soraya Bakhtiar, Mohammad Reza Shah’s second wife; and Shahpur Bakhtiar, long-time National Front activist and Mohammad Reza Shah’s choice as the prime minister who might stem the revolutionary tide are all examples of this heavy political involvement. None was close to the tribal population in its homeland (chiefly in Isfahan province, just above the Qashqai territories). Much like the Qashqais, the Bakhtiaris since 1978 have experienced both greater autonomy, owing to central government weakness, and increased internal struggles.[10] Like other tribes, they have also experienced growing class division and urban migration.

Less is known about the recent activities of other large tribal groups: the Shahsevans of Azerbaijan – who, unlike the Qashqais, Bakhtiaris, and most other tribes, speak the same Turkish language as the surrounding settled population – or the non-Bakhtiari Lurs, chiefly to the west in Luristan. It seems likely, though, that the general trend toward greater autonomy owing to governmental weakness is also felt by these and other tribal groups. This autonomy does not necessarily make tribal peoples supporters of the current Iranian government – especially as most tribes have taken Islam rather lightly, have had few dealings with the mullahs, and have not segregated or veiled their women (indeed, the migratory tribal schools pioneered by the Qashqais were coeducational). To the extent that these tribal peoples are now forced to follow the government’s interpretation of Islam, they feel restricted. [11]

IRANIAN RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

Muslims or Near-Muslim Minorities

The Sunnis, whose religion is well known (since it comprises the majority of the world’s Muslims), are chiefly concentrated among the border ethnic peoples discussed above – all Turkomans and Baluchis, most Kurds, and some Arabs. There are also little-known pockets of Sunnism among ethnic Persians, attested to by eyewitnesses but not yet studied. Almost the same may be said of the Sevener Shi’as (Isma’ilis), all of whom were once widely thought to have left Iran for India in the 1840s after the failure of a revolt led by their hereditary leader, the Agha Khan. Recent scholars have found and begun to study the thousands of Isma’ilis who still exist in Iran. The Ahl-i Haqq, or Ali-Ilahis, a sect found chiefly among the Kurds and some Azerbaijanis, are known as deifiers of the first imam, Ali, although scholars have found that their religion deviates in other ways from Shi’a Islam and probably includes native Kurdish and Turkish elements. There are also differences of view and affiliation among Shi’a Muslims that could result in severe factional struggles.[12]

Jews

The Jewish community, which may once have numbered as many as 80,000 but is now much smaller, especially with the post-1948 emigration (mainly to Israel) and the post-1978 emigration (mainly to the West), goes back centuries before the Christian Era. In recent times it has been wholly urban, concentrated in Tehran, with Shiraz as it second center. Shi’ism, Iran’s state religion since 1501, is generally said to have been more discriminatory toward Jews and other protected non-Muslims than Sunnism. Shi’a Islam emphasizes ritual purity: the touch of an unbeliever might be polluting, and Jews and other non-Muslims in Qajar times might have had to stay home on rainy days, since water could carry pollution. The protected minorities lived mostly in separate residential quarters, and meaningful social contact with Muslims, especially within the home, was usually out of the question. Food could not be shared since touch might be polluting. It is not likely that such restrictions were resented by minority communities of the past as strongly as they would be today: the notion that each religious community should stick largely to itself was (and in some cases still is) an accepted one in many societies, and within one’s own community a rich social life was often possible. More damaging to the Jews and other non-Muslims were Iranian laws to the effect that if one member of a family converted to Islam, he received the entire family’s property; occasionally there were also forcible conversions (often reversed later) of local communities to Islam. The Jews, moreover, were mainly an impoverished community in Qajar times, even though a few of them could make a good living at trades shunned by Muslims – namely money lending and silver- or goldsmithing. .

With some success, beginning in the last nineteenth and, especially, in the twentieth centuries, various Western Jewish organizations directly or indirectly pressured the government on behalf of the Jews and opened some modern schools. The Pahlavi dynasty – in line with its desire to modernize, encourage enterprise, break down community barriers in favor of an all-Iranian nationalism, and present a modern image – ended discriminatory laws against Jews and other minorities, closed down foreign and confessional schools to bring everyone under one national curriculum and language, and in some ways even encouraged minorities as a counterweight to overzealous Shi’as. Jews often prospered under the Pahlavis, with many of them becoming merchants and small businessmen, though thousands remained poor. Although many Jews emigrated to Israel, some came back and a majority chose not to go at all. Thousands of Jews, in fact, came to Iran from Baghdad. Jews were permitted to move out of their residential quarters, as were other minorities, and to some degree enter the Iranian mainstream. As in many countries, however, anti-Semitism did not die and was reinforced by the unpopularity, both among the Muslim masses and many secular intellectuals, of Shah Mohammad Reza’s friendly policy toward Israel. After the 1979 revolution, a few leading Jews were executed, but many hundreds of times more Muslims have been executed. So this is not, as of 1981, as large a discriminatory point as it has sometimes been made to seem in the United States. More widespread were various less drastic expressions of anti-Semitism, which was fed to some degree by the belief, common not only in the Muslim world but in the Third World and elsewhere, that Israel is an imperialist, anti-Muslim country and that Jews are likely to be actively pro-Israeli. Thousands of Jews with money were able to leave Iran during and after the revolution, but those who remain have less chance to leave and are understandably apprehensive. [13]

Christians

Iran’s Christians are divided into two major groups, the Armenians and the Nestorian Assyrians. Each has its own language. The Armenians were formerly concentrated in Azerbaijan, near Russian and Turkish Armenians, and in Isfahan, where the Safavid Shah Abbas imported Armenians who were traders or skilled in the crafts. They founded their own city of New Julfa and, more recently, have also moved to Tehran and other cities. While largely identified with the Persian constitutionalists in the 1905-11 revolution, Armenians have subsequently entered little into Persian politics. Some Persians suspect them of excessively close ties with Westerners and dislike their frequent prosperity, based largely on good education; in general, though, the Armenians have rarely been persecuted. As did other religious minorities, they preferred the secularist regime of the Pahlavis to the Islamic Republic, which has limited their freedoms, and many have left Iran since 1978. Their language is Indo-European but not close to Persian, although vocabulary influences exist in both directions. Until recently, they numbered over 100000. Many work in the crafts and as traders, a few are agriculturalists in Azerbaijan, and their mastery of languages and good education also brings them into cosmopolitan businesses and professions.

The Nestorians, who speak Assyrian, the modern version of ancient Semitic Aramaic, used to be found almost entirely in the region of Urmiyeh, on Lake Urmiyeh, surrounded by Kurds and Azerbaijanis. In recent times many have moved to Tehran and elsewhere, but Urmiyeh is still heavily Christian. The community, the only compact Christian community in Iran, was the center of attention for Western missionaries from the early nineteenth century on. As a result, schools and hospitals were built, and some Nestorians were converted to Western varieties of Christianity. Less numerous and less prominent than the Armenians, the Nestorians are not important in business or politics and hence have aroused less prejudice than the former. Neither the Nestorians nor the Armenians have faced as many problems as the Jews or, especially, the Baha’is, since the revolution. [14]

Zoroastrians

Iran’s several thousand Zoroastrians, now greatly outnumbered by South Asian Zoroastrians (Parsis), who are descended from Iranian exiles, experienced a dramatic change of fortune in the twentieth century. Concentrated in the southern cities of Yazd and Kerman, they were a poor and often despised community until Indian Parsis began to aid them and, more important, until an Iranian nationalism began to develop in the late nineteenth century that prized pre-Islamic Iran and its religion above Islamic Iran. This trend influenced Reza Shah, who encouraged pre-Islamic studies and cultural themes and, by honoring Zoroastrianism, went beyond his generally tolerant religious policy. Unsurprisingly, most Zoroastrians remained poor under the Pahlavis, but some were able to move out of their quarter and gain the education needed to become successful professionals, civil servants, and businessmen. Although the Islamic regime does not, of course, honor Zoroastrianism, there have been no reports of special persecution. Like the Nestorians, they are a small community and, having no great reputation for close relations with disliked Westerners, arouse little hostile feeling.[15]

Sabeans (Mandeans)

