Shervin Malekzadeh

With limited access to the Islamic Republic, it is perhaps not surprising that Iran watchers routinely turn to that country’s textbooks as ciphers for understanding the effects of the regime’s efforts to produce the New Islamic Citizen. More often than not, the conclusions that emerge from these investigations confirm what many already presume to know about Iran: that the regime is successfully indoctrinating young Iranians with its brand of militant and anti-western Islam.

It doesn’t take much effort to see that the efficacy of the IRI’s school system has been over stated. The wave of protests that swept the country in the wake of the 2009 presidential election demonstrated that many, if not most of Iran’s student population, have their own ideas as to what counts as a “good Muslim,” ideas that increasingly diverge from the interests of the state. Indeed, no less a figure than Iran’s Supreme Leader has condemned the schools for failing to serve the needs of the regime, even going so far as to accuse his Ministry of Education in 2006—well before the rise of the Green Movement—of running a school system that was little different from the “anti-religious” and “West struck” outfit that operated under the Shah.

One reason that the scholarship exaggerates the impact of textbooks on students is because researchers tend to impose an unnatural coherence to the curriculum by drawing their conclusions from a historically narrow set of textbooks, taking what is effectively a single snapshot in time of the history of post-revolutionary schooling in Iran.

Reports such as those recently put out by the Israel-based Center for Monitoring of the Impact of Peace (CMIP) and Freedom House treat the changes made to Iranian schoolbooks in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution as complete, cogent, and final—in effect transforming the curriculum and the textbooks into static and “sacred” objects with transitive properties that can be carried across the entire post-revolutionary period.

Through our lens we see that schooling in Iran is above all a highly politicized, contingent, and contested institution. Educational planners wish to produce the perfect Islamic society; they just haven’t been able to reach a consensus as to what the content or form of that idealized society ought to be.

Take for example the concept of Islamic modesty. As an illustration of Islamicization following the Revolution, Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University, points to the opening lesson of the First Grade Farsi primer. There, the classroom teacher in the prerevolutionary version is transformed from a young woman wearing a tight-fitting sweater and skirt to a more decorous (if less sexy) instructor outfitted with a plain baggy dress.

Dabashi ends his analysis there even though other variations on Islamic dress existed at the same time and in other parts of the IRI’s curriculum. The ensemble of a simple headscarf and unadorned blouse and skirt was considered monaseb or appropriate enough for a classroom teacher welcoming her students or a mother dropping her son off on his first day of elementary school in the Second Grade Farsi textbook. By 1982 this look was out for the teacher, her scarf replaced by a snug maghnaeh placed over a nondescript dress. It was only in 1987, a full eight years after the Revolution, that illustrators rectified the situation by pouring a black chador over the woman’s figure.

Around the time that the wayward mom was getting her makeover Iran’s curriculum was entering its most strident phase.  In general the late 1980s represents the apogee of what might be called schooling’s “arc of Islamicization.”  Textbook images become militant and harsh in ways not seen even during the peak of the Cultural Revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini, who up until then was mostly absent from the textbooks, was inserted for the first time into the front matter of the textbooks, occupying the space previously reserved f or the Shah and the royal family.  The smallest detail was not overlooked:  the dog in the poster from the opening lesson of the First Grade Farsi textbook disappears in the 1987 edition, presumably because of religious prohibitions against dogs as unclean ( najes ) animals, leaving the young girl to point at an empty country road.

This period did not last long, and by the early 1990s the textbooks were already riding the downward slope of the arc.  The chanting young militants on the back cover were replaced by a more mundane safety message (“Kids be careful!”) and accompanied by cautionary images of children engaged in dangerous shenanigans, including playing with knives and sticking a hand into a meat grinder.  Khomeini remained in the front of the textbooks, but was now transformed from the figure of the stern revolutionary into the kindly grandfather of the nation.

In recent years an equilibrium seems to have been reached between two concepts.  Today artifacts from the Islamic and pre-Islamic nation are redolent and (literally) sit without problem or complication next to each to other in the textbooks.  An example of reconciliation can be found on the very first page of the current First Grade Farsi textbook.  Here we see a scene of a family reading together in their apartment.  Clearly visible in the bookshelf in the corner of the picture books containing the epic poems of Iran’s national poets, including the Divan of  Hafez, Sa’adi’s Golestan , and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh , as well as copies of the Koran and Imam Ali’s Naj al-Balagha .  Visible on the wall behind the family is a framed picture of the ruins at Persopolis.

In the end, textbooks may be more useful as symptoms of politics in Iran than as measures of indoctrination.  Research on the ground and in the classroom by scholars such as the Iranian sociologist Mohammad Rezaei indicates that most students in Iran use textbooks to do well on tests, and above all to prepare for the university entrance exam, the dreaded konkur .  Children take away from the material only those facts that will ensure their academic success.  For all of the attention that textbooks receive by outside observers, it is quite likely that they are the last place we ought to look to determine the success or failure of the state’s hegemonic project.