Stanford University Press Blog

Hashtag Solidarity in Iran

How the Green Movement mobilized social media in the interest of social change.

by NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

Mousavi supporters, gathered in Tehran on June 18th, protesting against the election results. Photo by Hamed Saber, CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns in Iran in the spring of 2009. In the course of the thirty-year history of the theocratic state, no one could remember another time when Iranian state television had broadcast such lively debates among the presidential candidates.

Six years ago today Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president. Millions believe that their votes were never counted.

After leaving a rally for the then-sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described a crowd of tens of thousands: “They began to filter in to downtown,” he recalled. The Ahmadinejad rally was ending around the same time that the reformist leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s rally was also finishing up. Mousavi’s supporters made their way downtown, flooding the streets and squares. The scene, as Klein recalled it with obvious awe, was one of camaraderie, of playfulness. Describing the intermingling of the two camps, Klein observed, “they were just kind of joking with each other. It seemed as if someone had opened a magic door and an entire country had spilled out.”

This wasn’t just a feeling. Things looked lively too. Color was everywhere. Campaign paraphernalia, campaign headquarters, and campaigners themselves were clearly differentiated using predesigned graphic coding based on the colors of their chosen candidate’s campaign.

A New Solidarity for Freedom in Turkey

What recent protests and Erdoğan’s defeat at the ballot box tell us about Turkey.

by BERNA TURAM

Photo of the 2013 Taksim Gezi Park protests in Taksim Square, Istanbul. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

This Sunday Turkey voted a majority-less Parliament into office in a strategic attempt to block the ambitions of the increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. To defeat Erdogan’s hegemony, voters shifted votes away not only from the secularist opposition party, the People’s Republican Party, but most importantly also from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). This is pivotal: it shows that previous supporters of AKP and Erdogan,religious not, are also beginning to disagree and divide, like the secular opposition has split from within. Defecting voters, wary of Erdoğan’s aim to change Turkey into a presidential system, put aside traditional ethnic and ideological identity politics and pushed the pro-Kurdish party into the parliament. The result is being hailed as a triumph of Turkish democracy in particular, as well as a victory against autocracy in general. The Economist Espresso already came up with a festive title: “So Long, Sultan: After Turkey’s Election.”

Although there is a long way to go for either the formation of a coalition government or for a potential early election in the near future, freedom-seekers have come a long way. Decreasing tolerance for Erdoğan’s heavy-handed governing style and increasing unity amongst his opponents have been brewing for years in cities, even many years before the 2013 Gezi protests erupted in Istanbul and expanded around the world. 

Gezi at its peak was a remarkable experience, a breaking point in Turkish history and a crucial precursor to this week’s national elections.

A Fraught Commemoration

A brief history of the observance and politics of Nakba day.

by TAMIR SOREK

A girl in a protest on Nakba Day 2010, Hebron, West Bank. Photo by Shy Halatzi, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the subsequent mass expulsions that lasted until October 1950, approximately 85 percent of the Arab Palestinians who had lived in the areas of Mandatory Palestine that ultimately were subjected to Israeli sovereignty were driven outside the borders of the newly established state of Israel. In the process, hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, and the larger towns and cities lost most, if not all, of their Arab populations.

Differing existential conditions among Palestinian communities have led to a growing discrepancy in the collective self–image of both groups.

Between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinian refugees took shelter in the remaining parts of Palestine still under Arab control (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), as well as in the neighboring Arab countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, as well as elsewhere. These events are known in the Palestinian vocabulary as the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), and they constitute the key episode in Palestinian national history.

Those 156,000 Palestinians who remained under Israeli rule could not escape the dramatic consequences of the Nakba: about one-sixth of them came from nearby villages that were destroyed and depopulated. Subsequently they became internal refugees; many other lost their lands to Israeli state expropriations even though they remained in their villages; and families were torn apart never again to be reunited.

Digital Militarism

How Israelis live intimately with the military occupation in their digital lives.

by ADI KUNTSMAN and REBECCA L. STEIN

Israeli militant selfies, Facebook, July 2014. Left: Israelis hold a sign that reads "'Hating Arab isn't racism, it's values!' #IsraelDemandsRevenge." Right: A soldier whose caption reads "Let us simply spray [them with bullets]."

In the summer of 2014 we watched the bloody Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip unfold in real time on our social media feeds. As Israeli bombs fell, as civilian fatalities inside Gaza mounted, Palestinians live-tweeted updates from the ground, providing minute-by-minute images and accounts of the growing devastation. Many Palestinian social media users watched their international followers grow exponentially during the course of the Israeli assault. Among international anti-occupation activists and critics of the bloody operation, there was a prevailing sense of optimism, a sense that these viral jpegs of dead bodies and destroyed neighborhoods, circulating widely on social media, might make new kinds of international witnessing and accountability possible where Israel’s occupation was concerned.