Like Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, the Sabeans are a protected People of the Book. According to some scholars, this community was not really one of those intended by the Quran when it named protected people, but it was later so regarded. (They might have been protected in any case, since the Zoroastrians are not named in the Quran but came to be protected both for practical reasons and because they were judged to be scriptural monotheists.) The Sabeans live in Khuzistan, near the Iraqi border, and are also found in Iraq. Like Armenians and Jews, they work in precious metals, work that is shunned by Muslims for religious reasons, and they are also agriculturalists. Syncretic and partly esoteric, their religion has been described in various ways. In Muslim lands they may say that they are Muslims (without trying to hide that they are Sabeans), and to Christians that they are Christian. Their religion has some Christian elements, and Westerners have sometimes dubbed them “Christians of Saint John the Baptist.” The Iranian Sabeans are neither numerous nor politically important, and very little has been written about them or about their fortunes under various regimes. [16]

Baha’is

Although they are the largest non-Muslim minority in Iran, numbering perhaps 250,000 or more, they are also the most troubled. Unlike the above communities they are not protected People of the Book. What is more serious, from the point of view of fundamentalist Muslims, they descend from a religious movement that broke from Islam, and conversion from Islam is prohibited in Muslim law. To add to their difficulties and present danger, the headquarters of their religion happens, by historical chance, to be located in the present-day Israel Some Muslims therefore believe, especially if their leaders say so, that Baha’is are closely tied to Israel even though they have taken an officially neutral position in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Baha’is descend from the messianic Babi religion, which arose in the 1840s when a young Shirazi declared himself to be, first, the gate (bab) to the last imam and, later, the imam himself, returned as the messianic mahdi. He produced a new scripture and declared that mankind has a progressive series of prophets and scriptures, which will continue with a future prophet. The Babis led revolts and were persecuted, particularly after an attempted assassination of the Qajar shah, after which a number of them went to Iraq. There, one of two claimants to be the Bab’s successor also claimed to be the predicted future prophet and wrote new scriptures that greatly changed Babism in an internationalist, pacifist, syncretic, and liberal direction. This was Baha’ism (named after its founder, Baha’ullah), and it won over most Babis. (Only a very small, secret remnant of the followers of the original Babi creed remains in Iran.)

Despite the fact that Baha’ism requires its followers to eschew political activity, Baha’is have often been politically suspect in Iran and have frequently been made scapegoats. Their failure to oppose the Qajar shahs in the constitutional revolution caused many to see them as the shahs’ partisans. The Pahlavi shahs, even though they took anti-Baha’i measures, were believed by many to favor the Baha’is. In Muslim countries, people are regarded as belonging to the religious community of their parents or grandparents unless they have publicly converted to another religion (this is also true in Western countries for religious minorities, such as Jews and Muslims), and thus persons in the Pahlavi government whose backgrounds were Baha’i, or part Baha’i, were often considered Baha’is. Such persons included Amir Abbas Hoveyda, prime minister for twelve years, and a few other government figures. They were also dubious accusations about some persons in Savak, though there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Savakis were born Shi’as, and accusations against the Baha’is were mainly false pretexts for persecution.

The Baha’is have never been a recognized religion in any country that calls itself Muslim, since their recognition would go counter to strict Islamic law and sentiment. Nonrecognition does not automatically mean persecution, however, and for most of the twentieth century in most Muslim countries, including Iran, Baha’is have been treated little worse than other religious minorities. Yet, many ulama in Iran have disliked this fact, and in 1955 they pressured the shah into destroying the Baha’i temple in Tehran and carrying out other persecutions. Later, though, the shah halted persecutions and seems to have favored somewhat a few persons of Baha’i and other minority background, possibly since they were more likely to be beholden to him than Shi’a Muslims. The governmental and economic power of minorities was greatly exaggerated by their opponents. Like some other religious minorities, Baha’is tended to be well educated, and those who had good educations were in a position to get good jobs, some of which brought them into contact with Westerners.

Given the fact that the Jews and Christians have not suffered nearly as much persecution as recently experienced by the Baha’is, it appears that it is chiefly the Baha’is lack of legitimate religious status under strict Muslim law that has rendered them vulnerable. Relatively few Baha’is have been able to leave Iran, and most remain there in fear. Among officials and other executed after the revolution, persons of reputed Baha’i background were disproportionately numerous; and in 1981 the visible leaders of the Baha’i community were executed, and Baha’i children were turned away from school unless they converted to Islam. One charge against executed Baha’i leaders was that they were “Israeli agents,” although few Jewish leaders were killed under this charge. Some fear a forcible attempt to obliterate Baha’ism in Iran, and the community understandably feels very threatened.[17]

CONCLUSION: THE NEED FOR NEW POLICIES

Some may conclude that for minorities, the Islamic Republic has in every way been worse than the Pahlavis. This may be true for several religious minorities, toward which an extreme fundamentalist stance has often been taken, but for the ethnic minorities the picture is more mixed. Many tribes have greater autonomy and freedom to carry out migratory pastoral nomadism than they did under the Pahlavis. Toward ethnic autonomy, the Pahlavis did not offer even the partial concessions proposed by the Islamic Republic (some written into its constitution) but insisted on appointing officials from Tehran and on strict monolinguism. Armed resistance movements by the Kurds, Baluchis, Turkomans, and some Arabs under the Islamic Republic do not mean that they are treated worse now than under the Pahlavis, but rather that they did not achieve everything they expected from the revolution and that they face a weaker government, against which they can revolt with some hope of victory. Persian Shi’a Muslims have suffered far more jailings and executions since the revolution than any other combination of groups, mostly on political or morals charges. Those in charge of the regime seem to feel that they are in possession of God’s truth and that any political or religious deviation from their view is culpable. They also feel their own weakness, especially as compared to the Pahlavis, and hence are increasingly moved to try to suppress opposition and deviation by violent means. The Pahlavis were convinced enough of their strength and stability that Mohammad Reza executed hundreds, rather than thousands, on political grounds. Like the Islamic Republicans, however, the Pahlavis did take strict measures to enforce their own dictatorial view of conformity: Reza Shah’s tribal policy caused many deaths, and neither he nor his son allowed opposition parties or organizations to exist. The solution to problems of persecution and national minorities, then, is not to be found in a return to the past, but in the adoption of new policies.

ENDNOTES

Valuable suggestions for revision were made by the editors of this volume and Ervand Abrahamian, Lois Beck, Gene Garthwaite, and Leonard Helfgott, all of whom are owed thanks. Part of this work was done under a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, for which I am grateful. Juan Cole provided some useful materials and original summaries, and Eric Hooglund provided bibliographic assistance.

[2] Those interested in the Iraqi minorities problem should consult Batatu, Old Social Classes and Edmund Ghareeb, The Kurdish Question in Iraq (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981).

[3] Ervand Abrahamian, in his Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), using data for 1956, provides an elaborate table that includes figures for religious minorities: Assyrians, 20,000; Armenians, 190,000; Jews, 60,000; Zoroastrians, 16,000; and Baha’is, 192,000. Richard V. Weekes, ed., Muslim Peoples (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), offers figures (pp. 510-11) that, while they overstate native Persian speakers and understate the Azerbaijani and Kurdish minorities, seem more realistic for the smaller tribal groups: Qashqais, 408,000; Turkomans, 313,000; Shahsevans, 306,000; Karkalpaks, 21,000; Baluchis, 1.5 million; Arabs, 614,000; Bakhtiaris, 571,000; Lurs, 459,000; and Basseris, 21,000. Weekes, whose book includes several useful entries on many of the Iranian and Iraqi minorities discussed in this chapter, estimates the “undetermined” Hazaras, Tajiks, Qizilbashes, and Gypsies as totaling 1,813,000 persons.

[4] See Ervand Abrahamian, “Communism and Communalism in Iran: The Tudah and the Firqah Dimukrat,”International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (October 1970): 291-316; S. Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); William O. Douglas, Strange Lands and Friendly People (New York: Harper, 1951).

[5] William Irons, “Nomadism as a Political Adaptation: The Case of the Yomut Turkmen,” American Ethnologist 1 (1974): 635-58.

