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Experiments With Culture: The Iranian Revolution

1076 Words5 Pages

In 1979, a large scale revolution in Iran led to the fall of the Shah and the rise to power of a new, more religious leader: Ayatollah Khomeini. This event, later known as the Iranian Revolution, marked a drastic change in the ideals and culture of Iran. The United States, a Western country, was against the Islamic Revolution for many reasons, and had a very different perspective on this event than Iran. The contrasting American and Iranian perspectives are demonstrated by how they portray each other and themselves in various sources.
The opposing American and Iranian perspectives are shown by the stark difference between how Argo, an American movie, and Writings and Declarations, 1941, 1970, a propaganda article by Ayatollah Khomeini portray …show more content…

Even though the American textbook section on this topic, Experiments with Culture: The Role of Islam in Iran, presents the information in a very objective manner, the bias can be seen from what information isn’t included. For example, there was no mention of the Hostage Crisis or the various U.S. military failures in Iran. The textbook does mention the Shah’s westernization, but fails to address the CIA/America’s major role in the 1953 coup (Staff 2009) that overthrew the Iranian government and put the Shah in power. Aside from these shortcomings, the American textbook was fairly unbiased. Conversely, the Iranian textbook is a very biased source that demeaned American actions and justified their own. They inserted derogatory comments about America whenever possible; for example: “The Americans ran away disgracefully, without reaching Tehran…” (The Hostage, 1996) The purpose of this textbook was to educate and instil anti-U.S. sentiments. This makes sense, because this Iranian textbook was published by the “Tehran Ministry of Education”: the government body responsible for education in Iran. Government sources tend to have a patriotic bias, and aren’t a credible source – especially because Iran and America weren’t on good terms when this textbook was published (1996). Macmillan Education, an independent source, is the publisher of the American textbook; which explains why the information is given in a more objective

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