Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Revolution, reform, and science in Iran

2009; Volume: 374; Issue: 9705 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(09)62079-1

0099-5355

Name and address supplied,

Education and Islamic Studies

The middle-class revolution; few news reports from the tumultuous events in Iran this summer went without the qualifier “middle class”. What made commentators draw this distinction? Women's clothes, of course, the great social divider. During the recent Iranian protests, the conservative supporters of President Ahmadinejad were seen wearing black chadors versus the fashionable, colourful, tunic-clad women with sunglasses. Never had a revolution in the making been so fashion-conscious. There were other, less visual, indicators of class for the pro-Mousavi demonstrators: their higher level of education, their jobs, and ability to speak English. As Massoumeh Torfeh, writing in The Guardian, noted: “Those who marched…were mainly students, university lecturers, professors, doctors, lawyers, women's rights activists, journalists and the educated citizens that should form the backbone of any sound political set-up.” Although the middle classes attended the demonstrations in strength, more accurately these were protests of the youth, who are generally well educated in Iran and by definition, of course, fashionable. Ahmadinejad's first victory 4 years ago has been partly attributed to the youth's reluctance to vote in the knowledge that it would make no difference. These same people, 4 years older and with Mir Hossein Mousavi's promise of reform and freedom, appeared en masse at polling stations in July and were arguably silenced. Torfeh's comments echo the premise of early 20th-century modernising reformists presented by Cyrus Schayegh. In Who is Knowledgeable is Strong, Schayegh charts the rise of the reformist middle classes in Iran between 1900 and 1950. In doing so, he focuses on their use of the rhetoric that western science, especially biomedicine, is the high road to modernity. Schayegh maintains that the middle classes used “cultural capital” acquired through access to higher education to stake their position in society, translating cultural capital into economic capital and social power. He also examines how educated Iranians navigated hostile traditionalism to acquire influence and safeguard their professional status. Given the British and Russian meddling in Iran's affairs during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Schayegh views the then Iranian state as semi-colonial and suggests that the rise of modern science in Iran was based not on primary research but on a mix of theorising and vocational application, a “scientific knowledge practice”. Reformists' attempts to rewrite western science into Iran's history, their position that western medicine essentially originated in the East, and efforts to give major contributions of western science precursors in Islamic and pre-Islamic Iran, were partly an expression of a desire to appease the clerical establishment, the biggest internal opponent to reform—a situation that has not changed to date. Schayegh sets out three ideas on the rise of the biomedical sciences in Iran. First, neurology and psychiatry were adopted as the means to help cope with the “dangers of modernity”, which included opium, alcohol, and venereal disease, thought to “weaken the human body and spirit”. Second, modernisers' preoccupation with slow population growth and a perceived inability to compete economically with the west, led to Iran's first economic plan in 1947 and an emphasis on improving population quantity and quality through improved public health for the rural majority. Third, psychology was adopted to nurture the self-reliance and willpower necessary to build the modern Iran. Despite western misconceptions and foreign sanctions, the years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 have seen important advances in public health, especially primary care and education, with women having an integral and visible role. These advances include universal, free primary health care, 90% health insurance coverage for secondary care, and a public smoking ban. Most people, however, do still need to financially contribute to their treatment, including for the purchase of drugs. At odds with Iran's ultra conservative image, 2008 saw the piloting of a scheme to fit Tehran's addict shelters with condom and needle vending machines to combat a growing HIV/AIDS problem, fuelled by cheap narcotics from Afghanistan and prostitution. The UN and WHO may place Iran as a regional leader in health; however, the anti-western rhetoric of the Iranian theocracy has left its mark with an isolated scientific community and a drain of academics to foreign institutions. Those who stay, many either secular or moderate interpreters of Islam, drive change but remain a perceived threat to power as the arrests of academics and doctors during the latest protests highlight. Given the advances in Iranian public health during the post-Revolution era, and a recent focus on reinstatements of political rights and freedoms, one can only look forward to the next bout of interest in health-care reform—coloured by a wider interest in greater freedoms—and anticipate its intricate interplay with social change in Iran.