Authorities found Gholamreza Takhti’s corpse in the Atlantic Hotel in early 1968. Their discovery accorded an opportunity for sinfī-sīyāsī activities: political actions hidden behind the veneer of otherwise innocent acts. In this case, mourning processions for a national hero bordered on protest against the state. That official media deemed the death a suicide only exacerbated matters. Rumors of homicide spread, predicated on the assumption that a figure like Takhti couldn’t possibly take his own life.
Responses to Takhti’s death––processions-turned-protests held on his chihilum––accord an opportunity to reframe the global sixties in Iran. For most historians, the protest events of that decade seem, at best, loosely related. More often, a nationalist frame serves to highlight differences. What, if anything, links mobilization in Takhti’s mourning processions with the 15 Khordad uprising in 1963, the funeral commemorations held for Mohammad Mossadegh in 1967, celebrations of Parviz Ghilichkhani’s goal against the Israeli national soccer team in 1968, or student and bus riders’ strikes?
This paper argues instead for a global perspective. Responses to Takhti’s death equally accord an opportunity to reassess the concept of “the global” from Iran. “Global 68” has come to signal a wave of protests characterized by a shared anti-imperialist imaginary and nearly debilitating challenges to local governance. At first blush, the Takhti processions of early 1968 echo patterns of unlikely alliance across ideological lines and social class. What explains these similarities? Unsatisfied by mere temporal coincidence, existing scholarship identifies networks of protest across borders. Yet this positivist approach over-emphasizes activist intentions, foregrounding tactical maneuvers at the expense of taken-for-granted aspects of daily life.
Two features of 1979’s mass-based revolution in Iran make attention to the mundane and experiential particularly salient: (1) its qualities as a public and spectacular event, and (2) the role of everyday non-activist life in making an “unthinkable” revolution beyond the designs of any vanguard party. Taking a genealogical approach, this paper traces these dynamics to the rhetorical and atmospheric features of the 1960s. In the 1960s, disparate expressions of collective action were linked to global phenomena even if they weren’t. Similarities in logics of revolt despite the absence of demonstrable connections only proves the point. How can we write a history of the things that escape us in their ubiquity? How does that history occasion a different approach to “the global”? And would that approach occasion a different assessment of events in Iran?
