Science, Politics, and Gender in the Cultural Revolution

Ata Heshmati’s master’s dissertation (University of British Columbia, 2021) explores the aftermath of the 1980 Cultural Revolution in Iranian universities. Heshmati explains that the closure of all universities in Iran for three years led to the formation of two important administrative bodies: a decision-making council called the Headquarters of the Cultural Revolution (HCR) and a national network of Islamic students who changed university administrations, known as the University Jehad (UJ). Heshmati’s study examines the role of the HCR in developing science and technology during the creation of the state in post-revolutionary Iran. Using the term Islamic technoscience, his research explores the connection between the Islamic state and scientific efforts, changes in policies and practices, and the creation of new organizations by both the HCR and the UJ, all contributing to the making of the state under the Islamic Republic.

The dissertation comprises five chapters. After introducing the main concepts, providing a brief historiography, and presenting the structure of the thesis in Chapter One, Chapter Two provides a concise account of events leading to the Cultural Revolution, focusing on the rise and fall of the HCR and examining institutional developments, domestic politics, and global concerns. Chapter Three argues that Islamic technoscience emerged as a response to the substantial modernization programs of the Shah during the 1960s and 1970s. It attempts to contextualize the technoscientific activities of the state within the Islamic state’s ideological discourses of self-reliance, independence, and decolonization. Before summarizing all the points in the conclusion chapter, Chapter Four delves into gender, state, and Islamic technoscience, highlighting the struggles of female scientists. It reviews state gender policies in academic spaces and explores resistance from female practitioners, examining a correspondence debate in 1982-83 among the HCR, UJ authorities, and female professors in agricultural studies. This sheds light on women’s efforts to reclaim their positions in the evolving post-revolutionary science and technology landscape.

Heshmati identifies an important gap in the literature, specifically the lack of sufficient work on the Cultural Revolution in Iran, particularly its aftermath. Secondly, he believes that there is a common misunderstanding that the Cultural Revolution ruined all the technological achievements of the Shah’s modernization. He asserts that Islamism is usually perceived as an anti-science movement, and his work is an attempt to counterbalance the “chauvinistic misrepresentation” of science, technology, and philosophy in the minds of Iranian intellectuals (Heshmati, 2021:12). To me, this means Heshmati believes Islamism as a political ideology can make a harmonious integration of Islam and modernity, and considering the context of his study, he believes the Islamic regime in Iran can achieve this harmony.

While Heshmati tries to highlight an important point in the literature, ironically, one of the main weaknesses of his work is the use of literature. For example, it’s not clear whose common sense or understanding he refers to when he mentions the perception of the Islamic Revolution as anti-science or the usual understanding of the Cultural Revolution as something against the Shah’s modernization. That is, we cannot see the sources and thorough elaboration of these usual perceptions and understandings on the topic, nor can we see which authors suggest these ideas. We see the same problem when Heshmati claims that “while the Cultural Revolution has often been thought of as a political campaign initiated by the state, I will argue that it was the Cultural Revolution that formed the state and redefined the boundaries of the state’s political institutions” (Heshmati, 2014:14). Again, it’s not clear who has seen the Cultural Revolution in Iran as a campaign run by the state. Also, considering the phrase in this quote, perhaps it means that this movement started and then brought the officials along with it. If so, neither the factors involved in creating this environment that brought the officials along nor the process that led to this alignment are clear in Heshmati’s work. Furthermore, Heshmati points out the overshadowing of the Cultural Revolution in the literature by the Iran-Iraq 8-year war. However, except for some points in footnotes, it’s surprising that the war is notably absent in his work, and there is a lack of investigation into the military technoscience employed to support the war with Iraq.

To counter the “chauvinistic misrepresentation” he highlighted, Heshmati suggests that Islamist revolutionaries strategically harnessed science and technology, specifically by establishing revolutionary institutions and promoting Islamic technoscience. For Heshmati, this strategic approach aimed to consolidate power and influence within the Islamic Republic state since the 1980s. Although Heshmati references Khomeini’s speech rejecting a binary of Islamic versus non-Islamic science to support his claim, he falls short of providing concrete examples to substantiate his argument. While Khomeini mentioned this and Heshmati builds his narration on this statement, it is still unclear why there is an Islamic university in Iran or even the concept of Islamic technoscience in this context. If there is no difference between Islamic science and non-Islamic science, why was the revolution in universities necessary? Does this emphasis on “Islamic” add value to social institutions? Does it make them Islamic? If so, then there is a difference, for example, between Azad University and Islamic Azad University; technoscience and Islamic technoscience. Therefore, the Cultural Revolution is a process to Islamicate universities and society, and this is the definition of fundamentalist Islam which creates a binary of Islamic and non-Islamic in the entire history of the Islamic Republic. 

