Tehran, Autumn 1977: The Piercing of Autocracy
with Siavush Randjbar-Daemi
This talk will discuss several challenges to the ruling autocracy which occurred in the autumn of 1977 in Tehran and their impact in the emerging confrontation between the Iranian opposition of the time and the Pahlavi state. The main events under consideration in this talk are the ten nights of poetry readings at the Goethe Institute, the attempts to bring about a continuation of the same at the Aryamehr Technical University as well as an opposition gathering at a venue outside Tehran which was heavily suppressed by the secret police, Savak. This talk will place such events and the Iranian state’s attitude towards them within the context of the activities of the internal dissident community during the previous part of 1977, a process informally known as “Jimmycracy” within the opposition and assess their importance in light of the political mobilisation against the state which preceded and succeeded these incidents. It will argue that the events under consideration in this talk formed a key part of the momentum towards the revolutionary activity which would emerge in the first half of 1978. This talk, which is an extract from a forthcoming monograph by the speaker, will be based on a substantial amount of contemporary sources, such as periodicals published both inside Iran and by the opposition abroad as well as later memoirs by key protagonists of the events themselves.
About the speaker:
Siavush Randjbar-Daemi is Senior Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. His main research interest is the political history of Iran since 1941, with a particular focus on periods of relative pluralism and political diversity (1941-53, and 1979-1981), as well as the Iranian socialist and communist movement. His article on the Tudeh Party of Iran’s reaction to the land reform movement between 1958 and 1964 won the Elie and Sylvia Kedourie Award for Best Article of the Middle Eastern Studies journal in 2023. Siavush is the author of The Quest for Authority in Iran: A History of the Presidency from Revolution to Rouhani (Bloomsbury/IB Tauris, 2018), co-editor of Fadai Guerrilla Praxis (Bloomsbury/IB Tauris, 2023), and has recently completed a monograph on the Iranian Revolution which will be published in 2027 by Reaktion Books. He is currently working on a new book project which focuses on the early stages of the Islamic Republic.