IRAN’S STRUGGLES

FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

ECONOMICS, AGENCY, JUSTICE, ACTIVISM

Edited by Peyman Vahabzadeh

Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice
 Peyman Vahabzadeh
Editor

Iran’s Struggles for

Social Justice
Economics, Agency, Justice, Activism
Editor
Peyman Vahabzadeh
Department of Sociology
University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-44226-6    ISBN 978-3-319-44227-3 (eBook)

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 To the memory of
Khosrow Shakeri (Cosroe Chaqueri) (1938-2015)
social justice advocate par excellence
 Foreword

What does it mean when a group of young and middle-aged a­ cademics

gather on a North American university campus and wonder what has
­happened to the enduring problem of “social justice” in their homeland
half way around the globe in Iran?
Early in July 2015 I was part of such a group of almost exclusively
Iranian academics who had gathered at the University of Victoria, in
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. All the papers were delivered in
English. All the discussions in between the papers were in Persian. We
delivered our papers, exchanged and debated ideas, topics, concepts, and
issues in English, and then we retired to dining halls and restaurants and
caught up with the latest news in our homeland in Persian.
In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1977–1979, a generation
of Iranian critical thinkers has emerged outside their homeland. There is a
palpable disconnect between this generation and the unfolding history of
their country of birth. The chapters you will read in this book are a sample
evidence of the work of this generation that remains deeply concerned
about their national history and yet confined in their abilities to offer only
critical perspectives. This “generation,” to be sure, includes colleagues in
their sixties as well as younger scholars and critical thinkers in their thirties.
Both these cohorts, however, share the common denominator of having
exited the nasty censorial policies of the ruling Islamic Republic to be able
to live and think and read and write in relative freedom.
The writings of these chapters and their delivery in an academic ­gathering
in Iran are next to impossible to imagine. Over the last almost four decades,
the ruling apparatus of the Islamic Republic has s­ystematically destroyed

vii
viii Foreword

the very foundation of social sciences and categorically ­appropriated the

very idea of “social justice” for itself. There is no public debate, no common
conversation that would enable anything remotely resembling a commu-
nal consciousness surround the question of “social justice.” The slightest
suggestion of any such critical thinking will land a person in a kangaroo
court, facing prison terms for having ­compromised what the custodians of
the Islamic Republic consider their “national security/amniyat-­e melli.”
Although critical thinking and writing are inseparable from any human
gathering anywhere in the world, including and perhaps particularly in
societies in the snare of ­totalitarianism, the systematic destruction of social
sciences and humanities in Iran is a matter of state policies and their cul-
tural revolution against what they call “the West.”
In this book you will read learned discussions of various forms of
s­truggles for social justice in Iran, of the predicament of the working
class and labor movements, the theological underpinning of political
­mobilization of the poor, detailed accounts of the cooperative movements,
gender equality, the student movement, new literary archive pertinent to
social justice, and many other equally urgent issues. Do the writing and
reading of these crucial essays constitute an exercise in futility when the
subject of their conversations and contentions, Iranian people themselves,
scarcely know they exist, let alone read and perhaps learn from them?
Signaled by the fact that this book is in English and not in Persian,
though all its authors are Iranian, no organic link can be presumed
between this critical body of literature and the struggle for social ­justice
in Iran. In one way or another, as evidenced in every single chapter,
those scholars gathered here deeply care, closely follow, and are vastly
informed by the subject of their scholarship—and yet they have opted
to write their thoughts in English, while they are perfectly capable of
doing so in Persian. The location of these senior and junior scholars on
North American or Western European campuses does, in part, explain
their choice of English—a choice effectively decided by the fact that they
are writing, in part, in critical conversation also with their non-Iranian
­colleagues on these campuses.
This disconnect, however, is much less pertinent than it may first appear
if we remember that the public space upon which the very idea of “Iran”
as a nation was formed has always been transnational. The first Iranian
novel, Siyahatnameh Ibrahim Beig (1903), was written in Cairo and
­published in Istanbul; the first Iranian film, Abi and Rabi (1930), was
made in India. From Calcutta to Istanbul to Cairo to Berlin were the sites
 Foreword  ix

