This Flame Within: An Interview with Manijeh Moradian
In November, Manijeh Moradian (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College) published This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press), a new book on the radical organizing efforts of US-based Iranian students in the 1960-70s. The book arrives at an extraordinary moment as Iranians protest the killing of Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, by the state’s morality police. Across the country and around the globe, Iranians have rallied around the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” linking demands to end to the state’s repression of women to the struggle to end a decades-long dictatorship. It is a moment Moradian helps us understand through her critical scholarship on Iranian activism, US imperialism, and intersectional feminism. The book draws on in-depth interviews with former Iranian Student Association (ISA) members to develop an understanding of what she terms “revolutionary affects”—or the ways that political repression lives within the body and propels resistance movements. It also carries prescient thinking on feminist revolution in Iran historically and applicant lessons on the growth of global solidarity movements, both of which Moradian discusses in the context of the present political moment in Iran and for Iranians in the diaspora.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
BCRW: My first question is how did it feel for you to publish this book at the same time as the beginning of the protests in Iran? It was sort of miraculous timing.
MM: It was almost surreal at first. I wrote the book several years into a period in which the prospects for change in Iran looked very bleak. People had tried so many different strategies, electoral reform, protests, and movements through arts and culture–so many things–and hadn’t been able to fundamentally shift the direction of the society. So, I was just sort of stunned that a lot of the arguments I was making when I was writing the book seemed to suddenly… It was like you didn’t have to make the argument anymore because it was already happening. It was very strange. When I was finishing the book, I found myself almost hesitating to sound hopeful about the possibility of yet another Iranian revolution because I knew that the word revolution had been co-opted by the Islamic Republic for decades, I knew that repression was incredibly severe, and I knew that the efforts towards change had primarily been reformist for the last twenty years or so. I almost felt like I was going to sound really naive or overly earnest if I said things like, ‘This book is for the next time around,’ or, ‘I’m hopeful that the next time there will be an understanding that feminism is not some Western discourse being imposed on Iranian women.’
I wrote the book trying to get us out of this East versus West binary, and trying to tap into the traditions and histories that would help us get to a politics where we could have a critique of all forms of patriarchy, whether they’re secular or religious, whether they’re imposed by a foreign power or home-grown dictatorship, no matter what ideology they use as a justification.
BCRW: The materialization of the book’s feminist call to action is particularly remarkable.
MM: I’ve been trying the make the argument that feminism arises out of response to lived experiences, to conditions, especially for that generation of young Iranians who helped make the revolution and then found themselves, the women, at least, as second-class citizens in the new society. That was a dramatic betrayal. Of course, that was repeated in lots of countries. It has to do with the way that nation-states regulate gender and sexuality. In Iran, it was compulsory hijab as the defining feature of a kind of anti-Western, anti-imperialist, authentic subjectivity for women. So I wrote the book trying to imagine otherwise, trying to get us out of this East versus West binary, and trying to tap into the traditions and histories that would help us get to a politics where we could have a critique of all forms of patriarchy, whether they’re secular or religious, whether they’re imposed by a foreign power or home-grown dictatorship, no matter what ideology they use as a justification. So I was tracing this genealogy of revolution, revolutionary subjectivity, and trying to show how a kind of revolutionary feminist sensibility could emerge out of the shared experience of trying to make a revolution. And to salvage those lessons which I felt had been marginalized for the last few decades. Not that I thought people in Iran were going to read my academic book in English, not that I thought that I was literally going to have that kind of impact. But as a writer, as a scholar, you write towards the world you want to see, you write towards the vision of the future that you are hopeful about, where I think we might find some respite from the intertwined brutalities of empire and dictatorship.
BCRW: You mentioned feeling nervous about writing such a hopeful book. It felt like a scholarly book that’s from a very activist heart. Did you think about that when you were writing it? About how to fill it with that kind of heart?