[6] Personal observation and investigations: several articles by P. Salzman on the Baluchis, including “Continuity and Change in Baluchi Tribal Leadership,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (October 1973): 428-39, and several articles by B. Spooner on the Baluchis.

[7] My recent information comes mainly from personal informants and wide reading of newspapers and journals. Prerevolutionary minority group opposition, including that of the Arabs, is discussed in Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979), chap. 8.

[8] On the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere, see G. Chaliand, ed., People without a Country (London: Zed Press, 1979); and M. van Bruinessen, Agha. Sheikh and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan (Utrecht: n.p., 1978). Also see W. Eagleton, Jr., The Kurdish Republic of 1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).

[9] Personal information from Qashqai informants.  On the Qashqais, see especially the writings of Lois Beck, including “Tribe and State in Revolutionary Iran: The Return of the Qashqai Khans,” in Iranian Revolution in Perspective: Iranian Studies, ed. F. Kazemi, 13 (1980); “Economic Transformations among Qashqai Nomads 1962-1978,” in Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, eds. M. Bonine and N. Keddie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981);

“Women among Qashqai Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran,” in Women in the Muslim Worlds, eds. L. Beck and N. Keddie (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1978); and Lois Beck (with N. Keddie), The Qashqai People of Iran (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1981). Also see P. Oberling, The Qashqai Nomads of Fars (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) and anon., The Qashqai of Iran (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 1976). On several tribes, see R. Tapper, ed., The conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (1983).

[10] Oral information from J. P. Digard and G. Garthwaite.  On the Bakhtiaris, see the relevant articles by Garthwaite and his Khans and Shahs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1983). Digard has written several articles in French on the Bakhtiaris and has done a book on their technology.

[11] On the general problems and position of ethnic minorities before and after the revolution, see N. Keddie, Roots of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); L. Helfgott, “The Structural Foundations of the National Minority Problem in Revolutionary Iran,” in Iranian Revolution in Perspective, ed. Kazemi; idem, “Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” Iranian Studies 10 (Winter-Spring 1977): 36-61; and R. Cottam, Nationalism in Iran, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).

[12] Most Iranian towns have been traditionally divided into hostile factions of religious origin, notably the Nimatis and Haidaris, who have engaged in periodic battles. In addition, followers of different mujtahids or ayatollahs have sometimes been hostile toward one another, and this has continued until today. The Isma’ilis and the Ahl-i Haqq have both been discussed in numerous books and articles by W. Ivanow, V. Minorsky, and others; the medieval Isma’ilis, or “Assassins,” are studied in M. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins (The Hague: Mouton, 1955) and B. Lewis, The Assassins (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Rafiq Keshavee has recently completed his Harvard University dissertation on one group of Isma’ilis in contemporary Iran.

[13] Besides periodical and newspaper sources, see Laurence D. Loeb, “The Religious Dimension of Modernization among the Jews of Shiraz,” in Modern Iran, eds. Bonine and Keddie; idem, Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern Iran (London: Gordon & Breach, 1977); and the sources he cites.

[14] John Joseph, The Nestorians and Their Muslim Neighbors: A Study of Western Influence on Their Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960); Eden Naby, “The Assyrians of Iran: Reunification of a ‘Millat,’ 1906-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 8 (April 1977): 237-49; I. P. Y. Ter-Yovhaneanc, “The Armenians, 1850s,” in The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914, ed. C. Issawi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 59-62. There is a large body of missionary and travel literature dealing with Iran’s Christians.

[15] Michael M. J. Fischer, “Zoroastrian Iran between Myth and Praxis” (Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1973); Mary Boyce, A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Paul Ward English, “Nationalism, Secularism and the Zoroastrians of Kirman,” in Cultural Geography: Selected Readings, eds. F. Dohrs and L. Sommers (New York: Crowell, 1967). There is also a large body of missionary and travel literature on the Armenians and Assyrians.

[16] See Lady Esther S. S. Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Leiden: Brill, 1962).

[17] On the Babis and Baha’is, see especially E. G. Browne, Materials for the Study of the Babi Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918); Shoghi Effendi, trans. and ed., The Dawn Breakers: Nabil’s Narrative of the Early Days of the Baha’i Revelation (New York: Baha’i Publishing, 1932); N. R. Keddie, “Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism,” in Iran: Religion, Politics and Society, ed. N. R. Keddie (London: Cass, 1980); and William M. Miller, The Baha’i Faith: Its History and Teachings (South Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1974).

In looking back at my life it seems important to write not only about aspects directly relevant to my profession as a historian, but also about my political life, which influenced my decision to be a historian and to study the Middle East, and which continues, in a time of renewed political repression, to be relevant to understanding the life of academics and others in the United States.

I grew up mainly in New York City after spending ages 3-6 in upstate New York. My father managed textile factories and my mother from time to time worked for the Soviet- American Trade Organization, Amtorg, though she mostly stayed home with me and my older and younger brothers. I was what in today’s U.S. is called a “red diaper baby” with leftist parents. From the age of six I was intensely interested in political, especially international, issues and early empathized with people in distant countries. I filled Christmas stockings for Loyalist children in the Spanish Civil War. My mother was amazed when, at age just seven, after being away in summer camp for two months in 1937, I asked her first of all “How is the Spanish Civil War going?” and I remember her answering, “We have another war to worry about now; the Japanese have invaded China.”

After bad experiences in public schools, my older brother and I were sent to progressive private schools where history study was made interesting through doing plays and other projects. When we were asked to do papers on the Renaissance, I chose, at age eleven, to look at a non-western part of the world and wrote a paper on Genghis Khan and his period. I was cast as King Richard in a play on Wat Tyler’s peasant revolt, and as a Chinese woman in a play about the Sino-Japanese war; my brother had a more leading role as Nehru in a play about India–plays the classes and teachers made up.

In grade school and high school I was interested in history, chiefly American history, though I usually ignored the assigned textbooks and found more interesting or deeper material to read. Even in progressive schools at that time our textbooks characterized the period after the U.S. Civil War as one in which greedy men from the North and ignorant Negroes combined to ruin the South. I was beginning to think that this was untrue, though I could not have imagined the total revision of this Reconstruction period that has been done by historians led by Eric Foner in recent decades. In high school we learned little European history and no non-Western history, though we had a unique class in World Literature.

I participated in political activity, including ushering at the 25,000 audience-strong rallies at Madison Square Garden put on by groups like the Progressive Citizens of America, where speakers included Helen Keller, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Henry Wallace. This was the precursor to the Progressive Party, which ran Wallace for president in 1948. The summer I was sixteen I worked as a volunteer in Washington for an anti-racist organization, The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, staying with an aunt and an uncle who was editor of the labor newspaper, the CIO News. I was amazed to be asked to write congressional testimony for the Black leader Mary McLeod Bethune, and I was also sent, as an innocent-looking person, to a restricted press conference where the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee told why they had just listed the Southern Conference as Un-American.

When I went to Radcliffe, then technically separate from Harvard though all classes were at Harvard, I intended to major in Political Science, given my interest in politics, but friends advised me that Political Science would not give me what I wanted, and suggested I pursue my interest in History instead. I chose Harvard’s special honors program in History and Literature, in which one specialized either in a period or a country; I picked the nineteenth century (which in this program was truly long, 1789 -1939), and as my four countries chose England, France, Italy, and Russia. I studied Italian and Russian, already knowing French from an outstanding high school teacher who had us speak only French in class–a method that was then unique. I was attracted to Italy, particularly after a summer 1948 trip to Western and Eastern Europe, my first trip abroad, where I fell in love with Italy and got to know interesting Italians. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on reform and revolution in the Italian Socialist Party to 1922.

I was also heavily involved in politics and, like many leftist students at that time, joined the Communist Party. In the U.S., because Communists had been jailed or lost jobs, membership was rarely open, though the party was so penetrated by F.B.I. agents that the government knew nearly all members. Although there was a general “party line” that we were supposed to follow, we decided in our Harvard-Radcliffe groups most of the campaigns we would carry out based on this general line. Besides peace activities that included considerable naivety about the Soviet Union, these actions included several that pre-figured later major movements in U.S. society. Among these were to help set up a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Harvard-Radcliffe, and the campaign I led to open the Lamont Library for undergraduates to women.