of the most widely circulated and read periodicals of the Constitutional

period. Istanbul, in particular, was the site of the rise of the first ­generation
of Iranian public intellectuals. Central Asia and the Caucuses were the
domain upon which these intellectuals first came to grips with the very
idea of their homeland outside its emerging frontiers. So writing about
Iran from outside Iran is nothing new, novel, or unusual.
There is, however, one crucial difference between all those cases and a
volume such as this that you are about to read. All those books, films, and
periodicals were in Persian, while this one is in English. This volume, as
a result, as countless others like it, represents a new gestation of Iranian
scholars, critical thinkers, and public intellectuals. They are now all deeply
embedded in the heart of North American and Western European aca-
demic circles. They have mastered the language of their imperial where-
abouts better and more effectively than any other generation before
them. This development, of course, has the disadvantage of not being
read by their contemporaries in Iran. But it has certain number of other
advantages.
These scholars are now living, reading, and writing in a vastly more
cosmopolitan environment than what the Islamic Republic has allowed in
their homeland, and they are conversant with a widening body of litera-
ture beyond Iran as they openly or implicitly engage the work of postco-
lonial critical thinkers just like them from Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
never before so openly present in the horizons of Iranian thinkers when
writing in Persian as now confined to the censorial mandates of the Islamic
Republic. This cosmopolitan worldliness of their prose and the fact that it
is conversant at the heart of the globalized empire lift the dialogical dispo-
sition of their prose to an entirely different domain. They are bringing the
Iranian public sphere to global consciousness, where it can find its sense of
interiority onto a worldly scale.
Generations of writing in Persian addressed Iranians exclusively and
as such had a mournful, contemplative, plaintive, and introverted mono-
logue tone to it. Writing in English for a global audience has the entirely
opposite texture to it: defiant, conversational, embracive, worldly, and as
such in solidarity with others who share a similar trajectory. The English
these scholars write has the intonation of the Persian-speaking world
embedded in it. This English is not “accented” as some have suggested, as
if there is an English without an accent. All spoken and written languages
have an accent of their speakers and writers. But there is an intonation
to the language that has nothing to do with who is speaking or writing
x Foreword

but everything to do with whom is the speaker and the writer addressing:
who is his or her interlocutor? The interlocutor of these essays is a global
readership, a worldly audience, who knows where Iran is and what are
its issues, but does so in a comparative worldly context otherwise absent
when identical issues are rewritten in Persian and addressed exclusively to
Iranians. That worldly consciousness had always existed in Persian when
spoken in the imperial context of its own history. But that imperial context
today has moved to English, as it may very well travel to Chinese in our
own lifetime.
Yes, a vast segment of the Iranian population not conversant in English
may never get to read this or many other books like it. But millions of
other Iranians can and will. English, as a result, and what postcolonial
critical thinkers from four corners of the world write in it, is the upending
of the imperial language, the way Spanish was wrested in Latin America
from Spain, or English was in India, or Arabic in Islamic lands beyond
the control of the tribal Arabism of their conquerors. Today, English has
become an Iranian language too, as once Persian became an Indian lan-
guage, Arabic an African, or Spanish a Latin American. The book you hold
in your hand reads in English but breathes the desires and struggles of a
nation for social justice in Persian.

New York, NY Hamid Dabashi

May 2016
 Acknowledgments

This book represents the collective endeavor of academics and activists

who share a profound sense of social justice in their approach to the vari-
ous aspects of Iran’s present complex and unjust reality. The book origi-
nates with an international scholarly conference under the rubric of “Iran’s
Struggles For Social Justice: Canadian and International Perspectives”
(http://socialjusticeiniran.com/), organized by the editor of this volume,
and held on July 10–12, 2015 at University of Victoria, in the heavenly
city of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, Canada, in the unceded traditional
territory of the Coast and Straits Salish Peoples, on the ancestral land
of the Lekwungen family group, Checkonien and Sungayka, where the
University of Victoria campus sits on the site of an old Lekwungen village.
The organizers and participants in the Conference acknowledge that they
held their deliberations on Aboriginal territory and are grateful for the
hospitality offered to them.
I would like to thank the individuals whose collective effort created
a smooth and collegial conference: Scott Bryce Aubrey, Kaveh Bavand,
Heather Currie, Mariana Gallegos Dupuis, Susan Kim, and Ardalan
Rezamand. Many thanks are also due to the Department of Sociology
for financial and logistical support, and I would like to personally thank
Sean Hier, Chair of Sociology, and Carole Rains, Departmental Secretary.
Thanks also to Mona Sedky Goode, Margo Matwychuk, and Andrew
Wender for chairing sessions. I would also like to acknowledge the finan-
cial support for this Conference through Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada Connection Grant (611-2014-0393), and
offer my gratitude to Fred Farhad Soofi; Centre for Comparative Studies

xi
xii Acknowledgments

of Muslim Societies and Cultures and Institute for the Humanities at

Simon Fraser University; Kwantlen Polytechnic University; Shahrvand
BC Persian Weekly and its Editor-in-Chief Hadi Ebrahimi; Centre for
Global Studies; as well as Middle East and Islamic Consortium of UVic,
Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives,
Social Justice Program, and Centre for Studies of Religion and Society at
the University of Victoria. I am proud to announce that the Conference
was not funded through corporate sponsorship or grants from question-
able sources and foundations. It was important for a conference on social
justice to prove that such events can indeed be funded through social-
ized funds, public academic sources, and support of philanthropists with
impeccable public record in defending justice and democracy.
I am also grateful to the contributors to this volume, to their enthu-
siasm, dedication, commitment, friendship, and above all their patience
with my unending queries, critiques, and edits. Without them, this project
would not have succeeded. It is our collective hope that what we have
produced in this volume soon grows into a growing field of social justice
studies in Iran and in this shrinking and increasingly unjust world we have
inherited.
Lastly, I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for undertaking this
project, as well as the anonymous reviewer whose feedback helped us
improve on the various contributions in this volume. In particular, I thank
Mireille Yanow, Milana Vernikova, Alexis Nelson, and Kyra Saniewski
at Palgrave Macmillan for their professionalism, attentiveness, and kind
responses to my endless enquiries.
 Contents

