In September 2022, in the weeks after Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, videos circulated online of Iranian schoolgirls tearing pages from their history textbooks. What was striking about the footage was its target. The girls were not protesting the hijab law, the morality police, or the Supreme Leader directly. They were ripping up a state-issued object, the textbook through which generations of Iranian students have learned how to imagine their country, its past, and the legitimacy of those who rule it. Whatever else those images captured, they pointed to a rupture between the regime’s official historical narrative and the generation expected to inherit it.
Yasamin Alkhansa’s State Histories: The Politics of Teaching the Past in Iran takes that terrain as its subject. The book works through an archive of roughly four hundred Iranian history textbooks spanning the late Pahlavi period and the Islamic Republic, and the empirical scope alone makes it one of the most substantial longitudinal studies we have on the politics of historical pedagogy in modern Iran. What gives the book its weight, though, is less the size of the archive than the framing Alkhansa brings to it.
Her argument is that Iranian history textbooks should be read as autobiographies of the state rather than as narratives of the nation. National histories and state autobiographies can look alike on the surface, but they do different political work. National narratives try to imagine a collective community; state autobiographies organise the past around the legitimacy, continuity, and moral centrality of the regime. For Alkhansa, textbooks in modern Iran have consistently done the latter. They are instruments through which the state narrates itself to future citizens and that distinction shapes the whole analysis.
One of the book’s clear achievements is its handling of continuity and rupture across two political orders that have rarely been studied in the same frame. Most earlier scholarship has examined either the Pahlavi era or the Islamic Republic in isolation. Alkhansa tracks both, and what emerges is a pattern in which regimes that defined themselves in ideological opposition to one another nevertheless returned to remarkably similar narrative structures when telling the story of the state.
Out of this longitudinal reading, Alkhansa develops the concept of “history fever,” which she uses to describe the increased frequency with which states revise textbook narratives during periods of political insecurity. The idea is genuinely useful because it converts what textbook studies have often treated impressionistically into something closer to a traceable pattern. For Alkhansa, intense bursts of curricular revision are symptomatic rather than incidental. They mark moments when a regime is trying to stabilise legitimacy by reasserting control over historical meaning, and, in a Gramscian sense, over the cultural foundations of political authority.
The Mosaddeq chapter is where the analysis is sharpest. Working across successive textbook editions, Alkhansa traces how the figure of Mosaddeq mutates in response to political pressures inside the Islamic Republic. Under the Shah, Mosaddeq tended to appear as a disruptive or peripheral figure whose significance had to be contained within the larger mythology of monarchical modernisation. Immediately after 1979, he could still be invoked cautiously as a nationalist whose anti-imperial credentials were partially compatible with the revolution. The shift comes later. From around the Green Movement in 2009, the textbook Mosaddeq becomes less a symbol of nationalist agency and more a symbol of Iranian victimhood at the hands of foreign powers, especially the United States. Alkhansa reads this as part of a wider movement in official historiography away from narratives of national triumph and toward narratives organised around grievance, betrayal, and external conspiracy, close to what Houchang Chehabi, drawing on Hofstadter, called the “paranoid style” in Iranian historical writing.
That reading is helped by Alkhansa’s strong engagement with the wider scholarship on 1953. She uses Ervand Abrahamian’s work on the coup well and is particularly effective on the documentary material assembled by Gasiorowski and Byrne. One of the more interesting threads concerns the documents seized at the American embassy in 1979, which later re-entered textbook narratives as pedagogical evidence of foreign intervention. The chapter shows convincingly how historical memory gets reorganised under mounting political insecurity, and how a single historical figure can be made to carry very different emotional and ideological loads depending on what the regime needs from him.
The book situates itself usefully within broader debates on nationalism, historiography, and political pedagogy without losing its grip on the Iranian case. There are clear conversations here with Ali Ansari’s The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran and Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar’s Religious Statecraft, both of which examine how political elites in Iran reshape historical and ideological narratives in response to shifting legitimacy needs. Alkhansa’s focus is narrower and more empirically anchored. Where Ansari and Tabaar take in political discourse broadly, she stays with the textbook as an institutional form through which the state tries to fix historical meaning across generations.
The autobiographical framing is the most productive part of her conceptual apparatus. Alkhansa uses it analytically rather than as a loose metaphor. Her point is that the textbook lets the state place itself at the centre of the national story while managing contradiction, failure, and discontinuity in ways familiar from autobiographical writing, moments of selection, suppression, and retroactive coherence. Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative as a mechanism for organising identity across time is in the background here, though Alkhansa’s interest is institutional rather than philosophical. She wants to understand how states operationalise self-narration through curriculum, which puts her closer to Michael Apple’s view of textbooks as selective ideological instruments, though she stays more focused on narrative self-construction than on curricular reproduction.
