Scholarly focus on elites and modernization was swept away overnight in Iran
Evidence
There was a tendency to study and restudy, to focus resolutely on the same things: elites, modernization programs, the role of the military, greatly visible leaders, sensational crises, jihad networks, geopolitical strategy (from the American point of view), “Islamic” inroads. Those things may at the time have seemed interesting to the United States as a nation, yet the fact is that in Iran they were all literally swept away by the revolution in a matter of days. The whole imperial court crumbled; the army, into which billions of dollars had been poured, disintegrated; the so-called elites either disappeared or found their way into the new state of affairs, though in neither case could it be asserted, as it had been, that they determined Iranian political behavior. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 142
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Top-down secular nationalism failed in Iran because religion saturated daily life — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1748
Related
- Top-down secular nationalism failed in Iran because religion saturated daily life (similarity 0.85)
- Western scholars saw Islam as withering until the Iranian revolution changed minds (similarity 0.85)
- Iran’s 1979 revolution grew from fifty years of secular modernization and economic mismanagement (similarity 0.79)