MM: Yes. Of course. The book is about an activist movement and I myself had been a student activist. I know what it’s like to go to college and decide to spend a lot of your time fighting for a different world and the hopefulness of that and the excitement of being a part of a collective. When I was interviewing former members of the ISA and they would talk about that joy and that passion and how they created community and made a whole social world for themselves in which they could reinvent themselves as revolutionaries, I very much could relate.
In the book, I developed what I call “intersectional anti-imperialism,” a feminist critique of the US vs Iran binary that structure US-Iran relations and geopolitics on a larger scale through activism. It was not through reading scholarly books; I did all of that later. My analysis initially was developed as part of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, a group in New York City that I was one of the founders of. We formed in 2009, the last time there was a mass nation-wide uprising in Iran. That was a moment in which the diaspora was galvanized to act in solidarity with the protests in Iran. A group of us came together who wanted to think about what a feminist politics would mean in this moment and in this context. We didn’t want to play into the idea that Iran, in order to become democratic, had to become westernized, or that the democratic uprising in 2009 was fundamentally about wanting to be Western or asking for Western intervention. There are democratic traditions that are part of Iranian society, there are feminist traditions and histories that are a part of Iranian society. None of that has to come from some kind of hierarchical idea about liberation existing in the West.
We wanted to be attentive to the fact that we were in the US, where denigrating the Islamic Republic is the favorite pastime of neocons, Islamaphobes, and racists. At the same time, the Islamic Republic is really oppressive and brutal and misogynistic and homophobic. It really is. We very much felt ourselves in that double bind. So we read together, we talked together, we wrote together. We tried to draw on the work of other post-colonial feminists, women of color feminists, Iranian feminists who had thought about these problems and questions before. And for a lot of us who grew up in the US, we were already deeply influenced by women of color feminism, Black feminism in particular, where writers and scholars and activists have long had to think about how do we challenge homophobia and sexism within our communities even when we know that our communities as a whole are under attack? So it’s a similar problematic but on a different scale, and with different counters and details. But we really tried to develop a feminist politics that could be critical of US imperialism and state repression in Iran at the same time. That’s where my analysis first came from: Trying to do that in practice.
BCRW: How do you see the current revolutionary movement in Iran making its own feminist politics? What do you see that as? What do you see that as becoming?
MM: My first thought is that I am completely blown away and inspired by what people in Iran have been doing. The book concludes with the possibility of a revolutionary feminist alternative to dictatorship and imperialism. That’s literally where the book ends. And like I said at my talk at BCRW, I’m glad that people didn’t wait around for my book. I mean I was joking. I wasn’t expecting people to read my book. But also people don’t need to read my book. They have a lived experience in their bodies of repression, of surveillance, of the fear and humiliation of having a state try to regulate and control your body, your relationships, the way you move through the world. And there is just a profound rejection of that. People do not want to live that way.
The fact that this uprising began in response to the killing of a young Kurdish woman, it brings the feminist issue and the Kurdish issue or the issue of ethnic minority oppression immediately as the starting point and the center. To me, it’s profoundly intersectional. I’m not saying everyone in Iran has the same thoughts in their heads and there is a perfect united intersectional feminist politics guiding every single person’s behavior, no. But I’m saying that the lived experience of different forms of oppression coming from the same government, from the same source, has opened up this nationwide uprising in which the demands of many groups can be seen as legitimate and taken up broadly. That’s all new. In 1979, not only were women given second-class citizenship and really repressed, but so were all the ethnic minorities and religious minorities. So it’s as if people have learned the lessons of what went wrong last time around, or some of the lessons, and are trying to have a revolution which this time would really have equality and equal rights for everybody. That’s the first thing. Like wow, this is perhaps the world’s first feminist revolution. We don’t know if it will succeed, but it is something new.
BCRW: How would you encourage others to think about emphasizing the revolutionary moment happening in Iran without encouraging Western interventionist narratives?
