Amanat, Abbas

historian at Yale University specializing in the modern history of Iran; author of Iran: A Modern History

Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons

Lex Fridman Podcast · Nov 2, 2022

• Abbas Amanat
• Mahsa Amini protests
• Woman Life Freedom movement
• Islamic Republic of Iran
• 1979 Iranian Revolution
• Ayatollah Khomeini
• 1953 Mosaddegh coup and CIA
• Iran nuclear program and JCPOA
• Iran-Israel relations
• Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

Core ideas

Recorded six weeks into the 2022 protest movement, Amanat opens with the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who, according to eyewitness accounts he relays, was detained by Iran's morality police ostensibly for improper hijab and died in custody after reportedly collapsing, with her family and much of the public treating the circumstances as suspicious. He describes how her death — amplified through social media and turned into a widely shared symbolic portrait — catalyzed protests that spread from Tehran's streets to university campuses and high schools nationwide, driven overwhelmingly by a very young cohort (teens to early twenties) that he says is unusually well-connected to the outside world via satellite dishes, VPNs, and messaging apps despite decades of state efforts at information control. He walks through the "Woman, Life, Freedom" slogan's Kurdish origins, arguing the movement's three components map onto: legal/civil discrimination against women under a system he describes as institutionalized patriarchy (in matters of divorce, custody, inheritance, and travel), a demand for ordinary personal liberty ("life," analogous to the American "pursuit of happiness" — music, dancing, mixed-gender socializing), and the century-old Iranian demand for political "freedom" going back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. He is careful to frame the movement's relationship to the hijab itself as being about the right to choose rather than a blanket rejection of it, noting footage of veiled and unveiled women protesting side by side.

Amanat situates the protests within what he describes as a widening generational rupture: a demographic transformation (Iran's population grew from about 35 million in 1979 to roughly 83 million today even as the birth rate collapsed from around 3% to about 1.1%, driven by urbanization, education, and a vastly expanded university system — from roughly a dozen universities before the revolution to 56 today) has produced a large, educated, socially liberal middle class that, in his account, the Islamic Republic's own social-engineering project inadvertently created and then alienated. He describes the government's response as combining conspiratorial rhetoric (blaming foreign powers, the U.S., and Israel while dismissing state media reports of protest turnout as, in his telling, transparently fabricated) with organized violence — armed riot police and plainclothes Basij militia deployed even to small cities, arrests he cites in the thousands, and reported killings, including children, running into the hundreds by the time of recording — which he characterizes bluntly as bearing "clear signs of fascism," while noting he estimates genuine regime support at around 10% of the population and situates part of the state's remaining base in a "loyalty economy" of state jobs, oil-revenue patronage, and a large state-linked security establishment including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (which he describes as a distinct, ideologically driven parallel military with its own industrial and infrastructure interests, comparable in function to military-industrial establishments in Egypt or Pakistan).

Tracing the deeper history, Amanat covers Iran's 1906 Constitutional Revolution (part of a wave of contemporaneous constitutional movements worldwide) as a comparatively non-violent, leaderless push for legal constraints on state and clerical power; the discovery of oil in 1908 and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's outsized role in enriching first the British state and then a strengthening central Iranian state; the 1941-46 Allied occupation and subsequent brief democratic opening; and the 1953 coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after his nationalization of the oil industry — an episode he describes as widely regarded as one of the CIA's earliest and most consequential Cold War operations, explaining the U.S. rationale (Cold War fear of Soviet influence via Iran's large domestic Communist party, the Tudeh) working alongside British commercial interests, and noting the coup became a lasting nationalist grievance later exploited rhetorically by Ayatollah Khomeini despite Khomeini's own lack of sympathy for Mosaddegh's secular-nationalist politics. He then traces the Pahlavi state's subsequent authoritarian modernization under the Shah, the suppression of secular and leftist opposition that left the clergy as the only remaining organized dissenting institution, and Khomeini's rise through opposition to 1960s land reform and women's suffrage, his 1963 uprising and exile, and his eventual return in 1979 — describing Khomeini as combining personal self-confidence and opportunism with a symbolic role that, in Amanat's phrase, unintentionally fulfilled Shia messianic expectations of a hidden, returning Imam, and noting the post-revolutionary execution of several thousand political prisoners (predominantly leftist) in 1988 as a lasting, unresolved trauma. He describes today's system of clerical rule under the Supreme Leader (an office with, in his account, effectively unchecked constitutional authority over the military, judiciary, and economy) as historically unprecedented within both Iranian and broader Islamic history, and assesses it — despite its religious framing — as functionally "a brutal fascist regime."

On nuclear policy, Amanat traces Iran's pursuit of nuclear capability to the trauma of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War (in which he notes the U.S. largely backed Iraq) and describes the JCPOA negotiations as an attempt to trade sanctions relief for verified limits on Iran's program, criticizing the Trump administration's 2018 withdrawal from the deal as a policy mistake that removed international monitoring without securing any replacement, while stating he sees no clearly better alternative and worries that sanctions relief now would strengthen the same government currently suppressing protesters. Asked to address the Israeli-Iranian rivalry and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he distinguishes his own view (that Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric is not shared by most ordinary Iranians, that the Islamic Republic uses Palestinian solidarity partly as a legitimizing tool, and that its regional interventions in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen serve the regime's own expansionist interests rather than the Iranian public's) from his assessment that Israeli policy — specifically, in his view, the treatment of Palestinians and the postponement of a negotiated settlement since 1967 — is itself unjust and strategically unsustainable; when Lex asks him to steelman Israel's security rationale, he affirms Israel's right to security while stating he finds it difficult to reconcile a nation shaped by the memory of the Holocaust with what he considers its failure to extend equivalent justice to Palestinians. He closes on Iran's deepening ties with Russia and China as a historically unusual alignment (noting Iran spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries viewing Russia as its principal strategic threat), and, asked for a hopeful outlook, expresses cautious optimism that generational change and the movement's apparent lack of a single centralized leader make a peaceful, negotiated evolution more likely than either total regime collapse or a repeat of a Khomeini-style revolutionary takeover — while stating clearly that this is a hope rather than a prediction.

Excerpts