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3 books match the query 'Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988'

cover of Bordering on War: A Social and Political History of Khuzestan

Bordering on War

A Social and Political History of Khuzestan

Shaherzad Ahmadi

University of Texas Press, 2024

A study of transnational identity, migration, and state loyalties told through the social and political history of Iran’s Khuzestan province.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘athist forces invaded Khuzestan, one of the oldest and richest provinces in Iran, triggering the Iran-Iraq War. Shaherzad Ahmadi’s Bordering on War examines the social history of Khuzestan and sheds light on how border dwellers, provincial leaders, and migrants in the region shaped Iran and Iraq's history before, during, and after the war.

Drawing from a rich collection of Persian- and Arabic-language archival sources—rarely used by western scholars due to restrictions in Iran—Ahmadi’s research focuses on Arab Iranians and argues that Iranian border dwellers and migrants formed local, non-national loyalties, thereby eschewing bureaucratic pressures to confine loyalties to a single nation-state. The transnational character and ethnically diverse composition of Khuzestan, especially in the oil-rich towns on the southwestern border, led many, including Iraq’s Ba‘ath Party, to question the national belonging of Arab Iranians. Bordering on War contributes to a wider discussion about the ability of individuals and communities to exert agency through migration, trade, education, and other activities.

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cover of The Place of Stones: A Novel

The Place of Stones

A Novel

Ali Hosseini

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Finalist, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize

The Place of Stones is Ali Hosseini’s newly translated first novel, his second book to appear in English. In it, he paints a vivid portrait of Sangriz, a village in the southern part of Iran where life has been disrupted by industrialization and the revolution of 1979.

Haydar and Jamal are best friends, and their families have always made their living from the land in the foothills of Iran’s Zagros Mountains. Haydar is a dreamer who searches the hills for an ancient treasure called the Black Globe. Jamal is in love with Haydar’s sister, Golandam, and he attempts to accommodate himself to modernization as a way to create a better life for the two of them. The rapacious conversion of farmland to brick factories draws the trio into escalating conflict with the village landlord.

As Jamal, Haydar, and their families confront land reform, industrialization, revolution, and war, their lives are pulled forcefully toward the explosive events that will change them all. In masterfully crafted prose that never sinks into sentimentality, The Place of Stones illuminates how a lost past continues to shape the present.
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cover of Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran

Warring Souls

Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran

Roxanne Varzi

Duke University Press, 2006

With the first Fulbright grant for research in Iran to be awarded since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Roxanne Varzi returned to the country her family left before the Iran-Iraq war. Drawing on ethnographic research she conducted in Tehran between 1991 and 2000, she provides an eloquent account of the beliefs and experiences of young, middle-class, urban Iranians. As the first generation to have come of age entirely in the period since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, twenty-something Iranians comprise a vital index of the success of the nation’s Islamic Revolution. Varzi describes how, since 1979, the Iranian state has attempted to produce and enforce an Islamic public sphere by governing behavior and by manipulating images—particularly images related to religious martyrdom and the bloody war with Iraq during the 1980s—through films, murals, and television shows. Yet many of the young Iranians Varzi studied quietly resist the government’s conflation of religious faith and political identity.

Highlighting trends that belie the government’s claim that Islamic values have taken hold—including rising rates of suicide, drug use, and sex outside of marriage—Varzi argues that by concentrating on images and the performance of proper behavior, the government’s campaign to produce model Islamic citizens has affected only the appearance of religious orthodoxy, and that the strictly religious public sphere is partly a mirage masking a profound crisis of faith among many Iranians. Warring Souls is a powerful account of contemporary Iran made more vivid by Varzi’s inclusion of excerpts from the diaries she maintained during her research and from journal entries written by Iranian university students with whom she formed a study group.

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