The theoretical framework is sometimes thinner than the empirical material would justify. The discussion of myth, for instance, leans heavily on Henry Tudor and Thomas Sherlock on political narratives and saviour myths. Both are reasonable choices, but readers who have spent time with the broader literature on political myth, Ernst Cassirer, or more recently Chiara Bottici, who treats myth as an ongoing process of political significance-making, may feel that the philosophical scaffolding stays underdeveloped. The empirical richness of the archive occasionally outruns the conceptual vocabulary used to interpret it.
Two contributions stand out against the existing literature. Methodologically, the book pushes well beyond earlier work on Iranian textbooks. Haggay Ram’s “The Immemorial Iranian Nation?” and Golnar Mehran’s research on post-revolutionary education identified important ideological reconstructions after 1979, but worked with smaller corpora or focused on specific moments of curricular change. Alkhansa’s archive is larger and more systematically handled. Her use of MaxQDA coding across roughly four hundred textbooks lets her trace gradual shifts across multiple editions rather than treating official narrative as static. The level of empirical precision is unusual for this subfield.
The second contribution is comparative. Alkhansa places Iran inside a wider conversation about authoritarian memory politics. Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts argues, in the cases of Turkey and Japan, that international pressure can open the possibility of narrative change while domestic political pressures shape its actual content. Alkhansa’s Iranian material complicates that picture: she sees abrupt revisions tied to internal legitimacy crises rather than slow narrative drift. The disagreement is real but perhaps less absolute than the book occasionally suggests. Dixon herself emphasises that official narratives often combine long stretches of continuity with moments of incremental adaptation and partial reconfiguration, which would place Iran somewhere closer to the Turkish end of her spectrum than fully outside the framework. Even so, putting Iranian textbook politics into comparative dialogue with East Asia, Turkey, Israel, and post-socialist Europe is one of the broader achievements of the book.
The chapter on the Constitutional Revolution is carefully researched but less persuasive than the Mosaddeq material. Alkhansa shows that textbook narratives under the Islamic Republic increasingly inflate the role of the ulema in the Constitutional Revolution while reducing the visibility of secular intellectuals, reformists, and women. The shift across editions is documented with real empirical care. The argument would be stronger, though, if it engaged more directly with the historiography of 1906. Janet Afary stresses the broader democratic and social dimensions of the revolution, including the participation of women, intellectuals, and non-clerical actors. Said Amir Arjomand and, more recently, Mateo Farzaneh take Shiʿi constitutional thought and clerical participation more seriously as analytical objects. The Islamic Republic’s textbook narrative does not invent clerical centrality from nothing. It elevates one existing interpretation into orthodoxy and marginalises the others. Engaging this historiographical debate more openly would sharpen the difference between ideological distortion and selective amplification, a distinction that matters analytically for the book’s wider argument.
There is also a methodological limit built into the archive itself. Alkhansa shows in detail how the state produces and revises official historical narratives, but the question of how students actually receive, contest, or reject those narratives sits largely outside her evidence. This is a familiar limitation in textbook scholarship, which has long been stronger on curricular production than on reception. It becomes more pointed here because the book opens with one of the most vivid recent images of rejection, schoolgirls publicly tearing up state textbooks during the 2022 protests. That gap between official narrative and lived political experience is something the archive can illuminate only indirectly, and Alkhansa is careful not to overclaim. She never suggests she is providing ethnographic evidence of classroom reception. Still, the reader is left aware of the question her opening gestures toward but cannot fully answer.
Taken as a whole, State Histories is empirically rich, carefully researched, and conceptually ambitious without becoming opaque. The two central concepts, “history fever” and the autobiography of the state, travel well beyond Iranian studies and offer useful tools for thinking about authoritarian historiography and political pedagogy more generally. The book also arrives at a particular moment. The state continues to rewrite its past, but the authority of that rewritten past appears increasingly insecure among the younger Iranians who are supposed to absorb it. Alkhansa does not claim to explain what is replacing the official narrative in their political imagination, and she could not be expected to do so within this archive. What she offers instead is the most detailed account we currently have of how the Iranian state has tried to narrate itself across generations, and how those narratives shift under pressure. For scholars working on modern Iran, political pedagogy, nationalism, or authoritarian memory politics, the book will repay serious engagement.
