Shaping of Modern Iran

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course offers an overview of the intricate religious, political, and social dynamics that have shaped Iran over the last half-millennium. The opening module provides a background to Iran as a geographic and cultural concept, exploring various themes such as Persian kingship, priesthood, and messianism, and the evolution of Shi’ism and Sufism. It then delves into Safavid period themes, like sacral kingship and the philosophical traditions of the Isfahan School, along with the emergence of Iran’s characteristic artistic and architectural aesthetics. The course progresses chronologically into the Qajar and Pahlavi eras and the Islamic Revolution. Modules cover a wide range of topics, from interpreting miniature art, love poetry, and Iranian new wave cinema to deciphering the multiple languages of Great Power politics and the anatomy of rebellion. Broader themes include ideologies of protest and revolution, cultural collisions and exchanges, the evolving role of women, and the complex relationship between mysticism and legalism. Students will be encouraged not simply to try and reconcile apparent contradictions, but to look beyond the insufficient binaries of heterodoxy versus orthodoxy, religious versus secular, and so on. The course moreover traces the emergence of multiple indigenous modernities within Iran and considers the array of internal responses to colonialism and western notions of modernity. In addition to contextualizing modern developments, students will be introduced to historiographical debates and methodologies and critical analysis of primary and secondary texts.