Towards Freedom

Dr Mashallah Ajoudani is arguably the most influential as well as controvertial Iranian historian and literary scholar of the past two decades. His ground breaking first book, Mashrute Irani va pish zamineh velayete faqih, published in 1997, has been reprinted seven times and has shattered the established views of the constitutional revolution of 1906-07 and its implications. The book, initially banned in Iran, has been the subject of hot debates among the leading historians and even discussed in the seminary schools of Qum  Ajoudan's two other books entitled ya marg ya tajaddod and  Hedayat, boofe koor va nasionalism, give us a thorough and fresh outlook on the topics of modernity and nationalism.

In this recent interview with the BBC Persian TV, Ajoudani throws a new light on the events before and after 28 Mordad 1332 (19 August 1953). While to Ajoudani it is a matter of fact that the fall of Mossadegh was as a result of a foriegn assisted coup d'etat, he maintains that the weak and wrong policies of Mossadegh, on the one hand, and the absence of well established political and social institutions, on the other,  left no solution other than a coup to break the political deadlock. In Ajoudani's opinion, the coup was a necessary evil. The most important part of Ajoudan's interview, however, is his blaming the blind and biased intellectual movement of Iran for its ignorant and prejudicial treatment of the phenomenal achievements of the Pahlavi era. In Ajoudani's opinion the giant strides taken in this era were disregarded and even condemned by the political thinkers during the reign of both Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi simply becuase the two kings were allegedly installed through a coup. Ajoudani believes that this blind rejection of all the gains of the Pahlavi era, by its political thinkers and critics, compounded the existing conpiratorial mentality of the Iranians and pushed them to blame all their ills on foreign forces, which in turn brought them the dire consequences that are now history.

Please see Mashallah Ajoudani's interview using the link below:  

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Impk2qkBlgY

ps - Not all the views expressed in this interview are agreeable with those of the author's.