MM: I always try to say that the East-West binaries that have structured the US-Iran standoff for 43 years are inaccurate, unhelpful, and ultimately strangle the autonomy of independent voices of Iranian women. We have to reject the idea that this is a revolution against Islam: It is a revolution of Muslims who don’t want a religious state. This is not a revolution against hijab: It is a revolution against compulsory hijab. What people have a problem with is a government enforcing its version of religion onto people’s bodies with the threat of forced violence, imprisonment, and even death. The ability of the state to dominate and control your body, that is what people are rising up against. And the leading edge of that is compulsory hijab. That is what people are protesting against. People are rising up not because they want to be Western but because they want to participate in the world. They want to be part of the world. They want to be Iranians, but they want to define for themselves what that means. Where they can decide and determine for themselves what their culture is, what their religious faith is, how they want to express themselves. And that’s really different than saying, ‘See the hijab is really oppressive, they want to be like us, they want what we have.’
I think the final point is: We don’t live in a secular democracy in the West. We see that here in the United States. We are fighting for our rights to control our bodies, too. It looks different. It’s not about compulsory hijab. It’s about reproductive justice and a range of other issues. But it’s not disconnected from the basic problem of how misogynist interpretations of religion get embedded in the law and in the state. So I hope that all of these things can help break us out of those West vs. East, freedom vs. oppression, secularism vs. religion binaries, those binaries that have left Iranian people, but especially women, no space to say, ‘Actually, we don’t want either one, we want to define what it means to be Muslim, to be female, to be Iranian.’
BCRW: We could talk about what’s going on in Iran endlessly, but I also want to talk about the book more specifically. One thing that I found so inspiring is the discussion of solidarity movements, what you develop as “affects of solidarity.” We could make all these intellectual arguments about the connections of various oppressions, but, as you say, if it’s not felt, it doesn’t mean a lot. How does an affective view of politics shape a different definition of what is in one’s political interests?
[P]eople did not go to each other’s protests because they were ticking off a box. People were moved to go because they understood their struggles were linked. Even before reading it on paper, people understood: These people are oppressed and they’re fighting back, I’m oppressed and I’m fighting back, I want to stand with them. I want to go stand next to them and resist too because I want to put my body on the line. That is how I want to respond to what’s happened to me and my people.
MM: Thank you for picking up on that part of the argument. I do argue that we often have an almost transactional idea about solidarity or about politics. We each have our own narrow particular interests–if you can help me, maybe I can help you–but ultimately what we’re trying to do is advance our narrow group interests. Iranian [students in the ‘60s and ‘70s] wanted to stop US support for the Shah, and maybe over there the Vietnamese are trying to get the US out of their country. Okay, maybe we have a common enemy. So, if you come to my protest, I’ll come to your protest. But that’s not really how it actually worked. In fact, people did not go to each other’s protests because they were ticking off a box. People were moved to go because they understood their struggles were linked. Even before reading it on paper, people understood: These people are oppressed and they’re fighting back, I’m oppressed and I’m fighting back, I want to stand with them. I want to go stand next to them and resist too because I want to put my body on the line. That is how I want to respond to what’s happened to me and my people.
[When] the US was defeated in Vietnam, Iranians were cheering and celebrating because they felt like it was their victory, too. Because there was such an identification.
They felt this flash of recognition when they saw, for example, Black people on a picket line protesting against discrimination outside the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco, which had refused to hire Black people into better-paying jobs. Or when they saw Black Panthers resisting police. Or when they saw students protesting against the US war in Vietnam. There was this sense that you wanted to be with them because that’s where you could express your own desires for freedom and liberation. It’s where you could express your own militant refusal to be oppressed or to accept the status quo. It was a circulation of affective desire for revolutionary transformation. So when, for example, the US was defeated in Vietnam, Iranians were cheering and celebrating because they felt like it was their victory, too. Because there was such an identification. Oppressed people all over the world were rising up, refusing to go along with an imperial world order, insisting that they could govern themselves, that they could decide their own futures. That was something that was so resonant with the experiences of these young Iranian students who had seen their society distorted by this king who was armed to the teeth with US weapons and aid dollars. Who, in the name of modernizing, of progress, of enlightenment, was filling the jails with dissidents, was maintaining extreme class inequality. Who had made himself into a dictator. So that desire for a militant response in the face of oppression, the desire to orient your life towards social transformation, that feeling was shared. It meant that people could actually become deeply invested in the liberation of others.