The primary issue with Heshmati’s work lies in its internal contradictions and theoretical framework. Firstly, Heshmati states, “Islamism is usually perceived as an anti-science and reactionary movement seeking to overthrow secular ruling systems to establish a society whose ideals are fundamentally opposed to the moral, cultural, and material ideals of modernity” (Heshmati, 2014: 9). In response to this perspective, Heshmati suggests the concept of “alternative modernity” (Heshmati, 2014: 9). He wants to convey that political Islam in Iran is not a reactionary act against modernity. However, aside from the lack of literature and theory to validate the statement that “Islamism is usually perceived as anti-science”, Heshmati seems to confuse modernity in terms of institutional dimension of modernity (Giddens, 2013), and the cultural project of modernity (Habermas, 1990). Interestingly, this is the main problem of political Islam’s philosophy, which struggles to reconcile its Islamic revelation with modernity, as modernity stems from human reason and Cartesian dualism. “Semi-modernity refers to the concept of the Islamisation of modernity by means of the instrumental adoption of its material achievements while furiously rejecting its rational homocentric view of the world” (Tibi, 1995, p. 82). The dilemma for Muslim fundamentalists is that they simultaneously seek to adopt the tools of modernity while rejecting its cultural foundations. In his work, Heshmati tries to translate what Tibi calls semi-modernity to alternative modernity. However, there isn’t enough work on this concept to clarify what alternative modernity means to Heshmati and why he uses this term. One might ask if any alternative to modernity is called alternative modernity, why should we even call it modernity? Why not political Islam? Islamists claim that their model of an Islamic state enforces fixed shari’a rulings, institutionalizes one specific interpretation of Islam as authentic, and condemns any differing religious beliefs as heresy. Therefore, this approach cannot be considered as representing multiple modernities. Additionally, more questions arise, as it seems that in Heshmati’s work, modernity, the West, techno-scientific achievements, and other concepts are perceived as synonyms without thorough explanation.

Alternative modernity recognizes that various cultures and societies can create their own unique forms of modernity shaped by their specific historical, social, and cultural contexts. In this context, Heshmati believes that the Islamic regime in Iran suggests an alternative to Western modernity. Alternative modernity highlights local agency, and Heshmati believes that the Cultural Revolution is a proposal to build the future by considering the needs of society from the bottom up, not as a top-down political campaign. If so, he needs to start from the bottom, focusing on everyday resistances and collective forces that reflect the people’s demands—a fact missing in his work, as he starts from the top with those in power. Using alternative modernity is an effort to frame political Islam in Iran as a resistance front against what Heshmati interprets as Western influence. To do so, we need to see how a society resists colonialization and Westernization to gain its right to self-determination. However, there is only one example in his work of everyday people: female scientists who resist the Cultural Revolution and do not support it in their pursuit of an alternative vision. This means a group of women are resisting the Islamization of their space, which goes against the idea of alternative modernity and shows the Cultural Revolution as a forceful campaign. 

He discusses two contrasting views on the adoption of Western science and technology by colonized Muslim nations. One perspective, represented by figures like Sayyid Jamaleddin al-Afghani, advocates for using Western science to strengthen Islam and achieve self-determination. The other perspective, exemplified by Sayyid Qutb, rejects Western modernity entirely and promotes the establishment of an independent Islamic state based on Islamic laws (Heshmati, 2014:10). As Heshmati tries to show that “the conventional view of political Islam as solely opposed to progress and modernity is inadequate”(Heshmati, 2014:11), we can understand that he sees the Cultural Revolution as stemming from Sayyid Jamaleddin al-Afghani’s perspective. However, there is insufficient theoretical work to discuss these ideas and prove why he denies the influence of Sayyid Qutb as one of the three pillars of Islamism  (Tibi, 2013: 436), in the construction of the Islamic state in Iran. Therefore, the theoretical framework suffers from a lack of thorough investigation into “Islamology” (Tibi, 2009) in the context of this study.

Heshmati explains that the Cultural Revolution led to the radicalization of the educational system, the closure of universities, and the purging of professors and students, significantly reshaping the educational and technoscientific landscape in Iran. According to Heshmati, this radical shift was a practical response to the pre-revolution understanding of technoscience (Heshmati, 2014:38). By detailing the competition among Islamists, leftists, and liberals and highlighting Jalal al-Ahmad’s concept of “Westoxification,” Heshmati provides brief historiography of the Cultural Revolution that materializes its ideas in Islamic technoscience with the support of Velayat-e Faqih in articulating its definition. In each chapter and clearly in the abstract, he shows that the concept of Islamic technoscience emerged in reaction to Shah’s extensive modernization programs of the 1960s and 1970s, embodying revolutionary doctrines of independence, self-sufficiency, and anti-colonial science. According to Heshmati (Heshmati, 2014:8)

The shift from colonial science to Islamic technoscience marked a significant change in the Islamic state’s approach to science. Khomeini believed that large-scale scientific programs, such as the nuclear program, were not beneficial and could make Iran vulnerable to foreign influence. Consequently, Khomeini halted the nuclear program and advocated for a focus on ‘small science’ as a locally relevant solution to Iran’s economic challenges. 

