Iranian Studies Seminar
March 4, 2008
5:30 pm at Faculty House, Columbia University

“The New Post-revolutionary Generation in Iran: The Case of Qom”

Speaker: Professor Farhad Khosrokhavar

Synopsis:

This talk presented Professor Khosrokhavar’s research dealing with youth living in the holy city of Qom, a population with no first-hand knowledge of pre-revolutionary life in Iran. The major issues addressed in his research included: relations and conflicts between the new generation and their parents; relations between male and female members of the family; friendship outside the family, in particular, the potential and real problems of friendship between the sexes; relations with institutions such as the school system, the university and, in particular, Azad University; the influence of the educational system on the modernization of the new generations and their lives; the contradictory impact of patriarchal Islam on the new generations in relation to secularization and the new aspirations of the youth; politics and its significance for the youth; the problem of the city of Qom and the way it shapes family and individual life among the new generations; gender relations and their specific problems within Qom.

The research is based on 60 interviews with members of the new generation. An almost equal number of men and woman participated in the interviews, and they came from different social classes and professions. A book based on the project is due to be published in the early spring of 2008 in French by the publisher Robert Lafont in Paris. The book is co-authored by Amir Nikpey, who took part in the empirical research.

Speaker’s Bio:

Farhad Khosrokhavar is a professor at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. This spring he is a Visiting Professor at Yale University. His main fields of research are Islam in Europe, in particular the radical forms of the religion, and Iranian society after the Islamic Revolution.

He has been a Rockefeller Fellow (1990) and has lectured at conferences at various European and American universities (including Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin) and at many think tanks.

He has published extensively, and his publications include 14 books, three of which have been translated into seven different languages, and more than 70 articles, mainly in French, with a dozen in English.