Following the death of the Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in police custody on September 16, 2022, widespread protests erupted across Iran, challenging the Islamic Republic’s theocratic regime. One of the key centers of protest was Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, the country’s top-ranked technical institution. For authors Sepehr Vakil, Mahdi Ganjavi, and Mina Khanlarzadeh, the sight of elite engineering students—typically perceived as conservative or apolitical—actively supporting a movement for women’s and civil rights raised compelling questions. This unexpected alignment prompted them to investigate the deeper historical relationship between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and political activism in Iran.
They ask: How do engineers and scientists become attuned to ethical concerns? More broadly, how can STEM education help engineers recognize the ethical implications of the systems and tools they create? These questions resonate strongly today, especially amid ongoing debates about the responsible use of artificial intelligence and the cozy relationship between American tech companies and the US military. Sharif University offers a fascinating case study for these themes, as it was originally founded by the Shah’s regime in 1966 as the Aryamehr University of Technology (AMUT). By the mid-1960s, the Pahlavi regime needed to train a technocratic elite in its quest to modernize the country. Sending young Iranians abroad to study at Western European and American universities offered one way to train such an elite, but many students who went abroad became committed enemies of the Shah’s government. More practically, there was no way for Iran to become a truly independent country without its own technical universities—its own version of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Yet, as Revolutionary Engineers describes, the halcyon days of AMUT coincided with the growth of the anti-Shah student protest movement in Iran, and rising questions in the United States about the close relationship between Washington and Tehran. Archival research in AMUT’s records, those of would-be partner universities like MIT, and oral history interviews allow the authors to tell the story of the high Pahlavi era through the microcosm of AMUT. Engineering students at the university, including women, became enthusiastic followers of leftist guerrilla organizations, developing their own idiosyncratic norms of “revolutionary masculinism” that challenged traditional patriarchal norms. When the eminent Iranian philosopher Sayyid Hossein Nasr assumed the presidency of AMUT from 1972 to 1975, he attempted to implement his distinctive ideas about the “Persianization” of science. The high point of these efforts, the authors outline, was the establishment of a Center for Humanities that aimed to bring the next generation of Iranian engineers into conversation with scholars like Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and William Chittick, who shared Nasr’s philosophical-religious preoccupations.
Revolutionary Engineers neatly connects with several trends in the historiography of Pahlavi Iran. The authors’ interviews with students and close readings of memoirs by AMUT alumni allow them to respond to Naghmeh Sohrabi’s 2018 call for scholars to take seriously the messy, contingent nature of 1970s Iranian oppositional politics. Through the stories of AMUT students, we see how activities like mountain climbing assumed central importance as a way for revolutionary female students to demonstrate their physical prowess vis-à-vis their male comrades and prepare for the revolution to come. We see, likewise, how students could protest against the regime by deliberately failing final exams, while still hoping their education would enable them to contribute meaningfully to their country’s progress.
The authors’ focus on Nasr’s efforts to “Persianize” Iranian science also connects with scholarship by Roham Alvandi, Afshin Matin-Asgari, and Ali Mirsepassi, whose work has highlighted how the Pahlavi regime cultivated discourses of “cultural authenticity” to legitimize itself against socialist and Islamist challengers. I would have liked to hear more about how AMUT and Nasr’s tenure as its president intersected with these broader trends in late Pahlavi Iran, such as the formation of the Rastakhiz Party and the role of reactionary intellectuals like Ahmad Fardid. Unfortunately, the authors’ rather reverential tone toward Nasr seems to hold them back from such critical assessments. Nonetheless, Revolutionary Engineers provides students of the Pahlavi era with a valuable case study in the politics of higher education. Scholars interested in the history of higher education in the Global South or the Middle East more broadly also will find much of interest here.
I learned much from Revolutionary Engineers, but I was also left with some unanswered questions about how to situate the authors’ study of AMUT within larger conversations. How many of the trends they describe were distinctive to the Iranian context, for instance? What commonalities might be found between AMUT and peer institutions like the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara? Both were founded around the same time, and METU was a site of vibrant anti-American student activism during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Similarly, although the authors briefly reference Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s 2016 book Engineers of Jihad, which documents the disproportionate presence of engineers in Islamist movements, their cursory dismissal of the work sidesteps a deeper inquiry. Specifically, it overlooks the question of why engineers, often seen as symbols of societal modernization, might be drawn to particular strands of Islamist thought in specific sociopolitical contexts. For example, engineering students in Anwar Sadat’s Egypt may have encountered markedly different conditions than their Iranian counterparts: a stagnant neoliberal economy and a state that tolerated Sunni Islamist activism on university campuses, in contrast to Pahlavi Iran’s more favorable job market and the regime’s repression of Shiʿi Islamist activism.
These issues aside, Revolutionary Engineers offers a compelling contribution to the historiography of Pahlavi Iran and the broader history of science and education in the Middle East. As the authors underscore, authoritarian regimes in the region have long sought to cultivate politically loyal technocratic elites. A glance at Sharif University’s website today—three years after Mahsa Amini’s death and the suppression of nationwide protests—reveals the enduring legacy of this project across watersheds like the Iranian Revolution. The university proudly promotes conferences on “emerging technologies and methods for climate resistance,” while also highlighting its growing academic partnerships with foreign institutions—not in the United States, of course, but in Putin’s Russia.
