Life Under The Shah: What Iran Looked Like Before The Islamic Revolution

Before 1979 Iran was not any different from western countries. Marjane Satrapi explains it best when she says: “The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”(Satrapi, "Life Under The Shah: What Iran Looked Like Before The Islamic Revolution.”). However, as Reza Shah, the Iranian leader who was held responsible for westernization in the country, was overthrown with the Islamic Revolution.

For a long time after the revolution there were no universities in Iran. As Metz explains, quickly after the revolution the government felt an urgency to close all universities. She elaborates, “There were violent clashes at several universities in the 1979-1980 school year; as a result the government closed all 200 institutes of higher learning in April 1980. The universities then were purged of professors and students considered insufficiently Islamic and were not completely reopened until the fall of 1983.” (Metz, “Iran: A Country Study”). The reason behind why they closed the universities is obvious: taming an educated crowd is hard. After the government realized this after clashes against the revolution, the schools were kept closed until every staff member who has a tendency of transfusing secular thoughts into students was replaced by a religious person under the government leash. This way no teacher would ever provoke a riot by giving students ideas about religious freedom and liberalism. For the sake of becoming religious, no one could get a higher education for three years. However, no matter what professor is attending the students, an educated crowd is still hard to control. There’s a limit to how much the government can do just by changing the teachers, so, as Metz tells, even after when the universities were

They made education opposite of what it used to be by hiring religious teachers, changing textbooks to support Islam, and making people come to school dressed accordingly to religion. After going through this education, they had no where else to go because all the universities were closed for three years, and then opened by only admitting a fraction of the amount people they used to admit. Of course, one can’t call themselves an Islamic Government without oppressing women. So women were kicked out of the universities, and the equality that lay between Iran’s western influenced principles was broken. The education that was given in Iran was entirely different now, but unfortunately no change was made on the positive