While at Radcliffe I got married, and as my husband was about to finish his Ph.D. and seek a job, I chose an accelerated program and finished my four-year stint at Radcliffe in three years and two summers. My husband got a three-year instructorship at Stanford University and I entered the Stanford M.A. program. I felt badly treated at Stanford, which did not then have the outstanding History Department it has since developed, and the only part of my year there I enjoyed was writing my M.A. thesis on the philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico, a thinker whose originality, dialectical subtlety, and brilliance has been increasingly recognized. When I went to California, my Communist Party transfer was supposed to be accomplished by tearing a dollar bill in half and having the California receiver of the other half find me. No one approached me, and over time, as I became aware of more realities about the Soviet Union, I lost interest in the Party and concentrated on other approaches to progressive politics. These included the campaign against the execution of the Rosenbergs and several years’ activity in the grassroots California Democratic Council.

Unhappy with Stanford, I decided to commute to the University of California, Berkeley, where I was far better treated and was happy with nearly all my professors. Driving then would have been difficult and dangerous, so I chose a train, then a bus, then a trolley for a fairly long commute, and in my second year, in order to be able to attend late seminars, I stayed in Berkeley three days a week. Although I had been specializing in Italian history until then, I thought that so many people loved Italy that Italian History was sure to be overcrowded, and I should choose another field. At first I thought it would be Russian History, and I worked intensively in a Russian reading course on the great nineteenth century Russian literary critics. But I thought the really new frontier where the most original things could be done was in what came to be called Third World countries. I also thought, at a time of prejustice against many professors, and departments and often did not hire, women, I would be better off in a field that was new and expanding and in which I could use my linguistic talents to acquire rare languages.

By far my favorite professor and major influence at Berkeley was Joseph R. Levenson in Chinese history, a brilliant intellectual historian whose importance is again being recognized. I contemplated doing Chinese history, but two practical things stopped me–first, there were already several excellent Chinese historians in the country, many of them like Levenson trained in Chinese and Japanese in World War II, and I felt unsure I would be competitive, and, second, I have a bad memory, and it is hard to look up words in Chinese dictionaries. I felt more drawn to Middle Eastern, and particularly Iranian, history, even though I knew no Iranians and had no personal contact with anything Iranian. Iran, like Italy, has a long identifiable history, with outstanding traditions in the arts, literature, and religion. This was also the period of prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and oil nationalization, so Iran seemed politically interesting, though this ceased to be true after the U.S. engineered Mosaddeq’s overthrow in 1953, and became true again only in 1978.

Nobody taught Middle Eastern History at Berkeley and I was only able to take two years of Arabic and almost no Persian there, so I had to complete my preparation in these languages on my own, at summer schools offered for these purposes, and finally in Iran. The lack of history courses was far less serious than the inadequate language courses, as I could read a lot of books, take a few courses in political science and sociology, and put together a Middle Eastern field for my oral exams in addition to the fields in Early Modern and Modern Europe and East Asia. I have always been surprised when people think it impossible to get a Ph.D. and be a good scholar without having had a professor in one’s field as a guide. Having a background in what would now be called World History has been a huge help in understanding historical processes.

At that time the great names in the Middle Eastern field were men who had a primarily philological training as Orientalists, many of them with religious interests, and they tended (as many still do) to treat the Middle East with an emphasis on Islam to the virtual neglect of other factors in history. Among the great names then, perhaps only Claude Cahen had a historian’s training and approach. Without realizing it at the time, I became one of a very small first generation of specialists on the Middle East trained as a historian.

During the years when I was getting my Ph.D., I divorced, moved to Berkeley and remarried. Once, two men from the FBI came to see me and, not yet knowing the best response was to say I would talk to them with my attorney present, I declined to talk to them. One of them then said that they wanted to talk about the government’s (de facto) refurbishment of the World War II Japanese internment camps, and to ask which camp I wanted to go to. (This of course was not their real purpose but was said, successfully, to scare me.) Also during my years at Berkeley my Harvard undergraduate advisor, after once writing me an outstanding recommendation letter, the next year wrote the same letter and added, “My only reservations are political…” etc., which caused me considerable trouble at U.C. Berkeley, which had been rocked by a university-wide, and later a state-wide, loyalty oath ostensibly aimed at Communists. As a result, I never felt I could use my Ph.D. adviser for recommendations. I did well at Berkeley, however, with good fellowships from the university and from the American Association of University Women.

After getting my Ph.D. in 1955 with a dissertation on the broad topic of the impact of the West on modern Iranian social history, I was employed for a year in a group research project about South Asia, which I had studied. My first article was on labor problems in Pakistan, 1957. In late 1956 I had no job, and my husband wanted to go to Tucson, Arizona for a year, to help in his father’s business. I could not find academic or teaching employment there, and took a job as secretary to the Dean of the Graduate Division. The head of the History Department died suddenly, and they asked me on two day’s notice to take over his courses and another course, totaling 12 hours a week. Thus began my teaching career, in spring, 1957.

Teaching jobs were then obtained in the U.S. by having departments write the leading persons in the field and ask them for recommendations–the so-called “Old Boys Network.” My name would never have come up this way, so I did what was considered wrong–wrote letters to about 100 places. Though I got little response before I had the Arizona teaching job, afterwards I got four offers, two of which, from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and from the University of Arizona, were for regular teaching posts. I chose to go to Scripps, where I taught in the Humanities program, emphasizing the modern West, and courses on the history of all Asia.

In 1958 I was granted a Social Science Research Council fellowship for 1959-60 to go to Iran to study the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911. Until 1958, when the Supreme Court declared the denial of passports unconstitutional, I had been unable to get a passport for ten years.

Shortly before leaving on this trip I got a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was planning hearings in Los Angeles, though, in the politically improving times, these hearings were later cancelled. I, however, could not go abroad with an outstanding subpoena, so I contacted a New York attorney who was able to arrange a private hearing with the committee counsel in New York on my way abroad. The only way to avoid jail for not answering committee questions was to cite the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution against self-incrimination. My attorney said there were a few questions I could answer, including that I was not a Communist (which the Scripps president had insisted on), without waiving my Fifth Amendment rights, but the counsel asked many incriminating questions about spying and other activities that I could not answer without waiving these rights and risking jail for contempt of congress. Fortunately, my proceedings were not published. This was an extremely upsetting experience.

My stay in Iran, with my husband working on another project, was very fruitful. I was able to interview old people who remembered the constitutional revolution, and though this was not reliable for facts, it did tell me things not available in the written sources about the beliefs of many constitutionalists. Sayyid Hasan Taqizadeh, who had been a leader in the revolution, told me that for him and many of his colleagues attaining a modern education brought about a complete overturning of their former beliefs, rendering them religious skeptics even though in public they had to claim religiosity. He also named a group of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary leaders who belongs to the Azali branch of the nineteenth century heretical messianic Babi religion, while the larger, Bahai, branch, were not revolutionaries.

I became interested in explaining the unique alliance between unorthodox progressives and a large part of the orthodox Shi’i ulama against the Qajar government, which went back to the successful Iranian protest against a British tobacco monopoly. Only in Iran did a large part of the orthodox clergy combine with progressives in major movements against the government and its subservience to the West. I tried to explain the special features of both the clerical and progressive parts of this alliance in several articles, notably Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism (1962), The Origins of the Religious-Radical Alliance in Iran (1966), and a book, Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891-92 (1966). In broader articles written in this period I discussed the effects of repression and of imperialism on the forms taken by oppositional discourse in Asia and the Muslim World, discussed in Western Rule versus Western values: Suggestions for a Comparative Study of Asian Intellectual History (1959) and Symbol and Sincerity in Islam (1963)

I returned to California in 1960 and soon after divorced my husband. In early 1961 I learned that Scripps’s president had decided to terminate my employment, and I was very upset, but very soon Prof. Gustav von Grunebaum called and offered me a one-year position at UCLA. Von Grunebaum had been brought to UCLA from the University of Chicago to set up a major center of Middle East Studies. At UCLA all appointments are in departments, not centers, and both von Grunebaum and I were in the History Department. Although I was kept in visiting status for two years, the History Department then offered me an assistant professorship. The department chairman, without consulting me, lowered my step and salary to step one assistant professor, but later agreed to ask that it be raised back to step two after I complained. In early 1963 I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1963-64. I got a call from the UCLA chancellor’s office asking me to see the chancellor. When I came, the chancellor and vice- chancellor were there, and the chancellor said he had one question to ask me, and if I answered satisfactorily that would be the end of it. He asked if I was a member of the Communist Party, and I said no, and he said that was all. I was not so sure. I spent the year at Harvard and in Europe, reading documents and writing chapters, which became articles and a book, on the background of the constitutional revolution. But the minor correction from step (and salary) I to step II did not go through, and when I saw von Grunebaum in Europe he told me the vice chancellor was still dissatisfied, and I would have to answer more questions on my return in late 1964.

