I didn’t plan to put the Iranian Revolution on the syllabus: This class is a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not a history of the whole Middle East. But students thought it would be useful to spend a week exploring the revolution, so why not? A week isn’t enough time really to understand one of the most consequential revolutions of the modern era, but it’s enough time to make a good start.
Because the Iranian Revolution isn’t really my area of expertise, I’ve invited Shay Khatiri to join our discussion. You will like him very much. He was born and raised in Iran; he studied at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and he’s now seeking political asylum in the United States.
Because this isn’t inherently part of the ME101 class, the discussion on Sunday is open to all subscribers, not just the regular group. If you’d like to talk about the Iranian Revolution and its legacy with Shay, please join us: the Zoom link is below. But please give priority in the discussion to the students who have been diligently doing the reading from the start. Also, while I have no objection at all to discussing present-day Iran—after all, one of the goals of this class is to help students to understand the news we’re now seeing—our foremost aim is to understand the historical events that created the Islamic Republic, so let’s focus on that first, not the week’s news. (If Shay has the time, however, we can certainly talk to him about current events after we’re satisfied that we understand what happened in 1979 and why.)
