Small Media, Big Revolution This page intentionally left blank Small Media, Big Revolution Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi All Mohammad! University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 1994 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Parts of this book previously published in the article "Small Media for a Big Rev- olution: Iran," International Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Sciences 3, no. 3 (Spring 1990), are reprinted with permission of Human Sciences Press, Inc. Parts of this book previously published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12, no. 4: 33-59, are reproduced with permission from Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH. Parts of this book previously published in the article "Communications in Persia," E. Yarshater, ed., Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 6, fascicle 1, are reprinted with permission of Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, California. All photographs in the book were taken by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani- cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455-3092 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle. Small media, big revolution: Communication, culture, and the Iranian revolution / Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2216-7 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8166-2217-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mass media—Political aspects—Iran. 2. Iran—History—Revolution, 1979. 3. Communication—Political aspects—Iran. 4. Islam and state—Iran. 5. Freedom of information—Iran. I. Mohammadi, Ali. II. Title. PN95.82.I7S68 1994 302.23'0955—dc20 93-46191 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. We dedicate this book to Sara and Leili, daughters of the revolution This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Prolegomenon xi Introduction xvii I. Media, Modernization, and Mobilization: Theoretical Overview 1. Mighty Media, Big States, and Modernization: Big Identity Crises 3 2. Small Media and Revolutionary Change: A New Model 19 II. The Political Economy of Media in Iran 3. Media and the State in Iranian History 43 4. Dependent Development and the Rise of Television 59 III. The Culture and Weapons of Opposition 5. Oppositions: Secular and Religious 79 6. Cultural Criticism, Secular and Religious 95 7. Language, Authority, and Ideology 105 8. The "Heavy Artillery": Small Media for a Big Revolution 119 viii CONTENTS IV. The Revolutionary Process 9. A Communication-based Narrative of the Revolution 139 10. The Islamic Republic and the Process of Islamicization 163 11. A New Cultural Atmosphere 181 Conclusion: The Importance of the Iran Experience 189 Notes 195 Glossary of Persian and Arabic Terms 197 Bibliography 201 Index 213 Acknowledgments We want to thank all those friends and colleagues in the United States, Britain, and Iran who have discussed various of the ideas and read sections of this work over the past decade. We would particularly like to thank John Downing, Rick Maxwell, and an anonymous critic for helpful comments about the manuscript. We would also like to thank the good people at the University of Minnesota Press for their help: Janaki Bakhle, for believing in our work; Robert Mosimann, for keeping up the pressure; and Laura Westlund, for bringing order out of our disor- der. We alone stand responsible for the final product. This page intentionally left blank Prolegomenon This book is not only an analytic account of the role of media in the Iranian revo- lution, but also the story of our—the authors'—lives. Having talked for years about revolution, we actually lived through one. It dramatically affected our own lives, but we were merely two of the millions involved in its process. Yet, if an essential element of the revolutionary mobilization in Iran was its spontaneous, unscripted, small-scale escalation, its movement of countless individuals into political agents, then our small actions were at some level a mimicry of the actions of others and were mimicked by many others in this extraordinary moment of social solidarity that toppled a shah, and thus our experiences are precisely what need to be described. The political and the personal are always mutually implica- tive; in such a moment of social crisis, even more so. In this initial section, we will provide a brief overview of our lives in Tehran and our own inscriptions into the social and political environment of 1977-79. In other parts of the book, we elaborate on specific experiences and stories that not only help develop an intellectual understanding of the revolutionary process, but also provide a deeper, empathetic taste of what being there was like. Analytic writing tends to overlook the fact that revolutions are psychologically electric moments, full of emotional charge and somatic intensity, which social scientific jargon is woefully inept at presenting (and theory rarely considers worthy of analysis). Completing this long-overdue project, fourteen years after the revolution, is a way of remembering for each of us and a way of trying to make sense both of the xii PROLEGOMENON broader political processes and of our own lives, and of the implications of each for the other. It also seems appropriate at the beginning of this book to clarify that this is a volume of/from two voices. One prefers the voice of a speaker, and the other is more the writer: orality and literacy, the very tropes we shall discuss later. One author prefers Persian, and one prefers English. This text embodies their personal and political involvements and struggles over twenty years. Both are here. It is evocative of the disjunctive global moment in which we live that I, Annabelle, a Londoner, came to experience the Iranian revolution and now write a book about the process; that as a Jew, I write about an Islamic movement; that as a woman, I write about a highly patriarchal context in which the "problem of women" always threatens to spoil the prevailing order; and that born a first-gener- ation Briton because of the Jewish Diaspora, I write this in the context of another, political, exile. Ali was the first member of his family to attend university, gaining his political baptism as a student in Tehran during the last democratic politics of the Mossad- eq period in the 1960s. He was the only one of his family to go abroad to study, to obtain graduate qualifications to take back and use in Iran. We met as graduate students in the United States, both of us unattached from our "own" cultural moorings. I was at American University in Washington, D.C., teaching probably one of the first courses in a U.S. university on "Terrorism and National Liberation Movements" with Abdul Aziz Said. I returned to London to teach high school, but after a year of international correspondence and travel Ali and I both decided to move to New York. We lived together in Morningside Heights and worked on doctoral degrees at Columbia University. In 1976 we married in London, quickly, en route to Iran. The marriage certificate is redolent with the mixing of many worlds: my father, the Polish doc- tor, British army major, part of the Jewish Diaspora; Ali's father, the Isfahan! farmer, literally rooted in traditional Iranian life. We, the products, were already part of the global mixture with my Western lefty anti-imperialism and interest in Third World cultures, and Ali's delight in due process, political freedoms, and functioning technology, countering my arguments against technological depen- dency with evocations of the joys of electricity. So I "married in" and came to love Iran, its people, and culture as many Westerners have done before me. If Iranians were gharbzadeh, "Weststruck," I would joke that I had become shargh- zadeh, "Eaststruck." I was both insider and outsider to the Iranian revolution, but perhaps so was Ali and many of his contemporaries. Schooled in the West, well-read in Marx, Dewey, and Freud as well as Saadi, Hafez, and Mowlana, mine/his/our/their vi- sion of the post-Pahlavi Iran was of a democratic, socialist, open society. Or at least the fragments about the future that we discussed suggested this, for, thinking back, this was very much a movement in negativity, with only a vaguely articulat- PROLEGOMENON xiii ed vision of the new collective future to which it would lead. The Shah always seemed to cast an enormous shadow, obscuring the shape of the visions of the future; he had to be toppled in order to let in the light. I taught sociology at Dama- vand College and National University, conducted media research, and edited an English-language quarterly journal called Communications and Development Review. Despite the ever-present fear of S AVAK in the classroom, I always found some scope for introducing critical ideas without directly mentioning the clearly taboo topic of the Shah or the taboo name of Marx. (My sociology books were retained in customs because local bureaucrats confused Max Weber with Karl!) There was also some space in which to publish interesting materials, at least in English, for an international audience. Indeed, coming abroad for conferences during that period, I was often asked how the Review could be as critical as it was; my only answer was that because it had little resonance inside Iran, it was proba- bly a useful exercise in repressive tolerance for the regime. The research institute where I worked, Iran Communications and Development Institute (ICDI) under the directorship of Majid Tehranian, managed to bring in many of the top interna- tional scholars in communications during a brief dynamic period from 1977 to 1978.