In 1964 the Dean of the Faculty spoke to me and said someone (the FBI it turned out) had been to the chancellor with several charges. None of them said I was a Communist (the only point relevant in the then-university rules). They were things like my mother’s working for Amtorg, my friendship with a few Italian communists, and a total fantasy that I had dated Soviet Embassy spy couriers while in Iran. When I answered, the Dean said he was satisfied, and I was to be raised to Step III, but this was changed by the Vice Chancellor to Step II. I was reliably told that the Vice Chancellor was trying to force me to leave and would probably deny me tenure, and so I sought tenured jobs elsewhere and got two offers. The History Department then overwhelmingly voted for tenure, but higher bodies turned this down as too rapid an advance. I was about to leave UCLA for the University of Washington, but made a final appointment with the chancellor, who happened to be seeing von Grunebaum about something else in the interim. The chancellor told me he had not known what the vice chancellor was doing and, based on what von Grunebaum had said, I would get tenure without further review. He then made the most overt sexual advances and suggestions I have ever experienced from someone with power over me. The whole experience caused me extreme anxiety and stress, and I was never compensated by an apology or for the money lost by having been kept at such low salary for so many years.

At UCLA while I at first had few graduate students of my own, they were of high quality and their numbers increased over the years, until I had an outstanding group of graduate students in the 1980s and 1990s. All of them now have good teaching jobs. I also found both the Near East Center and the History Department outstanding and friendly, with most of my friends and close contacts being with historians in various fields rather than area specialists. I have always identified as a historian with broad interdisciplinary interests.

I had found that there was an unexpectedly huge amount of documentation on the constitutional revolution and came, after writing some articles on the background to the revolution, to concentrate on this background with my book on the tobacco protest and a series of articles on the years before the revolution and the beginning of the revolution. I then undertook a study of the internationally-important figure, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al-Afghani.” He was a late nineteenth century teacher and activist of great influence throughout the Muslim world, known especially for promoting pan-Islam, meaning the unity of Muslim countries and peoples for defense against imperialism, especially British imperialism.

The Iranian scholars Iraj Afshar and Asghar Mahdavi found, organized, and in 1963 published a catalogue of Afghani’s papers, left in Mahdavi’s family home when Afghani was expelled from Iran in 1891. I had all the papers microfilmed and purchased by the UCLA Research Library, and used these and other sources to reconstruct Afghani’s life and ideas. I found that the existing biographies of him were all mythical, based on what he and his disciples wanted people to believe about his Afghan birth and Sunni religious orthodoxy. These documents and others showed, as his Iranian relatives had written, that Afghani was born in Iran, had a Shi’i education there and at the shrine cities in Iraq, where he was influenced by the somewhat unorthodox Shaikhi school. He had among his books, and later taught in Egypt, works of the Greek-influenced Islamic philosophers. They, like other unorthodox thinkers in Islam, tried to escape repression by teaching that the rational truth was only for an elite, while literal religion was good for the masses. (This view in the West was called the “double truth” and was associated with Averroes). Afghani probably got his lifelong hatred of British imperialism during a trip to India at the time of the “Sepoy mutiny.”

Documents from Kabul show that Afghani came to Afghanistan for the first time in 1866 and was known to be a foreigner. His anti-British activism brought his expulsion in 1868 and he went to Istanbul, where a talk comparing prophets and philosophers brought his expulsion in 1871. He went to Cairo, where his teaching influenced a generation of activist reformers, notably Muhammad Abduh. He advocated modern science, self-strengthening, and resistance to the British. Expelled from Egypt in 1879, he returned via Iran to India, where he wrote several articles and a tract known as “The Refutation of the Materialists” in Persian. In 1968 I published An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al-Afghani”, with translations of his major writings and a 100 page introduction on his life and ideas. I gave the outlines of an accurate biography and showed how Afghani had adapted the methods of Islamic philosophers to modern political activism, appearing to mass audiences as an orthodox Muslim while known to his disciples quite differently. In an article in French, his Answer to Renan, in the Journal des Débats (1883), he wrote that both Islam and Christianity had tried to stifle reason and science, but that Muslims, like Christians would develop toward rationality, though the common people would always prefer religion. In 1972 I published a long biography of Afghani and also published the first of several edited volumes, covering the social history of religious institutions, Scholars, Saints, and Sufis. I subsequently edited or co-edited several books on Iran and Islam, among them Shi’ism and Social Protest (1981), co-edited with Juan Cole. Over the years, I also published volumes of my articles on Iran and on resistance and revolution in the Middle East. Another topic I have written about in recent years is secularism and fundamentalism, going beyond the Muslim world to write comparative articles about these phenomena in countries ranging from the United States to South Asia.

In the 1970s I became interested in women’s studies, having included an article on women’s religious life in Scholars, Saints, and Sufis. As people were beginning to produce high quality papers on women in the Muslim World, I decided to edit a volume of original articles; Lois Beck got the same idea, and we cooperated to produce the large volume, Women in the Muslim World (1978), with excellent articles from several disciplines. This was the first such volume published. Later, with my ex-student Beth Baron, I edited Women in Middle Eastern History (1991), and with Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, my graduate student, guest edited a special issue of a journal on women and fundamentalism, worldwide. I have a chapter on Middle Eastern women in the book, Women’s History in Global Perspective, Vol. 3 (2005) and in 2007 published the book Women in the Middle East: Past and Present.

In the past decades I have continued to work on Iran, on secularism and fundamentalism, and on other topics. In 1973-74 I spent a year in Iran, working on the economic and social aspects of handicrafts and carpets. I saw that this would involve photography, so got a good camera, studied photography, and took many photographs of handicraft and carpet workers and processes in nearly all provinces of Iran. I turned out to have a talent for photography (I had painted up to age 20), and returned in later summers partly for a photo project on the Qashqai people of southern Iran, which became a catalogued exhibit at UCLA. I also worked on other Iranian topics, and wrote articles about the crisis caused by Iran’s oil income boom and about the rising religious opposition. These and some of my talks gave me an exaggerated reputation of having predicted the 1978-79 Iranian revolution.

In the academic years 1976-78 I was honored to be a visiting professor at the University of Paris III, where I lectured in French and continued my research and writing. There I wrote an article about one of my other interests, Material Culture and Technology: A Neglected Field of Middle Eastern History. I went to Iran in the summers to continue my research and photography there. Over the years I have also spent many summers in Europe, primarily in London, doing research particularly in the Public Record Office. I have also attended many international congresses, including those of historians, economic historians, and specialists on Asia and North Africa. Unfortunately, chronic health conditions have made it impossible for me to travel abroad since my last trip to Europe in the summer of 1995.

After the Iranian revolution, when many people were suddenly interested in Iran, I decided to write a history of modern Iran that would focus on why Iran, ever since the tobacco movement (and to a degree since the mid-nineteenth century Babi movement) had had an extraordinary number of major rebellions and revolutions, all of them with some religious component. The ensuing book, Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (1981) updated my previous studies of the sources of the ulama’s power, discussed the positives and negatives of Iran’s attempts at modernization under the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, and included discussion of modern Iranian social, economic, and intellectual history. In 2003 I published a substantial revision of this book as Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, with three new chapters on political, socioeconomic, and cultural developments since 1979. The Rockefeller Foundation gave me a year’s fellowship in 1980, which I used primarily for work on Iran in Washington, D.C., where I was also a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for three months. In 1992 I got another Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for a month at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, where I wrote the manuscript of a critical book on identity politics, which I never published.