1 Introduction: How to Approach This Book1

Peyman Vahabzadeh

2 Historical and Conceptual Preparations for a

Multidisciplinary Study of Social Justice in Iran 9
Peyman Vahabzadeh

3 Gazing Upon the Land of Oil Through the Prism

of Structure, Elite Action, and Civil Society29
Hajar Amidian

4 The Unmaking of the Iranian Working Class since

the 1990s 47
Mohammad Maljoo

5 Charity or Mass Mobilization? Public Religion

and the Struggle for Economic Justice 65
Siavash Saffari

6 Iran’s Cooperative Movement: Agony of Development 81

Kaveh Sarmast

xiii
xiv Contents

7 Social Justice; Anti-imperialist, Racist, Persian-centric,

and Shi‘i-centric Discursive Formations of the
Ideal Citizen and Iranian School Textbooks:
A Social Biography Response 99
Amir Mirfakhraie

8 Justice Interrupted: The University and the Imam 127

Ardalan Rezamand

9 Ethical–Political Praxis: Social Justice and

the Resistant Subject in Iran 145
Shokoufeh Sakhi

10 Intergenerational Memory in Children of

the Jacaranda Tree 165
Nima Naghibi

11 Social Media as a Site of Transformative Politics:

Iranian Women’s Online Contestations 181
Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani

12 Performative Agency: A Realization of an Objective

Clash of “Social Justice” Discourses or a Requiem
for a Subjective Silence 199
Sara Naderi

13 The Voice of the Workers: Iran’s Labour Movement

and Reflections on the Project-Seasonal Workers’
Union of Abadan, 1979–1980 219
Mohammad Safavi

14 An Unfinished Odyssey: The Iranian Student

Movement’s Struggles for Social Justice 237
Roozbeh Safshekan
 Contents  xv

15 The Left’s Contribution to Social Justice in Iran:

A Brief Historical Overview 255
Afshin Matin-asgari

16 Iran: Multiple Sources of a Grassroots

Social Democracy? 271
Mojtaba Mahdavi

17 Social Justice and Democracy in Iran: In Search

of the Missing Link 289
Peyman Vahabzadeh

Afterword: Social Justice in Iran: Further Research307

Index311
 Notes on Contributors

Hajar Amidian is a PhD candidate in Political Science, University of

Alberta, Canada, specializing in the areas of international relations and
Canadian politics. In her dissertation, she attempts to advance the under-
standing of the correlation between authoritarianism and rentier theory in
postrevolutionary Iran. She holds an MA in North American Studies
and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of
Tehran.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has taught and
delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian
universities. He is the author of over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews
on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam,
and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art
(transaesthetics). His most recent books include Corpus Anarchicum:
Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power
in a Time of Terror (Transaction, 2015), Can Non-Europeans Think?
(Zed Books, 2015), and Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene
(Harvard University Press, 2015).
Mojtaba Mahdavi is the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities
(ECMC) Chair in Islamic Studies and Associate Professor of Political
Science at the University of Alberta. His research and teaching lie in the
areas of contemporary social movements and democratization in the
Muslim world; secularism, Islamism, and post-Islamism; modern Islamic

xvii
xviii Notes on Contributors

political thought; and political economy of the Middle East and North
Africa. He is the coeditor of Towards the Dignity of Difference? Neither
End of History Nor Clash of Civilizations (Ashgate, 2012) and the guest
editor of the journal Sociology of Islam on “The Unfinished Project of
Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond” (2014).
He is currently working on two book projects: Towards a Progressive Post-
Islamism in Postrevolutionary Iran and The Unfinished Project of Social
Movements in the Middle East and North Africa.
Mohammad Maljoo was born in Tehran in 1972 and educated at the
Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, where he received his PhD in
Economics in 2005. He was a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics,
Allameh Tabataba`i University and at the University of Tehran between
2006 and 2009. He was a research fellow at International Institution of
Social History (Amsterdam) in 2010 and at the School of Oriental
and African Studies (SOAS), London, in 2013. His field of special-
ization includes political economy of the postrevolutionary Iran. He
has published more than 60 journal articles in Persian and several in
English, German, and French on these subjects.
Afshin Matin-asgari holds a doctorate in Modern Middle East History
from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (1993) and is cur-
rently Professor of Middle East History at California State University, Los
Angeles. He is the author of Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah
(Mazda, 2002) and of more than 20 articles and book chapters on
twentieth-­century Iranian political and intellectual history, with particular
attention to leftist trends and movements. These include “The Berlin
Circle: Iranian Nationalism Meets German Counter-modernity,” in
K. Scott-Aghaie and A. Marashi (eds.), Modern Iranian Nationalism
(University of Texas Press, 2014), and “The Impact of Imperial Russia and
the Soviet Union on Qajar and Pahlavi Iran: Notes Toward a Revisionist
Historiography,” in S. Cronin (ed.), Iranian-Russian Encounters: Empires
and Revolutions Since 1800 (Routledge: 2012). His forthcoming book is
Both Western and Eastern: Intellectual Constructions of Iranian Modernity.
Amir Mirfakhraie is a Sociology Faculty at Kwantlen Polytechnic
University. He received his PhD in Educational Studies from the University
of British Columbia, specializing in the sociology and anthropology of
education, with a focus on Iranian textbooks, and multicultural, antiracist,
and global education. His research interests include antioppression and
 Notes on Contributors  xix