A very different conversation was unfolding concurrently on Israeli social media. Here, the images of dead Palestinian bodies and destroyed neighborhoods captivating global audiences were largely missing—as they were from national television news broadcasts and popular newspapers. Indeed, the mere mention of the names of the Palestinian dead was, in the eyes of the mainstream Israeli public, tantamount to treason (a charge mounted publicly against leftists). Many Israelis used social media to support the war efforts. As bombs decimated Gazan homes, Israeli Instagram photo streams and Facebook status-updates celebrated the “righteous” victory. And many used their social media feeds to laud the mounting Palestinian death toll in very explicit terms, egging the military on.

A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide

On the enduring legacy of Karnig Panian and his story.

words from VARTAN GREGORIAN and HOURY BOYAMIAN

At the dawn of World War I, Karnig Panian was a young Armenian boy living in an Anatolian village in what was then the Ottoman Empire. In his lifetime he witnessed and experienced firsthand the mass persecution, deportation, and extermination of the Armenians, a minority group both by dint of religion and ethnicity, at the hands of the nationalist Ottoman government. His memoir describes his experiences as a refugee in the deserts of Syria and as an orphan in an Antoura facility whose administrators sought to “Turkify” non-Turkish children. It also chronicles his personal struggle to guard against despair and erasure in the context of war and extreme loss.

In commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24^th), we share an excerpt from his memoir, as well as a few words on Karnig's life and legacy from Armenian-American scholar, Vartan Gregorian, and Houry Boyamian, Karnig Panian’s daughter.

A Key To Our Memories

An episode from Karnig Panian’s time in a “Turkified” Antoura orphanage.

by KARNIG PANIAN

The orphans lined up in the courtyard of the Antoura orphanage, ca. 1916. Photo courtesy of: Missak Kelechian, Collège Sain Joseph—Antoura.

In 1915 the Ottoman government marched five-year-old Karnig Panian, his family and their surrounding Armenian community, from their home village in east-central Anatolia to the Syrian Desert. Many members of Panian’s family succumbed to the harsh conditions, and he soon found himself an orphan. He was placed in an Antoura orphanage, which had been established with a broader nationalist agenda in mind; administrators of the orphanage aimed to “Turkify” their wards by erasing the cultural identities of the Armenian and Kurdish children in their care.

Goodbye, Antoura is Panian’s recollection of his time at the Antoura orphanage, a memoir described by the Financial Times as a “luminous story of witness” and a “literary gem.” Panian’s narrative offers intimate insight into the Armenian Genocide as well as the resilience of children in the face of tremendous adversity—excerpted below is a brief episode from Panian’s life in the orphanage.

Conscience and History

Justice, Martin Luther King, and the Armenian Genocide. 

by ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN 

“Conscience asks the question, is it right?" —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes it confuses people. Honestly, sometimes it confuses me. How did an Armenian guy from the suburbs of Boston become a historian of the black experience, living in the South? The short answer: partly by accident, partly by luck, and mostly out of an impulse to tell stories. What makes us who we are? African American history helps answer that question.

While helping to tell Karnig’s story,
I thought about the lessons of the civil rights movement.

Lately, I have been considering the connections between African American and Armenian history. On one level, these histories are nothing alike. They both have tragic watershed events— slavery in one case, genocide in the other—but they occurred at different historical moments, stemmed from different kinds of exploitation, and had different impacts. In such cases, historians are generally cautious to make sweeping comparisons.

And yet—what makes us who we are? I am not a historian of Armenia, but I am a historian, and I am Armenian. I jumped at the chance to serve as editor of Karnig Panian’s Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide. I bore a personal burden to do so, but I also saw the great possibilities in Karnig’s evocative language, resilient spirit, and incredible journey. It speaks to us today, a full century after he was uprooted from his village, marched to the deserts of Syria, watched his family die, and somehow preserved his body and soul through a long stint in an abusive orphanage.

Genocide and the Social Death of Children

Non-lethal elements of genocide are too often dismissed.

by KEITH WATENPAUGH

Armenian orphans of the Marsovan Anatolian College in 1918. Public domain.

I teach genocide—or more correctly a course that introduces students to the theory, history, and practice of genocide. The first day’s lecture is devoted to a key insight made by the father of the genocide concept, Raphael Lemkin: Genocide is about more than just mass killing. It is also the destruction of the very social, physical, and moral fabric that binds a community of people together and defines them as a group.

Mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder, but they still constitute genocide.