In the early eighties I wrote a number of newspaper and magazine pieces as well as scholarly articles on contemporary Iran. I then embarked on a comparative study of Islam and politics, traveling from Senegal and Nigeria to Indonesia, where I spent an entire summer in Minangkabau, Sumatra, the world’s largest matrilineal Muslim society, about which I wrote an article, as I did about Islamists in Tunisia, and a chapter about Yemen’s history. I wrote several comparative studies of Islam and politics, past and present. In 1999 I also published a book about the Qajar period in Iran.

While I have found it perfectly possible to edit a good book without a prior conference, I have initiated four conferences, all of them published with additional chapters–one with co-editor Eric Hoogland when I was a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., published as The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic (1986), another published as Neither East nor West: Iran, the Soviet Union and the United States (1990) co-edited by Mark Gasiorowski, and a third, Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics (2000) co-edited with Rudi Matthee. A fourth conference, on comparative fundamentalism, was published over two issues of the journal I founded and edited, Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science (1991-1996).

Contention was an undertaking especially appropriate to a time after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as well as the unexpected rise of fundamentalisms and of new, largely relativist, theories in the humanities and social sciences. I conceived of a journal that would include debates on these and other issues, and put together a distinguished and able board of editors. The format in this thrice-yearly journal was to have an initial article and a response in the same issue; these were usually commissioned, although as time went on there were increasing uncommissioned submissions. Further responses on the same subject were often submitted and published. The first issue included an article on What Went Wrong in communism by Eric Hobsbawm, with a reply by Richard Pipes. Over time we debated the deconstructionist Yale professor Paul De Man, whose early antisemitic articles had caused a stir; the ideas of Freud, Foucault, and Thomas Kuhn; several questions involving women, gender, and sexuality; the meaning of the rise of religious fundamentalisms worldwide; a number of seminal books and other questions of interest to educated persons. The journal was very enthusiastically received, but in a time of library cutbacks we could not get enough subscriptions to support its continuation after its initial five years. We still get requests for back issues, and two collections of Contention debates on particular subjects were published as books.

When I wrote this autobiography, for inclusion in a 2005 volume about 2004 Balzan prize winners, I was working on my book on women’s history in the Middle East (2007), which includes a narrative history based on the research done on this subject by several scholars especially since the 1970s. This book, Women in the Middle East: Past and Present, was published by Princeton University Press. It also include several review and critical articles I have written on this topic as well as the autobiographical interviews published by Nancy Gallagher in Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians (1994), supplemented by additional autobiographical pages. I have in press in 2009 a chapter on modern Iran in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Islam and since 2005 have published several articles and edited a special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s History, all of which are listed in my bibliography.

The Balzan prize will enable me to participate in several other projects involving younger scholars, including one that will put several hundred of my Kodachrome slides of countries from Senegal to Indonesia on the web for use by graduate students and scholars. I will probably also publish a book that includes some of my color photographs of ordinary men and women and their work in several Muslim countries. Another project will bring young scholars of the Middle East to the UCLA History Department on fellowships for research, with light teaching. A third project is for retreats or conferences, involving both young scholars and established scholars, on topics including the history of women, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East, and Shi’ism and modern politics. The winning of the Balzan prize is an amazing and totally unexpected honor, and gives me the opportunity to undertake programs that will be of benefit especially to younger scholars and to the scholarly world more generally. I can only wish that such studies may contribute to greater understanding between the West and the Muslim World in a time when relations between the two, particularly as concerns the United States, have deteriorated terribly, mostly because of recent U.S. policies. My own views on politics are more skeptical and nuanced than they once were, but I still have strong opinions about such things as launching unprovoked wars, neglecting the poor at home and abroad and limiting civil liberties.

“My Life and Ideas: A Brief Overview” released by Professor Nikki Ragozin Keddie

2004 Balzan Prize for The Islamic world from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century.

International Balzan Foundation, Claridenstrasse 35, P.O. Box 2448, CH-8022 Zürich T +41 1 201 48 22, F +41 1 201 48 29

For more information please Google Nikki Keddie or see Wikipedia.

Grafton covers major works by microhistorians, especially Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Davis, and Robert Darnton, and discusses some contributions by Lawrence Stone and (exotically for an article on U.S. trends) Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. He mentions other giants of history like William McNeill and C. Van Woodward, but not their main contributions. I can suggest some accomplishments and controversies Grafton does not cover.

Post-war politics affected the personnel and content of history studies, from HUAC investigations and loyalty oaths through mass movements for civil rights, against war, for women’s and gay rights and others. A leftward turn among students, with many chosing academe over more lucrative professions, changed history departments from their former largely conservative white male character.

The geographical expansion of history not only brought most of the world into history courses, but also created new views of World and Comparative History. McNeill’s work expanded from its early Western emphasis and encompassed novel studies of the role of disease, military organization and technology, and other subjects. Another world historian, Leften Stavrianos, gave an alternative generally Marxist view. [McNeill, who first studied Greece, Stavrianos, a scholar of the Balkans, and another pioneer world historian, Marshall Hodgson, a Middle East specialist, all early studied parts of the world with elements of "East" and "West," and hence knew how porous the borders were between the two. All three taught in urban Chicago, while most of Grafton's microhistorians had ties to Princeton.]?

World history is now taught in many universities, and is often a Ph.D. field. Views of the world by pre-twentieth century historians usually divided even the literate world into the advanced West and the rest, often homogenized under concepts like “Oriental despotism” or Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production”–concepts that were later effectively challenged but did not die. Other elements of Marxism were important in post-World War II schools founded by social scientists but adopted by many historians–Dependency Theory, originating in Latin America, and Worlds Systems Theory begun by Immanuel Wallerstein, which divided the modern world into a changing core, a semi-periphery, and a periphery, with the former exploiting the latter. World-oriented historians have often focused on trade, conquest, and migration as transnational forces, and many study trade regions–the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, and the Asian so-called Silk Route. Migration and conquest sometimes create diasporas, another topic of research. Modern imperial and postcolonial history also has a world history dimension and has attracted historians.

The impact of prehistorical developments on history, already suggested in the work of archeologists like G. Gordon Childe, was expanded in Jared Diamond’s seminal and popular Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond shows that Middle Eastern regions had the ideal ecology to develop agriculture and domesticate key animals, and that western Europe had the conditions for rapid later development. He shows that domesticated crops and animals spread quickly in Eurasia, but slowly in the Americas, with their north-south axis. While specialists disagree on the details, Diamond’s approach provides vital background for historians. Proponents of “Big History” like David Christian go further back, showing how the history of the cosmos and earthly evolution affect human history.

The rapid development of non-Western history brought a new range and sophistication in non-western fields that could have had more impact if more historians had paid attention. In my graduate education at Stanford and Berkeley, which then offered no Middle Eastern History, I learned more from historians of China and Japan than I did from those of my other field, Modern Europe. Joseph R. Levenson brought a subtlety and sophistication to Chinese intellectual history matched only by the different work of Benjamin Schwartz. Mary and Arthur Wright, who like the others were students of John King Fairbank, were other major pioneers of the China field, which continued to be a center of knowledge and controversy. Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Diversion argues that except for lack of coal and temporary political factors China was on an economic par with Europe just before the industrial revolution. Other major historians, including Philip Huang, have contested this.

A historical giant, whose work would be more influential if historians of the West read it, was Thomas C. Smith. His early works analyzed the development of industry and agriculture in modern Japan, and found many parallels to Western Europe. Smith later applied demographic methods pioneered by the Cambridge Group in England and again found several significant parallels to western trends. Several Japanese historians have contributed to such work although comparisons of Japan to the early modern West have given way to more monographic or post-modern studies, and rapidly-developing China is currently favored over Japan as a point of close comparison with the West despite the closer similarities to be noted in pre-Meiji Japan.

Indian and South Asian history have flourished, with an emphasis on theory–often postmodern and/or postcolonial, which has been welcomed by some and contested by others like Richard Eaton. Partha Chatterjee’s view of the nation and nationalism is popular among historians of the global south. Different views of colonialism have centered especially on South Asia–did imperialism enrich the metropole, hinder local industrialism, impoverish and divide the colonies, or are other interpretations more credible? Studies of major historical empires have also become significant.

