Abbas Milani is Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies in ICA, and Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Iran Democracy...
The Division of ICA contains a variety of programs representing many different cultures. What do you think the introduction of a program in Iranian Studies has contributed to ICA?
It was remarkable that a university of Stanford’s stature did not have an Iranian Studies Program until a few years ago. Initially the vision of Hamid and Christina Moghadam, and the encouraging support of academic leaders at Stanford, helped us launch the program. After a few years, major donations by Bita Daryabari allowed us to expand our work in the domain of literature and arts. Iran has been for almost three thousand years a country of great importance to the West, and to the evolution of our common human heritage. ICA rightly prides itself for standing at the forefront of cultivating, encouraging, and articulating truly interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research and pedagogy at Stanford, and Iranian Studies has been, from its inception, as much about the politics and economy of Iran as its literature, arts and theater. The fact that the Program has invited many of the foremost scholars, artists, filmmakers, poets, and political scientists from Iran (or working on Iran) to Stanford, and the fact that many of our colleagues at ICA—and many of our students—have attended these events, underscores our contribution to the enrichment of the scholarly, intellectual and political discourse on Iran here at Stanford and, through the community of our students, in the rest of the world. Finally, if we have had any success in our endeavors, it has been in no small measure because of the tireless and always gracefully efficient work of our program manager, Ms. Pasang Sherpa.
Since its establishment, what do you think the Iranian Studies Program has offered to the Stanford community at large?
I think our most important contributions to the Stanford community have been in the realms of pedagogy and cultural/political awareness. When I began at Stanford, I was the only person at the University teaching courses on Iran. The Language Center had a part-time instructor in Persian as well. Today we have a wider variety of courses—from Dominic Parviz Brookshaw’s course on medieval Persian images of wine to Bahram Beyzaie’s course on the semiotics of modern Iranian cinema, from my own course on the politics of modern Iran to Shervin Emami’s course that studies texts in their original Persian. This year the Program will be granting its first undergraduate certificate in Iranian Studies. Moreover, through a variety of activities—either events the Program sponsors, or those co-sponsored with other groups at Stanford—the Program in Iranian Studies affords the Stanford community the chance to see some of the best Iran has to offer.
Your nonpartisanship is fairly unique. What do you think the value is of a nonpartisan approach to the type of research that you do? How do you think it has benefited your work here at Stanford?
Policymakers no less than students, scholars no less than journalists want to hear the truth, and it has always been my belief that as scholars our foremost responsibility is to seek and speak the truth. In speaking the truth, we sometimes disturb the facile peace of partisans of one view or another, but impartiality, or what one scholar calls “eclipsing the self,” is the very foundation of scholarship—and good policy.
What kind of interaction do you see (if any) between your role as a professor, in which you are working primarily with students, and your role at the Hoover Institution, in which you are working more towards providing information for policymakers? Do the two positions affect each other in any way?
In my experience, the two aspects have no essential conflict; indeed they are, in my view, complimentary. To offer advice to policymakers requires, more than anything, familiarity with the subject, and students, too, expect nothing less. While in a policy paper I can freely offer what I think is the best way to tackle a problem—after adequately and accurately describing the problem—in a class, I think it is my responsibility to give students, not my views, but the range of views, attitudes, theories, or surmises about the subject. Needless to say, “eclipsing the self” completely, even in the context of a class, is virtually impossible, but it is our goal and responsibility.
What new research are you currently working on? How does it connect to your work in the Iranian Studies Program?
As you might know, last year I published a book on the Shah (called The Shah, published in the US and UK by Palgrave Macmillan.) I have now written an expanded version of the book in Persian. The government in Iran has banned my books, and perforce, I am publishing it outside Iran and making it accessible to those in Iran through the Internet. The book is a political history of modern Iran through the prism of the Shah’s life. It tries to trace the roots of the Islamic revolution and explain why from a modernizing authoritarian regime a clerical despotism emerged. It covers, at some length, the role the US played in Iranian politics, particularly from 1941-1980, and much of what I teach in my classes covers these very issues.
For more information about the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, visit iranian-studies.stanford.edu.