antiracism education, curriculum studies, critical pedagogy, citizenship

education, and Canadian and Iranian Diaspora studies. His research
focuses on the immigration of Iranians to Canada and British Columbia,
ethnic and racialized diversity in Canada, antiracist/antioppression peda-
gogies, and the construction of national identity, the family, the state and
economy, “race,” ethnicity, and gender in Iranian school textbooks. Dr.
Mirfakhraie has numerous publications on these subjects.
Sara Naderi is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, University
of Victoria. Her research interests include women’s studies, postcolonial
studies, cultural studies, sociology of religion, and sociology of knowl-
edge. Sara’s primary focus is on questioning and criticizing modern sub-
jectivity as she seeks alternative and critical subjectivities. In her academic
research, she endeavors to articulate the marginalized narratives of subjec-
tivity, probing, in particular, Iranian women’s subjectivity that arises from
their marginalized subject position—as women in a postcolonial society
and in the modern world. Her empirical research mainly focuses on
women in Iran, and partial findings of her study have been published in
Persian in Introduction to the Feminine Narrative of the City: A Study on
Women’s Lived Experience (Teasa, 2013).
Nima Naghibi is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto. Her research is in the areas of diasporic and postcolonial studies,
and life narratives, with particular attention to questions of human rights
and social justice. She is the author of Women Write Iran: Nostalgia
and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minnesota Press, 2016) and
Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minnesota
Press, 2007). She has published on Western representations of
Muslim Middle Eastern women, specifically the hijab, in Western
discourses; diasporic Iranian life narratives; documentary films; and
the filmic adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Her essays have
appeared in such journals as English Studies in Canada, Interventions:
An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Radical History Review,
and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.
Ardalan Rezamand completed his BA from the University of California
at Santa Barbara in 1998 with double major in Philosophy and Islamic and
Near Eastern Studies. He worked as a health-care analyst and a personal
banker before returning to academia. Ardalan attended Simon Fraser
University for his MA studies, graduating with an MA in History in
xx Notes on Contributors

2012. His MA thesis traced the influence of academic philosophy in

the formation of a modern Iranian identity. Currently, he is a PhD
candidate at Simon Fraser University. His research interests include
religion and politics of modern Iran, in particular, the hybridiza-
tion of knowledge in the twentieth-century state-sponsored civic
institutions.
Mohammad Safavi was born in the southern city of Abadan, Iran, into
an oil worker’s family. He joined the project workers in the Iran–Japan
Petrochemical Plant in a construction site in Mammko and Jarahi districts
near Bandar Ma’shour in 1975 and was soon involved in labor activism as
a member of the Project-Seasonal Workers’ Union of Abadan (1979–1980)
and as a labor and social activist working in Isfahan Power Plant. In
Canada, he started a career in food industry and worked as a baker, partici-
pating in 1990 in a successful campaign in organizing bakery workers
(Venice Bakery) to Join United Food and Commercial Workers Union
(Local 1518), in which he served as a representative in the Health and
Safety Joint Committee, and as a shop steward for almost 15 years. He has
written numerous articles on labor issues from social movement–unionist
point of view, published in various Persian publications and on the
Internet.
Siavash Saffari is Assistant Professor of West Asian Studies at the
Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National
University (South Korea). He received his PhD in Political Science from
the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), where he also taught
courses in comparative politics and political theory. Prior to joining Seoul
National University, he was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Middle
Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University. His
research interests include Middle Eastern and Islamic politics, modern
Islamic political thought, modern Iranian studies, modernity/coloniality/
decoloniality, and development/postdevelopment. His publications
have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
He is the author of Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism and
Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Roozbeh Safshekan is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the
University of Alberta. He obtained his MA in Middle Eastern Studies
from Columbia University and in Political Science from the University of
 Notes on Contributors  xxi