Historians of the Middle East have revised many earlier views, especially of the Ottoman Empire, whose entire history has been restudied. Widespread use of archival, legal, and other sources has shown that Ottoman law very rarely punished sexual crimes, often had mild punishments even for serious offenses, and protected many rights of women. There has been a reaction against the view of Ottoman decline from the late sixteenth century on, with many writing only of a relative decline as compared to the European northwest. Women in the imperial harem, often blamed for the alleged decline, have been rehabilitated in Leslie Peirce’s The Imperial Harem, which also revises views of how the empire was governed.

History has expanded to cover countries without writing or with writing systems that did not cover as much as did those much of Eurasia. Methods for using oral history were pioneered by Jan Vansina; historical linguistics to measure migration and material culture by Christopher Ehret and others; and supplementing incomplete writings by utilizing living languages by James Lockhart. Such methods are mainly used for Africa and the Americas. Novel approaches to material culture also contributed to the history of these areas and also to that of literate regions.

U.S. History since the 1950s has expanded in many directions, notably revision of views of slavery, reconstruction, and black history. Beginning with the works of W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, and then Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, which overthrew the dominant view of benevolent slavery, and proceeding through the works of Eugene Genovese, which saw slavery as part of an interlocking social and cultural system, revisionist works on slavery, black history, and reconstruction multiplied. Recent examples include Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity, Eric Foner’s works on reconstruction, and Clayborne Carson and Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King. David Brion Davis has pioneered in many, including cultural and comparative, aspects of the history of slavery.

The field of the U.S. West has been completely revised since the once-dominant frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. Other popular questions in U.S. history include the colonial period, the founding fathers, the U.S. as part of the Atlantic (on which Bernard Bailyn runs a yearly program), and U.S. international policies.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman brought a novel mathematical economic history approach to slavery in Time on the Cross. It was widely criticized for understating the mistreatment of slaves and for piling assumption on assumption. Such a combination of “what if” history with mathematics into “counterfactual history” was followed by some economic historians, while others pursued the mathematics without the “what if.” Economic historians who came from History departments rather than Economics departments tended rather to stress social, geographic, and cultural factors. A favorite macro question was why the West got ahead of the rest. Among respected historians addressing it were Joel Mokyr and David Landes, whose cultural view favoring the West elicited criticism.

Economic history intersects with ecological and demographic history, which flourished in recent decades. Woodrow Borah’s work on Latin America’s drastic population decline owing to the conquerors’ diseases was followed by many works on disease. Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism is a leading general work on ecological history. Demography has relied largely on family, birth, and death records, and has been most developed for areas with the best records. Such factors as late marriage and small families in England and Japan have been correlated with economic development.

Among subjects crossing geographical boundaries Women’s History stands out for its contributions and for encouraging the development of other fields–gender, family, male, and gay history. Women’s History boasts numerous authors of almost equal importance. Gerda Lerner, Natalie Davis, and Joan Scott are among the several pioneers. In gay history George Chauncey’s Gay New York goes beyond its title in discussing varieties of homosexual culture and practice. General histories can no longer ignore gender, though their mode of incorporating it is not always sophisticated or adequate. The study of women and gender has extended to all parts of the world, and three winners of the relevant AHA Joan Kelly prize since 1997 were books about China, Syria, and Iran.

Other groups–ethnic, religious, diaspora, migrant, class, and occupational–have also had historical treatment. Popular have been histories of human relations to the non-human–often to commodities. There has been a rise in writing about consumption and a relative decline in writings about production, although both the history of technology and of modes of production have received some attention. Those who see modes of production as crucial to the understanding of the way people are organized in society have been losing out in numbers to those who stress cultural or “superstructural” factors. There are some prominent historians with varying Marxist approaches, notably Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson.

In various fields number crunching, aided by computers, has brought information about people for whom we have scant records into larger views of social and economic history. Other novel methodologies, such as the Freudian psychohistory of Peter Loewenberg also have adherents. Many historians use new media, chiefly audio and visual records of individuals, events, and the material world.

European history has had important U.S. innovators. Among them, Robert Paxton opened the door to a true history of Vichy France; Carl Schorske’s book on Vienna is a brilliant model of social-cultural urban history; Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen showed how and when ordinary people became nationals, and John Brewer’s books on eighteenth century England dramatically revised established views. Important work was also done in other parts of Europe and in ancient and medieval history.

The History of Science and Medicine has become a major field in many History departments.. Thomas Kuhn’s seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was written when he was in the U.C. Berkeley History Department. In addition to the usual intra-field controversies, there are disagreements between scientists, who often see their history as a progressive discovery of scientific laws and theories, and historians, who stress the social and cultural aspects of science. Recently there have been histories of almost everything touching humanity, from sports to festivals, to clothes, food, and other commodities, to film, television, and popular culture.

On the theoretical side, a few books with different approaches have been influential, notably for a time E.J. Carr’s What is History? which combined a quasi-Marxist approach with relativism toward what is important in different periods. For more relativist postmodernists, Hayden White’s Metahistory is important, while Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs’ Telling the Truth about History combines a partially postmodern with other approaches.

Given the desire of identity groups to stress their contributions and the gap between a more liberal intellectual class and more conservative, sometimes organized, non-academic contingents, it is not surprising that history writing, especially for the schools, has often been controversial. Dealing with such controversies is History on Trial by Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn.

The students I have known have been interested in controversy and in diverse approaches to understanding the past, and the writers I have known have been enthusiastic, not bored. Surveying the varieties of twentieth century history seems more a cause for optimism than the opposite.

Labor Problems of Pakistan
by Nikki R. Keddie
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Aug., 1957), pp. 575-589

Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism
by Nikki R. Keddie
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Apr., 1962), pp. 265-295

Symbol and Sincerity in Islam
by Nikki R. Keddie
Studia Islamica, No. 19 (1963), pp. 27-63

Afghani in Afghanistan
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Jul., 1965), pp. 322-349

The Origins of the Religious-Radical Alliance in Iran
by Nikki R. Keddie
Past and Present, No. 34 (Jul., 1966), pp. 70-80

The Pan-Islamic Appeal: Afghani and Abdülhamid II
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Oct., 1966), pp. 46-67

Sayyid Jamīl al-Dīn al-Afghīnī’s First Twenty-Seven Years: The Darkest Period
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle East Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 517-533

British Policy and the Iranian Opposition 1901-1907
by Nikki R. Keddie
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 266-282

Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Modernism: The Case of Sayyid Jamīl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iran, Vol. 6, (1968), pp. 53-56

The Iranian Village before and after Land Reform
by Nikki R. Keddie
Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, The Middle East (Jul., 1968), pp. 69-91

Iranian Politics 1900-1905: Background to Revolution
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 3-31

The Roots of the Ulama’s Power in Modern Iran
by Nikki R. Keddie
Studia Islamica, No. 29 (1969), pp. 31-53

Pan-Islam as Proto-Nationalism
by Nikki R. Keddie
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 17-28

Iranian Politics 1900-1905: Background to Revolution: II
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1969), pp. 151-167

Iranian Politics 1900-05: Background to Revolution: III
by Nikki R. Keddie
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Oct., 1969), pp. 234-250

The Iranian Power Structure and Social Change 1800-1969: An Overview
by Nikki R. Keddie
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 3-20

The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914, and Its Political Impact an Overview
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2/3 (Spring – Summer, 1972), pp. 58-78

Intellectuals in the Modern Middle East: A Brief Historical Consideration
by Nikki R. Keddie
Daedalus, Vol. 101, No. 3, Intellectuals and Change (Summer, 1972), pp. 39-57

An Assessment of American, British, and French Works since 1940 on Modern Iranian History
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2/3 (Spring – Summer, 1973), pp. 152-165

Is There a Middle East?
by Nikki R. Keddie
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1973), pp. 255-271

Culture Traits, Fantasy, and Reality in the Life of Sayyid Jamāl Al-Dīn Al-Afghānī
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2/3 (Spring – Summer, 1976), pp. 89-120

