With the 1941 invasion and occupation of Iran by British and Soviet powers, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate. With this suspension of state surveillance, there were new opportunities to disseminate and publicize religious discourse. The new Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was inexperienced and insecure, and his reign was unstable; historical records show that his reign did not have the full backing of the main superpower, Britain, which continued to exercise an inexorable influence over Iranian politics, especially since its occupation of the southern province Khuzestan. It was within this context that the young Shah decided, or was forced, to put aside his father’s harsh policies towards religious authorities (in particular the clerical establishment) and adopt a more moderate approach towards them.
Faced with formidable rivals, i.e. Marxists and nationalist forces, members of the clerical establishment as well as religious intellectuals began to reconstruct and modernize their discourse, focusing in particular on their mode of publicity and religious advertising as well as their communication strategies. During this decade, these forces also tried to adopt a more modern interpretation of Islam, and worked to demonstrate Islam’s compatibility with science. The religious establishment also quickly realized that they needed to change their approach to media, overturning a previous ban by clergy on its use. Before long, religious authorities began to use new forms of media (Magazine, newspaper) to broadcast their message and disseminate their political agenda, in an effort to influence the younger generation of Iranians, for whom these new modes of communication were extremely attractive. Finally, in order to survive and flourish in the public sphere, religious forces began to carve out new public spaces for themselves (by constructing new mosques, establishing formal neighborhood religious associations, and sending young members of the clergy to small cities and villages as religious missionaries), and to form and build informal religious networks. These institutional and network-building initiatives played a crucial role in subsequent social and political development in Iran.
This research project will focus on four aspects of religious “revivalism” in 1940s Iran: it will focus on the major players, the discourses produced, the media structures used for religious propagation, and finally the networking strategies that were adopted by religious establishment and non-clerical religious intellectuals.
