The Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Chicago is honored to have Prof. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi as speaker in the Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series 2025. The lecture will be in person and on zoom on Wednesday , Feb 19 at 5:00 PM US Central Time at The Tea Room, The Social Science Research Building.
Abstract
“Rights Civilization and Governmentality: The Cyrus Cylinder and ‘Equality Rights’ in Cold War Iran” explores the interplay between historical memory, social rights, and the contested conceptions of governmentality and constitutionality in the four decades prior to the 1979 Revolution. Offering a corrective to the ideological and linear revolutionary narratives of Pahlavi Iran, this historical inquiry elucidates how a multi-confessional conception of Iran and its constitutionally sanctioned “equality rights” of citizens was reconceived at “a moment of danger” during WWII when Iran was invaded by the Allied forces and Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-1941) was forced to abdicate. It explores how the endeavor for the promotion of legal equality of women and non-Muslims was opposed on religious and constitutional grounds by those who conceived of Iran as a “Shi‘i nation” (millat-i Shi‘ah). Exploring the concurrent and protracted efforts of lawyers and jurists (fuqaha) to promote two divergent modes of governing the everyday conduct of citizens—one based on “equality rights” and the other on Islamic jurisprudence––this lecture offers a historically situated account of the rights question in Iran in the decades before the 1979 Revolution.
Bio
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, the Inaugural Director of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, is Professor of Historical Studies, History, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of Iran Namag, a bilingual quarterly of Iranian Studies, and co-editor of the Iranian Studies book series published by Routledge. Tavakoli-Targhi is the author of Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (2001) and Tajaddud-i Bumi [Vernacular Modernity] (2003). With critical introductions in Persian, he has edited Civilizational Wisdom: Selected Works of Ehsan Yarshater(2015); Jahangir Amuzgar: Selected Economic Essays (2015); and Ayin-i Danishjuyan: The First University of Tehran Student Journal (2016).
Tavakoli has published numerous historiographical articles in English and Persian on Iranian modernity, matriarchal nationalism, biopolitics, governmentality, and clerico-engineering.