Many measures, like mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder. But in the words of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, they are still part of the crime of genocide because they are intended to cause “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”

In my own research and teaching, I have struggled with how to make these “para-lethal” elements of genocide more legible, especially as they bear on the multigenerational harm of genocide. I’m not alone in this. The international human rights legal community similarly wrestles with elements of genocide that cross into the fields of sexual- and gender-based violence, like the sexual enslavement and mass rape of Yezidi women by the Islamic State, or the harm done to First Nations peoples in Canada at the hands of teachers and administrators at residential schools—experiences mirrored in the Armenian Genocide in the treatment of Karnig Panian at the hands of Halidé Edip in the orphanage at Antoura.

Armenian Feminism in Post-Genocide Turkey

On the complications of feminist speech and national belonging.

by LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU

Hayganush Mark and her husband in 1920. Public domain.

Perhaps unique in its history, feminism among Armenians reached a zenith in the immediate aftermath of genocide in the capital of the perpetrator state. The goals of Armenian national revival put extraordinary emphasis on women’s duties to the nation, not only as mothers and nurturers, but also as relief workers, financial contributors, and lobbyists. The Republic of Armenia gave suffrage to women, which in turn emboldened Armenian women throughout the world to demand representation in the governing bodies of their communities.

Feminism among Armenians reached a zenith in the immediate aftermath of genocide.

Hayganush Mark stood at the forefront of the battle against “women’s enslavement” and took it upon herself, along with her comrades at her journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman), to convince the Armenian nation that women’s emancipation would not distract from, but would ultimately add to its revival.

She was born Hayganush Topuzyan in 1882 to a family of modest means. Hayganush’s mother, herself illiterate, insisted that her only child receive a well-rounded education. Mark would later note that she took “feminism’s first liberating steps” thanks to this hard-working woman who “did not know even the ‘a’ of the alphabet.” After high school, Hayganush became a teacher in the Armenian schools and started publishing literary pieces. In 1905, she got engaged to Vahan Tosigyan, a young and promising journalist, and soon thereafter the couple launched the women’s journal Dsaghig (Flower).

Transactions in Time

Enforced disappearances and the Armenian Genocide.

by KABIR TAMBAR

A photograph of a "Saturday mother," holding the picture of a victim of forced disappearance, during a sit-in vigil. Photo by Mehmetaergun available via Wikipedia.

Every week a group called the Saturday Mothers/Peoples (Cumartesi Anneleri/İnsanları) gathers in Istanbul to remember the lives of individuals who were forcibly disappeared by Turkey’s security forces in the 1980s and 1990s. Holding photographs of the disappeared, relatives, friends, and supporters come together to publicly describe how the disappearances took place and unremittingly demand accountability for the presumed deaths.

With their vigils the Saturday Mothers/Peoples ask us to think in two historical directions at once.

Many of the enforced disappearances took place in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces during the 1980s and 1990s: a time when the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were engaged in armed conflict; a state of emergency was legally authorized in that region and forced evacuations from villages were increasingly common; and media reportage of these events was heavily controlled and censored by state authorities. The vigils are politically charged because participants call out the specific individuals whom they hold responsible for the disappearances, including public prosecutors, security officials, interior ministers, prime ministers, and presidents of the republic.

The Perils of Minorityhood

The nationalist fervor that led to the Armenian Genocide still haunts us today.

by JANET KLEIN

Armenians are marched to a prison by Turkish soldiers, April 1915. Public domain.

In this centennial year of the Armenian Genocide, the matter of official recognition remains a focus of activists and for many in and beyond the global Armenian community. Recognition of a group’s tragedy is important, not only for the victims, survivors, and their descendants, but also for the perpetrator group. Any recognition must acknowledge that the genocide was not just a singular event, but rather a wider set of practices, backed by a particular worldview.

The genocide is more than an artifact of its time—though, to be sure, certain practices and ways of thinking were specific to the late-Ottoman period—and its effects remain with us today. Until we look carefully at the ongoing social construction of minorities, at the real and symbolic violence associated with this construction, mere recognition is not enough; recognition may heal the wounds of the past, but recognition alone cannot address the continuing trauma wrought on Ottoman and Turkish minorities—then Armenians and now especially Kurds.

Revolutionary Fallout

How the Young Turks went from Carnegie Hall to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

by BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN

A postcard commemorating the grant of the Constitution on July 24, 1908.

On Sunday, September 6, 1908, at 7:30 pm a “Grand Mass Meeting” to celebrate the establishment of a new constitutional government in the Ottoman Empire took place in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. The occasion commemorated the Young Turk Revolution, which had succeeded just months before in pressuring Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876, and with it the Ottoman Parliament, ushering in a new era of multi-party politics—a maneuver heralded as a triumph against absolutism.

