Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World : Dabashi, Hamid: Amazon.com.au: Books

Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World : Dabashi, Hamid: Amazon.com.au: Books




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Hamid DabashiHamid Dabashi

In his retelling of the boldness and tragedy of the Zhina uprising in Iran, Hamid Dabashi asks: What constitutes the success of revolutions and how do we measure their failures?

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, "Woman, Life, Freedom," spread like wildfire from Amini's hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.

by author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region.

argues that "democracy" and the "nation-state" are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.
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Review


"Dabashi expertly combines philosophical rumination with sharp political analysis to ask probing questions about the state of our world in this learned study of Iran's recent uprising."
--Bill Fletcher, Jr., trade unionist, international solidarity activist and writer

"In this historical era of plutocratic global autocracy and livestreamed genocidal violence, Hamid Dabashi provides a forceful diagnosis of the present moment: we are living through a time in which there is no model of a truly democratic state anywhere in the world, even as ordinary people everywhere fight for a better tomorrow against the odds. Where does this leave would-be revolutionary social movements like the Zhina uprising in Iran? Dabashi argues compellingly that our best hopes everywhere is in small-d democracy that fights at local and grassroots levels against the illusory promises of the State. A provocative and penetrating analysis of our dire times." --Golnar Nikpour, author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran

"Reading Dabashi is like going for an extended coffee with a very smart friend."
―Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations

"The grand clash of civilizations and ideologies will increasingly take place in the West, with such writers and intellectuals as Dabashi."
―The Guardian

"A leading light in Iranian studies."
―The Chronicle of Higher Education


About the Author


Hamid Dabashiis the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Among Dabashi's recent books areOn Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past,The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West, andIran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World.

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Product details
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CT7J4Q6F
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Haymarket Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 14 May 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8888902660
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 318 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.27 x 21.59 cm
Best Sellers Rank: 618,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)70 in Middle Eastern Studies
399 in History of Iran
435 in Political History (Books)
Customer Reviews:
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars (5)





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Hamid Dabashi


Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Born in Iran, he received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Dabashi has written 20 books, edited four, and written over 100 chapters, essays, articles and book reviews. An internationally renowned cultural critic, his writings have been translated into numerous languages.

Dabashi has been a columnist for the Egyptian al-Ahram Weekly for over a decade, and is a regular contributor to Aljazeera and CNN. He has been a committed teacher for nearly three decades and is also a public speaker, a current affairs essayist, a staunch anti-war activist, and the founder of Dreams of a Nation. He has four children and lives in New York with his wife, the Iranian-Swedish feminist scholar and photographer Golbarg Bashi.

Follow him on Twitter @HamidDabashi

Visit his website http://www.hamiddabashi.com/

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From AustraliaThe “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising was not rupture but propaganda — a continuation of reformist engineering dressed as revolt. Iran in Revolt refuses to face this. It parades the movement as revolution and hides behind the slogan of “post-democracy.” Still, the book has one merit that deserves full credit: it takes Masih Alinejad, a media-made figure long posing as a voice of freedom, and smashes her to pieces. The demolition is merciless, reducing her image to rubble — and for that, the book earns real points. Few texts in English have dared go that far.

But the courage stops there. Instead of exposing Alinejad’s entanglement with the reformist machinery inside Iran, Dabashi fixates on her ties to VOA, ignoring the deeper dynamic of what can only be called “exported opposition.” This is a glaring absence, because the recycling of insiders into opposition figures abroad has become one of the regime’s most reliable tactics.

The book shines elsewhere in different ways. Its engagement with Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is sharp, framing celebrity as a threat to political life. Yet it fails to connect that insight to the reality of Iranian celebrities, who are themselves carefully managed and sponsored within propaganda networks.

The blind spots grow larger in the digital sphere. Dabashi circles around manipulation online but never names the Islamic Republic as its architect. He gestures toward bot-driven distortions, but he avoids the evidence — like the 2023 NIH study showing that by 2012 French-language Twitter was already 85 percent fake, saturated with fabricated political accounts. If Europe was awash in manipulation, how could Iran’s online space not be saturated as well? Dabashi avoids the obvious.

He invokes post-Islamism via Asef Bayat and even nods to Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and hyperreality. Yet he refuses to push these frameworks to their conclusion: that “Women, Life, Freedom” may itself be simulation — a staged performance of revolt, designed to look like rupture but functioning as continuity.

The book also suffers from vanity. Dabashi cannot resist leaning on his own earlier works, praising himself at length and weighing down the text with self-reference. The result is uneven: bold where it tears down a false idol, sharp when it channels Adorno, but evasive and indulgent everywhere else. It sparks, but it never burns through illusion.

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