Heshmati shows that Khomeini evidently wanted to retake the steering wheel of the Cultural Revolution and undermine the authority of Banisadr’s government (Heshmati, 2014:26). These are examples and reasonings provided by Heshmati that, contrary to his claims, demonstrate the Cultural Revolution as a reactionary effort of political Islam and cannot be framed as alternative modernity.

Heshmati claims that Islamic technoscience did not destroy the majority of the modern technoscientific infrastructure and projects established during the Shah’s modernization program in the 1950s-1970s (Heshmati, 2014:2). And instead, these state efforts were some of the initial strategies employed by post-revolutionary clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic Party to strengthen their authority and promote their envisioned image of an Islamic state as a modern entity. Here, specifically in chapter three, we have two scenarios constructed by Heshmati to explain his claim. First, the theoretical one, Heshmati explains, Motahhari advocated for state ownership of automated machines to prevent private accumulation of surplus value, while Beheshti proposed collective ownership of agricultural land (Heshmati, 2014:42). The second is the practical one, such as the de-mechanization approach. Also, according to Heshmati (2014: 40), Khomeini maintained a neutral stance, rejecting the binary distinction between Islamic science and science as separate entities. However, right after presenting Khomeini’s quote, Heshmati states:

Although Khomeini would barely admit that these kinds of binaries were credible in his post-revolutionary regime, when we look at archival sources from the HCR and the UJ, we see that there was an organized rejection of Western sciences and Western-style universities among the middle-rank university managers and young engineers. (Heshmati, 2014: 40)

Therefore, the first scenario, without concrete examples, resembles a theoretical debate among authorities, and Heshmati’s discussion on the economy, promoting self-reliance and independence, remains underdeveloped theoretically. In the second scenario, practical approaches to modernity, Heshmati provides concrete examples such as de-mechanization, which aimed to depict machines, mechanization, and automation as sources of corruption, dependency, and colonialism. This is exemplified by Beheshti’s proposal of a counter-colonial machine: a small, hand-operated harvester (2014: 53)! However, this is a good example of simplistic solutions to the challenges of modernity for Muslims and the philosophy of the Islamization of knowledge (Tibi, 1995). The consequences of debates arising from the Cultural Revolution resulted in prioritizing small-scale and low-tech agriculture as a prerequisite for the material self-reliance of the Islamic state were reactionary and opposed to progress. Eric Lob’s thesis (2013) on Jihad proves that such a strategy can be rooted in the regime’s political claims and adoption during war, and it was not a choice.

What is interesting is that Heshmati’s reasoning leads to conclusions that contradict his claims. For instance, Heshmati discusses Beheshti’s suggestions on agriculture, describing the Qanat idea and asserting that “hostile attitudes towards high-tech machines, along with the idea of ‘self-reliance,’ were responses to the late Pahlavi’s development policies initiated in the 1960s” (Heshmati, 2014: 49). He states that “a human-based production approach, as opposed to a machine-based one suggested by Beheshti, is a reactionary conservative act” (Heshmati, 2014: 48). So, this narrative undermines Heshmati’s claims that the Cultural Revolution is a form of alternative modernity and not a conservative, top-down political campaign. 

Moreover, Heshmati’s narrative conceals at least one of the main reasons for the Cultural Revolution: the threat posed by leftist groups in universities to the Islamic Republic Party and its allies.  Although Heshmati mentions how, in various cases, Khomeini attempted to adopt anti-imperialist ideas from leftist groups, there is a lack of deeper historical understanding of the Cultural Revolution and its relationship with leftist and secular academics and intellectuals.

This could be addressed by more critically engaging with Shahrzad Mojab’s PhD thesis (1991), looking into the conflicts between student groups with different political affiliations, and also engaging with the documents about the National Organization of University Professors and its critical views on Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the dissertation reveals a shift in Heshmati’s perspective compared to the writings in his Farsi blogs (Heshmati, 2020a; Heshmati, 2020b), where he emphasizes some of these political tensions.

References

Giddens, A. 2013. The consequences of modernity. Wiley.
Habermas, J. 1990. The philosophical discourse of modernity: twelve lectures (1st MIT paperback ed.). Polity Press.
Heshmati, Ataollah. 2021. Islamic Technoscience: Machines, Politics, & Gender in Iran’s Cultural Revolution (1980-1983). Master of Arts Thesis, UBC.
Lob, E. S. 2013. “An institutional history of the Iranian construction jihad: From inception to institutionalization (1979–2011).” (Order No. 3597518). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (1458296697).
Mojab, S. 1991. “The state and university: The ‘‘Islamic cultural revolution in the institutions of higher education of Iran, 1980-1987.” (Order No. 9210922). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (303918890).
Tibi, B. 1995. “Islamic Dream of Semi-modernity.” India International Centre Quarterly, 22(1): 79–87.
Tibi, B. 2009. Islam’s Predicament with Modernity: Cultural Change and Religious Reform. London and New York: Routledge.
Tibi, B. 2013. “The Islamist Venture of the Politicization of Islam to an Ideology of Islamism: A Critique of the Dominating Narrative in Western Islamic Studies”. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 96(4): 431-449.