Homa Katouzian, "Iran and the Revolution: A History" (Yale UP, 2026)

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**Nicholas Gordon** (1:44)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region.
Iran is once again in global headlines, following US strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran's modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and ISF Unite to raid the Revolution, to the present day's tensions over Iran's nuclear program. Homa Katouzian looks at this history in his latest book, Iran and the Revolution, A History, where he posits that Iran is a short-term society, one that lacks long-term continuity. We recorded this interview on May 18th, 2026 Homa is a member of the Faculty of Asian-Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford, and he's visiting Skoll at the Department of History, University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books, including Iran, Politics, History, Literature, Iran, A Beginner's Guide, and The Persians. Homa, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I talk about your book, Iran and the Revolution.
This is clearly an important event in history to understand, given what's in the news right now, given how Iran is central to how we're thinking about the region right at this point in time and the region's geopolitics. So maybe as just a broad overview, what do you think is the best way, what's the best way to understand the Iranian Revolution?

**Homa Katouzian** (3:18)
Actually, Nicholas, hello and good to talk to you.
The Iranian Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution, was not a liberal democratic revolution, was not a socialist revolution. It wasn't any kind of European type revolution. It was an Iranian type revolution which had had many similar examples in the long history of Iran. It was the revolution of the state against the society, a revolution of the people against the shah.
All classes of the people participated in it. All small minorities sat on the fence. But not a single social class defended the state, not a single political party backed the shah and the Iranian government of the time. And that is exactly the meaning of that revolution. It had hard precedents in history, as I said.

**Nicholas Gordon** (4:30)
So in your book, you talk about Iran being a short-term society, as opposed to a long-term society. Could I ask you to explain what you mean by that idea?

**Homa Katouzian** (4:44)
Now, in fact, I've written several times that in Iran historically, a person could be a merchant this year, a minister next year, and end up in jail the following year. Now, this may be an exaggeration, look like an exaggeration, but in fact, this happened. And as a matter of fact, we've got contemporary examples of it.
That something like that, that kind of incredible change taking place in the life of an individual or the whole society. It's short-term, because Iran, of course, has a very long history, but the society is short-term, in that anything could happen because of lack of unpredictability. And there's lack of unpredictability because of the fact that historically, Iran has been ruled by the system of arbitrary despotism. I mean, absolute and arbitrary rule, not just absolute rule, like the despotic states of Europe for over four centuries, taken as a war. But since its very foundation, Iran has been ruled by the system of absolute and arbitrary rule, which means government by fiat, a personal rule. Now, this is different from the caters' group, because the caters' group is a minority rule, a minority government, which is headed by the data. I mean, every old government in the world are headed by one person. But the caters' group is a system in which the minority of people, the upper class is normally around the state, and it's headed by a educator. But the caters' groups are not lawless. They are not arbitrary.