Tehran. His research interests include cyberpolitics, international relations

theory, and comparative social movements. Roozbeh is the recipient of a
number of academic awards, including a Joseph-Armand Bombardier
Canada Graduate Scholarship–Doctoral (CGSD), Honorary Izaak Walton
Killam Memorial Scholarship, and Queen Elizabeth II Doctoral Award.
Shokoufeh Sakhi is a visiting scholar at the University of Victoria. She
holds a PhD in Political Science from York University, Toronto, special-
izing in political theory, writing on the phenomenology of the resistant
subject. Dr. Sakhi acted as Executive Committee Director (2013–2014)
of the Iran Tribunal Foundation, investigating the Iranian state’s crimes
against humanity in the 1980s, and also testified as an ex-political pris-
oner at the Iranian People’s Tribunal hearings held at the Hague
(2012). Among many documentaries, she appeared in The Tree That
Remembers (2002), a National Film Board of Canada (NFB) film on
Iranian political prisoners. Her most recent publication is “Prison and
the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry” in Death and Other
Penalties (Fordham, 2015).
Kaveh Sarmast has been a lecturer of various courses, including coopera-
tive theory, entrepreneurship, and development courses, at Allameh
Tabataba`i University and the University of Welfare and Rehabilitation
Sciences (UWRS) in Tehran from 2009 to 2013. He received his PhD in
Economic Development from Belgrade University, Republic of Serbia
(Ex-Yugoslavia). His principal academic interest is in cooperative the-
ory and movement, as reflected in his PhD dissertation, where he
made a detailed discussion about international cooperative movement.
He has other publications on cooperatives and economic develop-
ment issues; participated in many debates, conferences, and seminars
on Iranian and global economic issues; and recently concluded his research
fellowship at the Center for Cooperative and Community-­Based Economy
(CCCBE), University of Victoria, Canada. As Chair of the Iranian
Association of Graduates in Economics (2008–2013), Kaveh played a key
role in the development of a community of graduates in economics.
Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani is Assistant Professor of Women and
Gender Studies at the Department of Historical Studies, University of
Toronto-Mississauga, and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the
University of Toronto. Dr. Tahmasebi is an interdisciplinary scholar
whose areas of specialization encompass feminist theories in relation to
xxii Notes on Contributors

continental and transnational contexts, critical theories of women’s move-

ments in the Middle East, digital activism, theories of ethics, and contem-
porary history of social and political thought. Her recent publications
include Emmanuel Levinas and Politics of Non-Violence (University of
Toronto Press, 2014) as well as refereed articles in Subversive Itinerary
(University of Toronto Press, 2013), Difficult Justice: Commentaries on
Levinas and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2006), Civil Society
and Democracy in Iran (Lexington Books, 2012), and Philosophy and
Social Criticism, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and
Democratic Theory.
Peyman Vahabzadeh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University
of Victoria, Canada, specializing in classical and contemporary European
thought, in particular phenomenology, social movements, exile, and
Iranian social and political movements since the 1960s. He is the
author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of
Contemporary Social Movements (SUNY Press, 2003), A Guerrilla
Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Period of
National Liberation in Iran, 1970–1979 (Syracuse University Press,
2010), Exilic Meditations: Essays on A Displaced Life (H&S Media,
2013), and Parviz Sadri: A Political Biography (Shahrgon Books,
2015), in addition to eight books of poetry, fiction, literary criticism,
and memoirs in Persian, and some 50 articles in the public domain.
His works have appeared in English, Persian, Kurdish, and German.
 List of Figure

Fig. 12.1 Performative agency 213

xxiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: How to Approach This Book

Peyman Vahabzadeh

Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice has found its present shape through a
collective sense of wonder: the Iranian Revolution, a revolution that at
its core was a nationwide, popular movement for social justice and demo-
cratic self-determination, not a Shi‘i state or Shi‘i values, has produced,
37 years later, a sad reality contrary to the ideals of 1979. The discourses of
social justice and participatory democracy that mobilized a proud and resil-
ient nation from different walks of life for a better future has now faded
away, leaving only bitter memory in the lives of ordinary people who are
left with no choice but to sadly measure the Revolution in terms of their
loss of social and international status, equitable conditions, institutional
avenues of participation in deciding their future, one-off opportunities,
means of subsistence, and of course, their loved ones lost to the war or in
waves of political purges.
This book offers a first contribution to the long-term project of under-
standing the issues, challenges, and potential outcomes pertaining to the
Iranian people’s struggles for social justice, in particular after 1979 but
also in tandem with their struggles in the past century. The project is a
response to the scholarly neglect of the theme as the fast pace of over-
whelming challenges since 1979 have, for good reasons, diverted scholarly

P. Vahabzadeh (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Vahabzadeh (ed.), Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44227-3_1
2 P. VAHABZADEH

attentions from social justice and to issues such as human rights, citizen-
ship and authoritarianism, economic analyses, diplomacy, secularism, or
analyses of political Islam, to name but a few. These fields constitute legiti-
mate concerns and have yielded abundant scholarship. Since the academic
field, just like the social and political expanse, witnesses rising discourses
that dominate, relatively speaking, the field for a while, it is important to
note that certain discursive turns over the past three decades have inadver-
tently marginalized the focus on social justice, despite the fact that stud-
ies of labour, women’s movement, and minorities necessarily prompt the
question of social justice.
This is a rather unusual book. As a collective effort, the book crosses
disciplinary boundaries, shifts analytical angles, and brings out lived expe-
riences. As such, the contributions of this volume go beyond the estab-
lished literature, often appropriately informed by the political economy
approach, on Iran’s steadfast post-revolutionary transition to economic
liberalization and privatization and its detrimental social and economic
consequences for the working class, the middle class, the poor, the vulner-
able, women, the minorities, not to forget Iran’s delicate ecology. The
post-revolutionary transition to a neoliberal economy and the abandon-
ment of social justice are undeniable facts. Thus, the common immediate
historical context of our collective interest in social justice is the post-­
revolutionary and postwar Iran, when in the pretext of the war, the oppo-
sition was severely repressed, and in the shadow of rebuilding the country,
a neoliberal shift in Iranian economy emerged and has been gaining sig-
nificant momentum. Our contributions in this volume, therefore, intend
to promote new studies of this multifaceted phenomenon, produce new
research, and stay unrelentingly analytical. From such a heterogeneous
group of scholars, activists, and graduate students who have contributed
to this book, one can naturally expect interdisciplinary and multidisci-
plinary approaches and studies—a testament to the originality of this vol-
ume and our collective approaches to social justice. We hope this book
provides the groundwork for a growing field of social justice studies in
Iran in this increasingly unjust world we have inherited.
This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary book dwells in the analy-
ses of grand socioeconomic structures as well as the legal turns necessary
for the assault on the collective, social rights of Iranians and for undoing
the past collective achievements of working peoples. Attending to these
aspects prompts the question of social justice, but this book is also equally
about the struggles for social justice since 1979 and their consequences.
 INTRODUCTION: HOW TO APPROACH THIS BOOK 3

