- 06 Feb 2014
CHARACTER AS DESTINY: the Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the Tortured Politics of Modernization
Abstract
After the collapse of his monarchy in 1979 and his death in 1980, Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlevi, the last Shah of Iran, still remains relevant today. In this presentation via live video conference, internationally respected author Abbas Milani gave an account of how Iran went from politically moderate monarchy to totalitarian Islamic republic. What role did the Shah’s policies, personalities, quirks of character, strategic assessment of his foes and friends, his role in increasing the price of oil in the seventies play in his fall. Was his fall in 1979 an indication that in life, even in politics, character is destiny, or were there structural tensions, created by the changes the Shah brought about in the sixties and seventies? Are there lessons about his fall that have any relevance to what is going on in Iran, and the rest of the Middle East today?
About the Speakers
Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Till 1986, he taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center. Professor Milani came to Stanford ten years ago where he has been the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. Amongst his books, are Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (in Persian, Gardon Press, 1998); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution ( in both Persian and English, Mage, 2000; Akhtaran, 2001); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (Mage 2004); King of Shadows ( in Persian, Ketob Corp. 2004); The Myth of the Great Satan (Hoover Institution Press, 2010); Eminent Persians, two volumes (Syracuse University Press). His latest book is The Shah (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English. His articles have been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers including The Washington Quarterly, the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Hoover Digest, Iranshenasi, the Journal of the Middle East, Middle East Journal, the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into Persian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashtun and Arabic. He has won numerous grants, teaching awards and Fellowships and has on numerous occasions appeared on major news and opinion programs here in America and around the world.
