28 July, 2009 — MRZine – Monthly Review

According to Ervand Abrahamian, a scholar of Iran’s contemporary history, George Rudé’s observation that “perhaps no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the crowd” is particularly true about the Middle East.¹

While European journalists have invariably portrayed oriental crowds as “xenophobic mobs” hurling insults and bricks at Western embassies, local conservatives have frequently denounced them as “social scum” in the pay of the foreign hand, and radicals have often stereotyped them as “the people” in action.  For all, the crowd has been an abstraction, whether worthy of abuse, fear, praise, or even of humour, but not a subject of study.²

Abrahamian’s classic text on the subject called “The Crowd in Iranian Politics 1905-1953” describes the role of the crowd in politics and conceptualizes, for the first time, the social and class makeup of the Iranian crowd in the country’s transformation from a pre-industrial to a semi-industrial national economy and, by doing so, invents a language with which to study the Iranian political crowd and its history.³

Written in 1968, Abrahamian’s text unfortunately does not bear witness to the crucial role that the crowd played in the political developments that culminated in the Islamic revolution of 1978, a task Abrahamian finely accomplishes later in his magnum opus Iran between Two Revolutions.⁴ Abrahamian is Iran’s first structuralist historian who rejects the prominence of events and personalities as clues to history and is rather interested in the social makeup of Iran and its various movements for political power, an energy that, according to him, finds its proper medium of expression in the crowds and demonstrations.

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