Therefore, the book attends to political analyses, historical observations,

the question of justice, social movements, activism and activists, education,
personal experiences, and literature. Thus, the economic conditions merge
with agency and activism around collectively constructed notions of jus-
tice. Contributors to this volume believe the profound question of social
justice requires such multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.
We also believe that as a pioneer work, this book is still in need of further
research to address many other issues pertaining social justice.
The sites of collective action, public discourses, and intellectual debates
are explored and examined here. A glance at Iran’s history in the past cen-
tury clearly shows that the country’s entry into political modernity—epit-
omized by the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, an anti-colonial,
anti-authoritarian, and democratic movement—has always contained a
vivid and weighty element of social democracy. In other words, the emer-
gent discourse of rights, citizenship, and constitutionalism has been con-
comitant with the discourse of just social relations and equitable working
conditions. The subsequent history of Iran has also contained continuous
and democratic struggles for citizenship rights as well as social justice in
the face of serious setbacks imposed by the states on social movements
and organized dissent especially those of the Left. Here is how we should
understand Iranian modernity without reifying it: a process involving ago-
nistic social projects and multiple social imaginaries. Alas, authoritarian rule
has never allowed this diversity, and the public debates arising from it,
to come to fruition. The postrevolutionary turn of events, in addition
to the dominant neoliberal discourse worldwide, have contributed to the
diminishment of the social democratic imaginary—in public discourse as
well as in social and political programmes—while the staggering social
inequalities, in their multiple forms, and increasing pauperization of the
population invite a reinstatement of the social justice discourse in public
debates. This is why the authors of this book stand against resignation
and forgetting, against succumbing to neoliberal models and declaring
the decline of social justice as fait accompli. This project also means that
social justice must be rescued from rigid definitions of the doctrinal Left,
so it can re-emerge in a new, dynamic way, as the multifaceted project at
the heart of Iranian modernity.
As a collective effort of academics, students, and activists, this book
intends to critically probe the various aspects of social justice and social
inequality. It will show that reality is always a socialized process. The
authors challenge the reified concepts of human rights, citizenship, and
4 P. VAHABZADEH

democracy, in both their current liberal and social democratic discourses.

The book aims at showing how by viewing democracy and social justice as
socialized, and thus collective processes, discourses pertaining to human
rights, democratic citizenship, and social justice will return in an entirely
new light by turning away from reified, ossified, ideological, and bor-
rowed concepts.

The Road from Here

In Chap. 2, the Editor offers preparatory observations on the historical
and conceptual contexts of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies
of social justice in post-revolutionary Iran. He contextualizes the Iranian
state’s abandonment of the ideals of 1979 Revolution within two conse-
quential events in 1988: ending the war with Iraq and the massive purg-
ing of political prisoners. Iran’s history since then has been a history of
economic privatization, abandonment of social programmes, reducing
subsidy payments, a rising oligarchy that feeds off a rentier state, com-
monplace corruption, and suppression of opposition. The author then
offers a concept of social justice that speaks to the realities of today’s Iran.
The contributions in this book speak to the various aspects of the themes
raised in this chapter.
Chapter 3 attends to the relationship between Iran’s rentier state and
struggles of civil society for democracy. Examining the Iranian case, Hajar
Amidian challenges the thesis that oil-producing states block democratic
struggles. Although rent-dependent states tend to become authoritarian,
she argues, Iran shows clearly that the authoritarian state does not con-
stitute a total structure, and as such it is prone to challenges by both elite
action (Iranian Reformists) and democratic social movements (student
movement) including collective actions for social justice. Mohammad
Maljoo attends, in Chap. 4, to the legal enactments of the state in order
to “unmake” the working class and thus diminish the labour movement
and the workers’ collective power to challenge their exacerbating work-
ing conditions. Privatization and neoliberalization of economy, he shows,
have caused fundamental changes to Iran’s Labour Code to the detriment
of the workers’ bargaining power. Labour casualization, exclusion of small
workshops from the Labour Code, contracting out state positions, and
empowering human resource firms to deal with the workers are among the
manoeuvres leading to the workers’ collective disempowerment.
 INTRODUCTION: HOW TO APPROACH THIS BOOK 5