BCRW: Right, and it also seems like it helps shake up the idea of identity politics and what the uses of identity can be in politics.
MM: Absolutely. Iranians had, of course, their own identities as Iranians about where they had been and what they had seen and what they had lived through and how it had all impacted them, but they weren’t organizing around an Iranian identity. This is a very US-specific concept. I mean, now it’s broader, but because we in the US have these particular histories where people were excluded from citizenship and rights and equality based on racial categories, identity has a particular valence here that is different from other places. I guess the main identity that I saw bringing people together [in student organizing movements of the 60s and 70s] was revolutionary. That was their identity. That was actually how they could identify with one another. In other words, the Iranian students who I write about, who I interviewed, they didn’t identify with every Black person [on the basis of racial marginalization]. They didn’t identify with people who were in the more religious, liberal civil rights wing of movement. They were drawn to the Panthers, to the Third World Liberation Front in San Francisco, they were drawn to the militants, to the leftists, to the radicals, because they shared that affective response to oppression. But yes, absolutely, there was a kind of recognition, a kind of affective resonance across all these different experiences and groups around this particular stance: How do you respond in the face of all of this? What do you do? That is where they found connection and identification.
BCRW: What is the state of this kind of solidarity now? And what does that mean for Iranians in Iran and in the diaspora?
MM: We’re very much in a different historical era than we were in the ’60s and 70s. The dictatorship in Iran is not backed by the US, so the kind of alignments and contours of resistance are more complex and more difficult to navigate. It’s much harder to build solidarity between Iranians and other groups because almost everyone else in the world is still dealing with US imperialism as a major source of their oppression globally. And yet, for Iranians, the Islamic Republic is their main oppressor. I think that we still need to figure out how to build solidarity across borders and groups and movements. I think that the experience of affects of solidarity, an experience that fueled a Third World internationalist era of which Iranian students were a part, is an inspiration, and also contains many lessons for us. But I do want to acknowledge that it’s harder today.
[ISA members] were drawn to the Panthers, to the Third World Liberation Front in San Francisco, they were drawn to the militants, to the leftists, to the radicals, because they shared that kind of affective response to oppression: How do you respond in the face of all of this? What do you do? That is where they found connection and identification.
If you want to build solidarity between Iranians and Black revolutionaries and Palestinians, and if Iranians want help from Biden and are calling for more US government intervention, that’s really hard because a lot of Black activists are struggling against the US government and its police state repression of Black communities, and Palestinians are struggling against US support for Israeli occupation. So how do we reconfigure the alignments and the contours of solidarity? We need an anti-imperialism that can account for multiple overlapping forms of oppression, including home-grown dictatorships which, in the case of Iran, rule in the name of anti-imperialism and sovereignty and national independence. Things that I would support: I support national sovereignty and anti-imperialism. Yet you have this repressive authoritarian regime where those are some of its main ideological pillars. I think the thing we can take from the history I write about the Iranian Students Association is this experience of what we might call people-to-people solidarity, or solidarity from below. It has to be intersectional so that we can take into account the oppression of Iranians by their own government and the oppression of Palestinians by a combination of the US and Israel. This is the challenge ahead of us: How can we link the struggle against dictatorship in Iran—which is profoundly a struggle against police state conditions—with the abolitionist, feminist movement in the United States? What can we learn from Black feminism that we can apply to the Iranian context? And what does the new feminist uprising in Iran have to teach other people around the world about their own liberation movements? We have to have a new kind of dialogue and conversation that’s rooted in grassroots struggle from below and self-determination from below.