This was an almost aggressively terrible book, which I imagine in part must be due to the very short lead time between the events of the Green Revolution in Iran and the time of the book's publication. I picked up this book because I wanted to know more about Iranian history and the political tensions in the region—I'm shamefully ignorant. Yet I felt I learned little more about contemporary Iran than I'd already picked up from newspaper articles. Not only is there remarkably little in here about internal politics in Iran, Iran, The Green Movement and the USA reads like a partial first draft, poorly structured and only half thought through. The first few chapters are written like a newspaper op ed, but as the book progresses it becomes more a piece of academic theory, riddled with jargon which is italicised in random places for no good reason. If Dabashi did have anything worthwhile to say about the Revolution, I saw little of it here—due, in great part, to his impenetrable prose style. With sentences like

"which means nothing more than re-worlding the world with the world we have known and lived and experienced, before it was de-worlded by the false binary of 'the West and the Rest'"

Dabashi gives Judith Butler a run for her money in terms of incomprehensibility. (No, he never explains how one can de-world, or re-world, a world.)

Dabashi's methodology is also shoddy. He spends much of the book talking about Iran's ongoing encounter with 'modernity' is causing so much upheaval (which irritated me greatly, because he never defines what he means by 'modernity', a term which I almost always find problematic when used in historical writing), and then turns around in the last chapter to lambast scholars who do use the term. He's either being a hypocrite or he's not aware of what he himself has written. I tend towards believing he's just being sloppy and imprecise in language usage, hence also his use of 'medieval' as shorthand for uncivilised and brutal. This medievalist found that quite inaccurate and, coupled with his use of 'modernity', revealing about Dabashi's conception of historical progress.

What caused me to finally lose faith in learning anything of worth from the book, however, was reaching the section towards the end in which he denounces feminists—they are, it seems, just as bad as religious fundamentalists who oppress women, who torture, rape, and murder people because... well, Dabashi's not quite clear about that, but apparently because they're angry. (Women who are righteously angry: what bitches, amirite? Moral equivalence!) Feeling very uneasy about some of the language Dabashi was using to pillory a "clearly non-Muslim" Western feminist historian for apparently Orientalising and condescending to Iranian Muslimahs, I went hunting through the endnotes and tracked down the offending interview online. Now, I neither speak nor read Persian, so I can't speak to the accuracy of his characterisation of this scholar's words, but this "clearly non-Muslim" woman is evidently, and quite obviously, an Iranian expatriate. That seems like more than simple sloppiness; that's outright misstating the facts in order to suit your case, and an undergrad historian should be aware that that's wrong.

I'd still be interested in reading more about the history of Iran, but I won't be using any more of Dabashi's writing to do so. Alternative recommendations are welcome. ( )

I requested this book because I'm interested by Iran and wanted to learn more about its history and politics. Which I kind of did from this book, but it was a slog.

Dabashi's rejects the portrayal of Iranian history as a series of unconnected phases, instead linking the rise of the civil rights (Green) movement in 2009 with the protests that in 1906 led to the founding of an Iranian parliament. I would have liked to know much more about how the Green movement started and spread , who is involved and where it is now, but Dabashi assumes an amount of knowledge about this that I don't have.

Perhaps the target audience is 'Middle East watchers' and those who have a deeper knowledge of political theory and philosophy. Much of the book was lost on me as Dabashi discusses 'anarchic versus erotic bodies' (in reference to public, openly loving letters that women write to their jailed husbands) and 'presumed mimetic absolutism'.

In the end this felt like an unnecessarily extended essay in which what could have been interesting ended up being inaccessible to a casual reader. ( )

Hamid Dabashi's 'Iran, the Green Movement and the USA' arrives at an interesting time in the development of protest movements and democracy in the Middle East, with the Arab spring events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria dominating the headlines over the past few months. Unfortunately Dabashi misses his opportunity to bring this alive for us in Iran. His use of a traditional parable, about the wily fox and the waning power of the lion, creates a useful frame to discuss Iran's place in the international context and his opening analysis of the impact of US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan unwittingly allowing Iran to strengthen its hand in the region. However, his treatise on the place of Iran's green movement in changing the paradigm is flawed by his prose style. I struggled to finish this book despite my interest in the topic. His writing style is over complex and dense, losing sight of the fact that good ideas can be expressed simply. And he does not seem to know who he has in mind for his readership. We vere from academic jargon to the florid style of folk story tellers 'But more of that fire, esteemed and learned reader, will come later. Flattery does not succeed here.

Iran, the Green Movement, and the USA begins with a parable of a wily fox who takes advantage of the former power of a lion king past his prime. With this, the author argues his proposition that due to the involvement of the United States in the Middle East, Iran is perfectly positioned to become a strong nation among the Islamic Republic as the US is neutralizing all of its national threats for it. With the current political climate both nationally and internationally, Iran cannot not win. The Green Movement has been a particularly powerful force in building the country's identity both distinct from and in relation to international politics.

Unfortunately, both the writing and argumentation of this book were uneven. Dabashi writes in very dense and academic prose, which would be fine except that the trade-off of such dense writing is that he cycles through his ideas too quickly and too briefly. He expresses a lot of hope and pride for the direction that Iran is taking - but he doesn't do it particularly by analysis of the Green Movement itself. Instead, a lot of his consideration is about the reception of Iran by the rest of the world - whether the Green Movement is credible in everyone else's eyes and how it will change the dynamic of international politics. There is a lot about international involvement in Iran from the time of the Shah (rightfully so) and how that drastically altered Iranian self-identity, but relatively little about the radicalization of Islam in Iran since then, and particularly in response to foreign involvement. There is also relatively little about Ahmadinejad, Khatami, social media, and modernization in the context of Islam - all topics I expected to be central. So, I don't know; what does it mean to have a book ostensibly about Iran's blooming autonomy and self-identity framed largely in the context of how external politics have set up this situation for Iran? ( )

Iran, the Green Movement and the USA is Hamid Dabashi's exploration of the significance of the recent Green Movement in Iran, and the factors that have led to this popular uprising. It makes for an interesting and timely, if flawed, read.

Some of these flaws stem from the fact that it's not always clear who Dabashi expects his audience to be. As such the tone (and prose) are somewhat uneven: a nadir being the utterly awful phrase "a theocentric soteriology that feeds on its own messianic fanaticism" (p86) - a phrase which is not only obfuscatory and ugly, but also (in my opinion) wrong. However, Dabashi is at his best when he is passionately arguing for his country, for Obama to actively "bear witness" to the nascent civil rights movement (as he compellingly frames the Green Movement) and for the bizarre insistence of US commentators to announce the significance of the actions of Iranians, instead of allowing them their own voice. These passionate and personal passages sit at odds with the more academically-phrased portions of the book, which failed for me simply because they seemed to lack intellectual rigour and accessibility, making them a kind of unenvaging polemic.

Many of the issues of this monograph could have been managed with better editing - straight copies of text between introduction and chapter (pp 13 & 147) feel amateurish, and the book would undoubtedly have benefitted from greater consistency in language. However, this may partly be that this is a book that is reacting to and commenting on very recent events, and there was thus a desire to publish quickly. Indeed, it is in some respects already out-of-date - Dabashi's prediction that the civil rights protests that began in Iran would spread throughout the Middle East has been proven entirely correct.

While this is, in my eyes, a flawed book, it is nonetheless an important look at the events developing in Iran and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in that region. One final note should go to the inspired illustrations, courtesy of Termeh, a Tehran-based poet and visual artist. Her work does much to enhance the strongest parts of the text, that call us to solidarity with the young people who are striving for freedom in a country they love deeply.