Chapter 5 attends to the increasing role of charity organizations in

attending to the needy and poor as the state’s commitment to the “down-
trodden” (mostaz‘afin) withers away. Public religiosity based on Shi‘i lib-
eration theology has been advocating economic justice, argues Siavash
Saffari. In moving away from economic justice, the state has instead rel-
egated the poor to religious-charity organizations and foundations. In the
end, Saffari hopes for the mass mobilization of the poor in challenging
privatization and austerity. In Chap. 6, Kaveh Sarmast attends to the his-
tory and status of cooperatives—a forgotten experience in citizen-oriented
and -initiated economy. Pointing out the old tradition of mutual assistance
in rural Iran, Sarmast shows the exogenous and endogenous causes of the
cooperative movement before 1979. He examines the legal and constitu-
tional aspects of cooperatives today and how as a result of the new eco-
nomic turn the cooperative movement, despite several key success stories,
has gradually diminished.
Educational aspects are key to maintaining a public conception of social
justice. In Chap. 7, Amir Mirfakhraie critically examines Iran’s school text-
books, revealing how the textbook propagated notion of the ideal Iranian-­
Shi‘i citizen, while anti-imperialist, promulgates discriminatory, racist,
patriarchal, and ethno- and religio-centric values. The Iranian Self thus con-
structed, he argues in this condensed study, is out of tune with the necessary
values at the heart of social justice. Ardalan Rezamand critically examines, in
Chap. 8, the official pretext to the Cultural Revolution of 1980. He shows
that while Ayatollah Khomeini called for an end to westoxification in uni-
versity curricula and Islamization of otherwise Western knowledge, it was
the university’s being a long-time bastion for students and faculty defending
social justice and democracy that lay at the heart of the Cultural Revolution,
closure of universities, and purging of students and faculty.
The questions of agency and the subject are closely connected to rec-
ollecting the severe suppression of post-revolutionary, leftist social jus-
tice activists. Shokoufeh Sakhi critically examines, in Chap. 9, the ethical
and political consequences of the appeal of victims’ repression in Iran to
human rights as natural and inalienable. The human rights discourse allows
for the new subject to emerge and voice the injustices inflicted upon him
or her, while the social justice subject needs to enter an ethical relation
of respons-ability. In Chap. 10, Nima Naghibi offers a close reading of
Sahar Delijani’s fictional Children of the Jacaranda Tree, a novel about the
children of the leftist activists in the 1980s who were subject of prolonged
imprisonments, torture, and executions. Naghibi’s reading highlights the
6 P. VAHABZADEH

importance of remembrance in the intergenerational approach to tragic

and historic events in light of current day social movements.
Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani offers an original study of Iranian women’s
online activism, in Chap. 11, in particular My Stealthy Freedom Facebook
page. Reaching nearly the unprecedented one million “likes,” My Stealthy
Freedom allows for “low-risk” online activism in which Iranian women
can register their personal protest against the imposed veiling laws. Despite
the state’s continued filtering of this and other opposition websites, argues
Tahmasebi-Birgani, the popularity of this initiative indicates how social
media platforms can be effectively used as a means of mobilization for
gender and social justice. In Chap. 12, based on her fieldwork on the
women of Tehran, Sara Naderi critically problematizes the commonplace,
feminist conception of Iranian women’s subjectivity. She shows that the
Iranian woman is caught between the dual-parallel binaries of Islamic view
of woman and Western-secular, Iranian feminism, on the one hand, and
the paternal–maternal models of personal development and subjectivity,
on the other. As a result, she argues, Iranian women’s subjectivity is per-
meated by serious contradictions. In conclusion, she offers a model of
“performative agency” for understanding women’s struggles for gender
and social justice.
Mohammad Safavi presents his first-hand experience as an activist with
the Project-Seasonal Workers’ Union of Abadan, 1979–1980, in Chap.
13. He contextualizes this historic experience within a brief history of the
labour movement in Iran, showing how this successful but short-lived
unionization effort of Abadan workers stands in tandem with the history
of labour movement: the Union’s mandates and its successes inevitably
rendered it a formidable social institution with broader mandates than
those of a workers’ union. The Union’s success then led to its sad demise,
as the new regime dismantled the Union, repressing its activists, and jail-
ing its key organizers. Roozbeh Safshekan offers in Chap. 14 the history
of the student movement in Iran in order to contextualize the origins
and struggles of the post-revolutionary student movement, in particular
the Freedom and Equality Seeking Students, a short-lived, leftist stu-
dent union of which he was a member. Safshekan shows that despite the
efforts of the state the student movement has steadfastly been a defender
of democracy and social justice, while it has failed to forge the necessary
alliance of the social movements for these causes.
Chapter 15 presents a historical overview of the Left’s contribution
to the cause of social justice in Iran from the Constitutional Revolution
to the present. Applying a global social justice frame to modern Iranian
 INTRODUCTION: HOW TO APPROACH THIS BOOK 7

