Iranian revolution’s methods borrowed from European Jacobin and Stalinist precedents

Evidence

An examination of the record however, in Iran and elsewhere, reveals that the rejec­ tion of Europe and its offerings is by no means as comprehensive and as undis­ criminating as the propaganda might indicate, and that some of the importations from the lands of unbelief are still very welcome. … There is another respect in which the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran have, alas, borrowed from Europe. While their symbols and allusions are Islamic rather than European, the leaders and practitioners of the revolution have found their models of style and method in European history. The summary trial and exe­ cution of great numbers of ideologically defined enemies; the driving into exile of hundreds of thousands of men and women; the large-scale confiscation of pri­ vate property; the mixture of repression and subversion, of violence and indoc­ trination that accompanied the consolidation of power—all this owes far more to the examples of Robespierre and Stalin than to those of Muhammad and Ali. These methods are deeply un-Islamic; they are, however, thoroughly revolutionary. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1509

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Said-adjacent critique: Lewis’s ‘Islamic vs Western’ binary is complicated by his own admission that revolutionaries borrow European models, undercutting claims of civilizational incommensurability.