After last summer\u2019s anti-government protests following the disputed presidential election in Iran, authorities set up show trials of over 100 alleged opposition leaders. One of Stanford\u2019s own came into focus: Dr. Abbas Milani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and director of Iranian Studies at Stanford.<\/p>\n
The statement read that Milani was even more important to the CIA than Shah Reza Pahlavi\u2019s son because of Milani\u2019s close contact with reformists and his position at \u201can institute called Hooffer\u201d\u2013the most important of the American foundations behind the Velvet Revolution, according to the court\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n
In the U.S., Milani is one of the most respected scholars on Iranian politics. He is the resident Iran expert for The New Republic magazine and has been interviewed on CNN. In July 2009, he testified before the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n
His path to success, however, was all but straight. Milani was born into a prominent Iranian family\u2013one uncle a senator, another a minister in the cabinet. At age 15, he was sent to study in the United States and enrolled in Oakland Technical High School, from which he managed to graduate only a year later.<\/p>\n
Milani went on to Oakland\u2019s Merritt College where, as he writes in his 1996 biography \u201cTales of Two Cities,\u201d the two founders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, \u201cgave [him his] first taste of radicalism,\u201d just at the emergence of the Black Power Movement.<\/p>\n
Having transferred to Berkeley in 1968, Milani joined a Marxist student group opposing the Pahlavi regime in power in Iran. He remained stateside until receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1974, at which point he was ready to return to his homeland.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really wanted to go back quickly to Iran,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI was a radical student. I wanted to go back and make the revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Tehran, he began teaching political science at National University. The revolution that Milani had envisioned, however, never came. Coating his Marxist ideas in metaphors while lecturing, Milani failed to carry on unnoticed. After just two years back in Tehran, he was dealt a five-year prison sentence for opposing the regime, despite his family\u2019s ties in government.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Iran at the time,\u201d he said, \u201cand in Iran today, I think, the one crime that connection cannot solve is political.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, after plea bargaining and agreeing not to attack the regime in a media-packed courtroom, his sentence was shortened to one year. During this time, Milani spent six months in the notorious Evin Prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I was a university professor and came from a prominent family, I was placed in Cell Block Number One, [a division of the prison reserved for special inmates],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But despite this, he was granted no special treatment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe head of domestic intelligence told me during one of my interrogations, \u2018Don\u2019t think your family can save you. Your ass is mine,\u2019\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n
At the time, Cell Block Number One held some of the most influential leaders of the revolution yet to come; among them, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani. Milani\u2019s close contact with them turned him into a skeptic of the flowery speeches of democracy that Ayatollah Khomeini delivered from exile in Paris and of the Islamic Revolution itself once it hit the streets of Tehran in 1979.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent time with these guys in prison. I knew how intolerant they would be,\u201d he said. \u201cI sensed that what was coming was a form of despotism worse than what was leaving us. Mixing religion and democracy would not be an option.\u201d<\/p>\n
Upon his release, the shah\u2019s regime kept barring Milani from the classroom because he was considered a leftist. He believes that the shah\u2019s fear of communism blinded him from the foe that would eventually overthrow him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey thought we\u2013a group of small students\u2013were their main enemy and they allowed the clergy to do anything they wanted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The political science professor also draws a parallel to the Cold War.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US made the same mistake in Afghanistan,\u201d he said. \u201cThey thought they could use the Islamists against the Soviet Union and they were successful in doing it. But they created a monster bigger than, or at least as big as, the monster they were fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Milani laughs as he recalls the chaos surrounding the hottest days of the Islamic Revolution in \u201979. He joined a group of professors with the endeavor of keeping Teheran University a non-militarized zone.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople had ransacked army depots\u2013everybody carried a machine gun. Somebody even brought a tank into the University,\u201d he said, pausing with a smile as he remembered the events that followed. \u201cSo we asked them to take it out. And they did.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to his students, his apparent ease and lightheartedness are translated into his teaching.<\/p>\n
\u201c[He is] one of the most laid back and personable professors I\u2019ve ever had at Stanford,\u201d said Andi Harrington \u201912, one of his students in this quarter\u2019s Polisci 245R: Politics in Modern Iran. \u201cHis class offers relief even though the content is so dense through his simple and concise descriptions and of course with a little humor.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of his advisees, Miguel Molina \u201911, said that keeping in mind his close interaction with Iranian politics, including imprisonment, makes his impartial work in the classroom all the more impressive.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis unbiased scholarship and teaching is remarkable and commendable,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter each class session, you walk away with the sensation of not just having learned a great deal, but with the intellectual comfort of having the ability of fomenting your own educated opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the Islamic Revolution, Milani went back to teaching, but encountered the same types of barriers to his scholarship that he had under the shah\u2013popularity among students intertwined with suspensions and dismissals.<\/p>\n
In 1986, while Milani sought a second opinion before undergoing open-heart surgery, an American doctor, Dr. Childs at UCLA, said there was nothing wrong with his heart and instead diagnosed the scholar with \u201cKhomeini Syndrome.\u201d Milani understood the time to leave Iran had come once again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI left a job at the top university in the country and came here with no job,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI literally had to work as a bartender initially to make ends meet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The university professor joined the ranks of Spangler\u2019s Bar in Berkeley. Luckily, Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif. soon appointed Dr. Milani as Chair of the Department of History and Political Science, where he stayed for 12 years.<\/p>\n
But his longtime comfort at Notre Dame de Namur would soon be briskly disrupted. Milani was again put in the spotlight of Iranian expatriate political life when a group of Persian Americans raised enough money through donations to create the Iran Democracy Project at Hoover.<\/p>\n
Milani speaks lovingly and proudly of the project. Although the Bush administration allocated $75 million in efforts to promote democracy in Iran and, according to Milani, offered him one of those millions, he kindly declined.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe decided that we were going to be a grassroots, non-government endeavor and we have remained that,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
Only hours prior to speaking to The Daily, Milani went on the Voice of America and addressed this issue of government funding.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you can find evidence that we got one penny from the U.S. government\u2013one penny\u2013I will never utter a word about Iran again,\u201d he stated. He reinforced this to The Daily: \u201cIt is absolute, utter nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khomeini\u2019s government has been the project\u2019s most outspoken opponent, linking it to American imperialism and the CIA. It even named Milani an enemy of the state and now Stanford University is\u2013along with Yale\u2013on the regime\u2019s list of \u201csubversive organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The regime that denounced him, Milani explained, is fractured and scared. Even Ahmadinejad\u2019s supporters are leaving what seems to be a sinking ship.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know they are sitting on a seething volcano. They know people hate them,\u201d he said. \u201cAny sudden move can unleash this wrath. If they thought they could\u2019ve gotten away with killing Mousavi [the \u201crunner-up\u201d in June\u2019s presidential election], they would have killed him yesterday. Not only haven\u2019t they killed him, they\u2019ve increased his bodyguards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if it wanted to, the Hoover Institution inspiring a democratic revolution in Iran would be a major long shot, if not impossible. But what about a revolution from the Iranian people themselves?<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless people want a potentially bloody civil war, you can\u2019t be looking for a revolution in that sense,\u201d he said. \u201cI think Iran will need a transitional phase before democracy. For that to happen, you need the will of the people and I think we have that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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