­ istory, Afshin Matin-asgari argues for a new social contract that incor-
h
porates the necessities for the implementation of social justice in Iran.
Despite its problems, the Left has been the steadfast defender of social jus-
tice, and Matin-asgari calls for the renewal of the Left in light of the new
experiences in Turkey, Greece, and Spain. Mojtaba Mahdavi, in Chap. 16,
offers a meticulous survey of the indigenous, grassroots ideas of social
democracy in Iran, focusing in particular on the theories of Mohammad
Nakhshab, Khalil Maleki, and Ali Shari‘ati. Mahdavi shows the funda-
mental limits of the liberal paradigm in addressing social justice, and he
concludes by calling for building a new, decolonial discourse of social jus-
tice. Lastly, in Chap. 17, Peyman Vahabzadeh offers an interpretive his-
tory of the founding element of social democracy in the Constitutional
Revolution in order theoretically articulate the missing link between
social justice and democracy. A democratic future, he argues, is unthink-
able without the formidable presence of social justice, and this defines
the unfinished project of political modernity in Iran that started with the
Constitutional Revolution.
The Afterword invites the readers to consider the areas for further
research in the field of social justice in Iran.
Rebuilding the discourse of social justice is at the heart of this multidisci-
plinary project, as it attends to the diverse aspects of social justice: gender
justice, environmental justice, collective rights of workers and working
peoples, rights of minorities, equitable conditions for the masses, edu-
cating justice and peace, and of course building democratic institutions
capable of advancing the struggles for social justice. In short, we need to
opt for understanding social justice as the socialized process of bringing
the nation together instead of subjecting groups and classes to discrimina-
tory practices.
 CHAPTER 2

Historical and Conceptual Preparations

for a Multidisciplinary Study of Social
Justice in Iran

Peyman Vahabzadeh

In the summer of 1988, two significant events marked a historic turning

point in the trajectory of Iranian sociopolitical life. First, Iran’s war with
Iraq—a war fought feverishly since September 22, 1980 when Iraqi forces
crossed Iran’s western borders; a war that has won the unfortunate desig-
nation of the longest conventional war between two states in the twentieth
century; a war in the state of stalemate and attrition since 1983—ended
on July 20, 1988 when the leader of the Revolution conceded, in a his-
toric declaration, to drink from the “goblet of hemlock” and Iran at last
accepted the UN Resolution 598. Second, thousands of political prison-
ers—from Marxist, socialist, radical Muslim, nationalist, and various other
secular or religious backgrounds—were summarily executed during the
fateful months of August and September 1988.
The first event released the country from a devastating war economy,
and as Iran’s rentier economy transitioned toward a celebrated and trum-
peted postwar rebuilding or reconstruction period (dowran-e sazandegi),
an incremental but visible and significant turn away from the ideals of the

P. Vahabzadeh (*)
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

© The Author(s) 2017 9

P. Vahabzadeh (ed.), Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44227-3_2
10 P. VAHABZADEH

1979 “revolution of the downtrodden” (enqelab-e mostaz‘afin) in which

peoples from various walks of life selflessly participated in a nonviolent,
grassroots, national liberation movement for democracy and social justice.
The second event profoundly scarred Iranian political life as it emblema-
tized the generational purge of defenders of social justice from diverse
ideological streaks, plurality of political affiliations, and multiplicity of
gender, ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds outside of the ruling
establishment. Given the concurrent mass exodus (by tens of thousands)
of an entire generation of postrevolutionary activists between early 1980s
and early 1990s, this otherwise unfathomable purge represented a vivid
act of “clearance,” to borrow a term from Ian Angus (2012), of the politi-
cal field from diverse agents of the social justice cause; in fact, the purges
represent a clearance of political field from those who uncompromisingly
stood by the ideals of the 1979 Revolution: democracy, social justice, and
postcolonial self-assertion. Once the articulators of social justice were
silenced, the public discourse pertaining to social justice and participatory
democracy died out or was forced into exile. The second event—the gen-
erational purge of defenders of social justice—was the necessary step for
the (neoliberal) socioeconomic processes following the first event—the
end of war—to take place without hindrance. Or so it tragically seems.

The War’s “Blessing”

The war was “a divine blessing” (ne‘mat-e elahi), famously declared
Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a blessing, held the Ayatollah, because it pro-
vided a historic opportunity for the Iranian nation, at the forefront of liber-
ationist Islam, to come to terms with the “necessity to rely upon ourselves
and abandon hope in outsiders” (2016). The leader of the Revolution still
held a view of the war as a war of liberation through which the long-­coveted
“return to the [authentic] Self” would finally be realized. He did not see
much of the postwar Iran (having died within a year after the ceasefire),
having no idea what members of his inner circle, who collectively secured
key positions after the Imam’s death in order to rule the country in the
decades to come, had in mind for the country. For them, the war was
indeed a “blessing”: the war effort (or the “sacred defense”) symbolized
a courageous defense of the Revolution. For sure, the war indicated the
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ambitious maneuver to settle long-time ter-
ritorial claims in his favor, and he was encouraged by Western powers that
wished the defeat of Iranian Revolution. Iran’s engagement was indeed