The Midas Touch: Black Gold, Economics and Politics in Iran Today
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 243-266

Class Structure and Political Power in Iran since 1796
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1/4, State and Society in Iran (1978), pp. 305-330

Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women
by Nikki R. Keddie
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May, 1979), pp. 225-240

Iran: Change in Islam; Islam and Change
by Nikki R. Keddie
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1980), pp. 527-542

Communications
Antoine Ayoub, Nikki Keddie
Middle East Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring, 1981), p. 295

Comments on Skocpol
by Nikki R. Keddie
Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May, 1982), pp. 285-292

Iranian Revolutions in Comparative Perspective
by Nikki R. Keddie
The American Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jun., 1983), pp. 579-598

Material Culture and Geography: Toward a Holistic Comparative History of the Middle East
by Nikki R. Keddie
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1984), pp. 709-735

Introduction
by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2/4, Iranian Studies in Europe and Japan (1987), pp. i-viii

Italian Scholarship on Iran (An Outline, 1557-1987)
Angelo Piemontese, by Nikki R. Keddie
Iranian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2/4, Iranian Studies in Europe and Japan (1987), pp. 99-130

Nikki Keddie: Pakistan’s Movement Against Islamization
Nikki Keddie, Joe Stork, Eric Hooglund
MERIP Middle East Report, No. 148, Re-Flagging the Gulf (Sep. – Oct., 1987), pp. 40-41

Letters to the Editor
Iranian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2/3 (1989), pp. 189-194

Letters to the Editor
Iranian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1/4 (1990), pp. 157-160

The Past and Present of Women in the Muslim World
by Nikki R. Keddie
Journal of World History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 77-108

Letter
Middle East Report, No. 175, Palestine and Israel in the New Order (Mar. – Apr., 1992), pp. 45-46

The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism
by Nikki R. Keddie
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 463-487

The New Religious Politics: Where, When, and Why Do “Fundamentalisms” Appear?
by Nikki R. Keddie
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 696-723

Correspondence
Nikki Keddie, Mehrdad Kia, Ahmad Seyf
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 205-208

Communications
Nikki Keddie, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Bernard Sinsheimer, Cornelius J. Jaenen, William Seraile, Gilbert A. Williams
The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 720-723

Communications
Steven Heydemann, Efraim Karsh, Inari Karsh, Nikki Keddie
Middle East Journal, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 363-365

Women in the Limelight: Some Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women’s History
by Nikki R. Keddie
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Aug., 2002), pp. 553-573

Secularism & Its Discontents
by Nikki R. Keddie
Daedalus, Vol. 132, No. 3, On Secularism & Religion (Summer, 2003), pp. 14-30

Review of Gosudarstvo Sel’dzhukidov Maloĭ Azii by Vladimir Gordlevsky
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Jul. – Sep., 1954), pp. 192-195

Review of Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization. by Gustave E. von GruneBaum
The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3 (May, 1956), p. 464

Review of Pakistan: Society and Culture by Stanley Maron
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Nov., 1958), pp. 159-160

Review of The Agricultural Policy of Muhammad `Ali in Egypt. by Helen Anne B. Rivlin
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1962), pp. 291-292

Review of Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. by Albert Hourani The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas. by Serif Mardin
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Jun., 1964), pp. 306-308

Review of Nationalism in Iran. by Richard W. Cottam
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Dec., 1966), pp. 665-666

Review of Anthologie de la Littérature arabe Contemporaine: Les essais. by Anouar Abdel-Malek
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 135-136

Review of The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800-1914: A Book of Readings. by Charles Issawi
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1967), pp. 258-259

Review of The Communist Movement in Iran. by Sepehr Zabih
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp. 498-499

Review of Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864-1914 by Firuz Kazemzadeh
Iranian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 170-172

Review of The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations by Hans E. Wulff
Iranian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 172-173

Review of Oman Since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society. by Robert Geran Landen
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 1969), pp. 368-369

Review of The Cambridge History of Iran. Volume 1, The Land of Iran. by W. B. Fisher
The Cambridge History of Iran. Volume 5, The Saljuq and Mongol Periods. by J. A. Boyle
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 552-553

Review of The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam by Bernard Lewis
Middle East Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Autumn, 1969), pp. 550-551

Review of The Foreign Policy of Iran 1500-1941: A Developing Nation in World Affairs by Rouhollah K. Ramazani
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr. – Jun., 1970), pp. 281-282

Review of Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century. by William R. Polk; Richard L. Chambers
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Jun., 1971), pp. 364-366

Review of Djamal-ed-Din Assad Abadi Dit Afghani by Homa Pakdaman
Middle East Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer, 1971), pp. 428-429

Review of The Persian Land Reform 1962-1966 by Ann K. S. Lambton
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1971), pp. 373-378

Review of Religion and State in Iran 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period by Hamid Algar
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1972), pp. 116-118

Review of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Albert Kudsi-Zadeh
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 382-383

Review of The Republic of Armenia. Volume 1, The First Year, 1918-1919 by Richard G. Hovannisian
Iran: The Impact of United States Interests and Policies 1941-1954 by Michael Kahl Sheehan
The American Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Dec., 1972), pp. 1489-1490

Review of Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period. by Hamid Algar
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 692-693

Review of The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes and Modernization. by James Alban Bill
The Journal of Politics, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Aug., 1973), pp. 768-771

Review of The Political Elite of Iran. by Marvin Zonis
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 776-777

Review of Rural Politics in Nasser’s Egypt: A Quest for Legitimacy by James B. Mayfield
The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp. 207-208

Review of Iran: The Illusion of Power by Robert Graham
The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 801-802

Review of Iran Erupts. by Ali-Reza Nobari
MERIP Reports, No. 86, The Left Forces in Iran (Mar. – Apr., 1980), p. 31

Review of Tell the American People: Perspectives on the Iranian Revolution by David H. Albert
Iran: Royalty, Religion and Revolution by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi
Middle East Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Egypt Today (Winter, 1981), pp. 74-75

Review of Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period by Shahrough Akhavi
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Mar., 1981), pp. 219-220

Review of Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period by Shahrough Akhavi
The American Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 511-512

Review of Modern Islamic Political Thought by Hamid Enayat
Middle East Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer, 1983), pp. 489-491

Review of Women in Muslim Family Law by John Esposito
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 774-775

Review of The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey by Donne Raffat
Iranian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3/4 (Summer – Autumn, 1986), pp. 299-300

Review of Shi’Ism, Resistance, and Revolution by Martin Kramer
Iranian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987), pp. 90-92

Review of Iran: At War with History by John W. Limbert
Iranian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987), pp. 95-96

Review of Persian Carpets by Michael Craig Hillmann
Iranian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1989), pp. 111-112

Review of The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations by James A. Bill
The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 141-142

Review of The Babi and Baha’i Religious: From Messianic Sh’ism to a World Religion. by Peter Smith
The American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), p. 1162

Review of Revolution in Iran: The Roots of Turmoil. by Mehran Kamrava
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), p. 381

Review of Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present. by Margaret Lamberts Bendroth
Fundamentalism and Gender. by John Stratton Hawley
Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 5 (Sep., 1994), pp. 675-676

Review of Ties That Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet by Leonard Helfgott
Middle East Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 114-116

Review of Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran by Parvin Paidar
The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Feb., 1997), pp. 148-149

Review of The Political Dimensions of Religion by Said Amir Arjomand
History of Religions, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Feb., 1997), pp. 285-287

Review of Techniques et ressources en Iran du 7e au 19e siècle by Parviz Mohebbi
Iranian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, Historiography and Representation in Safavid and Afsharid Iran (Spring, 1998), pp. 304-306

Review of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism by Mehrzad Boroujerdi
Iranian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 123-124

Review of Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety by Gavin R. G. Hambly
Iranian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1/2 (Winter – Spring, 2000), pp. 242-245

Review of The Future of Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence by Shireen T. Hunter
The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder by Bassam Tibi
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 180-183

2001 Mentoring award of Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which also made her an honorary fellow in 2003

2001 Award for scholarly distinction from the American Historical Association (AHA)

2002 Persian History award from the Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation

2004 Balzan prize from the International Balzan Foundation

2008 Lifetime Achievement Award for  Iranian Studies from the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS)