Visiting professor Hossein Bashiriyeh can bring something unique to his classes on Middle Eastern politics-his own life experiences in Iran.
After teaching at the University of Tehran from 1983 to 2005, Bashiriyeh is embarking on a new challenge in the Syracuse University classroom. He is teaching three sections of PSC 300 this semester, one on transitions to democracy, one on Islamic political thought and one on Middle Eastern political systems.
“He can provide insight you couldn’t get from someone who hasn’t been there,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, director of Middle Eastern studies at SU. “Especially because non-Western political thought has been in the news so much, having somebody like him is a big plus for us.”
The main difference between teaching in Iran and teaching in the United States, Bashiriyeh said, is the general atmosphere for academics.
“The University of Tehran has been a center of turmoil since the revolution,” Bashiriyeh said. “There were attempts to ‘Islamize’ the departments, meaning that they would get rid of some academics who were considered liberals. Also, during the reformist regime, there was no peace of mind for academics to do their research. Politically and culturally it is very different.”
Bashiriyeh also notes the differences in library facilities and access to information. In Tehran they do not get many recently published books and often have a difficult time accessing the ones they do have. Internet sites are also filtered, hindering the free exchange of information.
He finds that students are more polite here because they don’t approach everything from a political standpoint as his students in Iran did.
“At Tehran in every class we have some disputes and arguments,” Bashiriyeh said. “It is not a very peaceful situation because of the different types of students-radicals, extremists, fundamentalists, liberals. In a sense it is very lively, but it doesn’t contribute to academic research and work.”
Joseph Alvarado, a senior international relations and political philosophy major, and a student in Bashiriyeh’s Islamic political thought class, said Bashiriyeh uses a variety of texts to help students understand Middle Eastern politics.
“As for the class, he has approached it with scholarship, as an object of study, not promoting ideas, but an account of what happened,” Alvarado said.
Bashiriyeh’s contract with SU is only for one academic year, and after that he does not know what he will do. He will eventually return to Iran but probably not in the near future.
“Given the situation in my country, and especially in the university since the new government has come to power, things have become very difficult for academics,” Bashiriyeh said. “Some of my colleagues have been dismissed from our faculty, and I think that it is not a very good time to return.”
Born in the city of Hamadan in western Iran, Bashiriyeh attended primary and secondary schools in his hometown before receiving his bachelor’s degree in political theory from the University of Tehran in 1975. He went on to earn a master’s from the University of Essex and a doctorate from the University if Liverpool, both in England. After his final graduation in 1983, Bashiriyeh was back at the University of Tehran, where he taught until last year.
Bashiriyeh moved to the United States 10 months ago to work as a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. While he was there, Bashiriyeh conducted research on transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe, a topic on which he is currently writing a book that he hopes to finish shortly.
Bashiriyeh has written a dozen books in Farsi and one in English, and has also translated classic works into Farsi, like Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan.” His major interest these days is a project about democratization in Iran.
Having only previously been to the United States to attend conferences, moving here full-time was an adjustment for Bashiriyeh. He is not used to the food yet because it is quite different from back home. He also had to get used to speaking English again, which he had not done since he attended college nearly 30 years ago.
Bashiriyeh brought his wife and two children, who are 13 and 9, with him from Iran. The family currently resides in Manlius. His children are now learning English and attending American schools. Despite the changes, Bashiriyeh has found the new atmosphere more relaxing.
“Living in the U.S. is an education in itself for me because it is a very different cultural atmosphere,” he said. “I have not been feeling the type of tension and pressure that we usually feel at home because everything is political back there.”
Bashiriyeh thinks relations between the two countries have been going the wrong way since the revolution, before which the United States was once considered “a great friend of Iran.” The United States acted as a balancing force when the British and Russians were trying to colonize Iran a hundred years ago, and it was only after the coup d’etat of 1953-specifically because of the U.S. involvement-that conflict erupted.
“As far as the people (of Iran) are concerned, they have nothing against the U.S.,” Bashiriyeh said. “There are surveys that show that public opinion is not, at least today, so much opposed to the U.S., it is just the government. There are some issues, like the nuclear issue, which have become so important to the Americans, which I don’t see any way to resolve.
“Some trust should be built between the two countries and maybe if the two sides are prepared to enter negotiations-which is very difficult to do-that would be the only way out,” he said. “At this time I see no way out; it is a sort of deadlock.”