The echoes of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution reverberated around the globe—from Istanbul to Cairo, Paris to New York.

Flyers announcing the festivities had been distributed among the different ethnic groups in Manhattan inviting them to attend. With the trilogy of the French Revolution—“Liberty! Fraternity! Equality!”—across the top, the flyer indicated that the event was organized by the Young Turks, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and the Hunchakist Party with “the participation of all the Ottoman Elements in New York, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Hebrews, Albanians, etc.” The honorary presiders at the event were to be His Grace Archbishop Yeznig Abahouni, the Armenian Primate of the Eastern Diocese; the Honorable Dr. Tiryakyan Khan, once the personal physician of the Shah in Persia; and the Honorable Munji Bey, Ottoman Charge d’Affaires in Washington.

Remembering the Armenian Genocide

A blog series in commemoration of the centennial.

Armenians are marched to a prison by Turkish soldiers, April 1915. Public domain.

On April 24^th, 1915—one hundred years ago this Friday—the Ottoman government arrested hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders living in Constantinople and, save a few exceptions, gradually deported and assassinated them. This blow to the Armenian community came after years of social strife and nationalist propaganda presenting the Armenians as a threat to the empire’s security. Driven by nationalist impulses, the Ottoman government persecuted the Armenian minority within its borders by way of conscription, deportation, massacres, and death marches—events that coalesced into what is widely regarded today as the first genocide of the 20^th century.

April 24^th, the date that the Armenian notables were arrested, serves as the formal start date of the Armenian Genocide and is commemorated today as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians the world over. This week the Stanford Press blog presents reflections on this harrowing chapter of history, and introduces Goodbye, Antoura—the memoir of one young Armenian boy who lived through it all.

Tuesday

Revolutionary Fallout ⇨

How the Young Turks went from Carnegie Hall to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

by BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN

 

Tuesday

The Perils of Minorityhood ⇨

The nationalist fervor that led to the Armenian Genocide still haunts us today.

by JANET KLEIN

 

Wednesday

Transactions in Time ⇨

Enforced disappearances and the Armenian Genocide.

by KABIR TAMBAR

 

 

Wednesday

Armenian Feminism in Post-Genocide Turkey ⇨

On the complications of feminist speech and national belonging.

by LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU

 

Thursday

Genocide and the Social Death of Children ⇨

Why do we downplay the non-lethal elements of genocide?

by KEITH WATENPAUGH

 

Thursday

Conscience and History ⇨

Justice, Martin Luther King, and the Armenian Genocide.

by ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN

 

 

Friday

A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide ⇨

On the enduring legacy of Karnig Panian and his story.

words from VARTAN GREGORIAN and HOURY BOYAMIAN

 

Friday

A Key To Our Memories ⇨

One man’s recollection of his childhood spent in a “Turkified” Antoura orphanage.

by KARNIG PANIAN

 

 

What Makes the Business of Writing So Interesting

Using fiction to realize a new mental architecture.

a Q&A with BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

Novelist Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, author of The Woman Who Read Too Much.

Q:

The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in 19^th-century Persia (now Iran) and is built in part on the life of a historical figure, the revolutionary female poets Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn. Am I right to think that you came to the idea of this novel initially through learning about her? 

A:

The general outlines of this story have been familiar to me since childhood. Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn was my ideal, the “heroine” I learned about growing up in a Baha’i family; she was the first woman to embrace the revolutionary teachings of the Bab, who was the prophet herald of the Baha’i Faith. An erudite scholar, a theologian as well as a poet, Tahirih understood, from her reading of the Quran, that religion, like all other human institutions, has a life cycle; Islam was in need not merely of reform but of renewal. This belief, based on the teachings of Ali Muhammad the Bab, pitched her into a headlong battle with the clerics of her generation, a struggle that is still raging in Islamic countries today.

I learned all this from history; her ideas and her ideals are well documented. But I discovered much later, as an adult, how little I actually knew about her as a woman, how little I could trust about what people have written of her life. It was because there were so many contradictions surrounding this woman that I came to the idea of writing a novel: it was precisely in order to contain all the contradictions and the paradoxes she symbolizes, that I chose fiction.

Signed Book Giveaway: The Woman Who Read Too Much

Enter to win a signed copy of a new novel chronicling one woman's luminous legacy.

Plots. Political intrigue. Treachery. The high-handed actions of omnipotent rulers. Death by decree. That’s the world that Bahiyyih Nakhjavani plunges readers into with The Woman Who Read Too Much: Persia in the mid-nineteenth century, a society that clings to the old ways even as the world around it is rapidly transforming.

A young Shah, personally and politically weak, sits on an uncertain throne, fascinated by modernity even as he fears the Western powers that would deliver it to his nation—for a price. When a female poet, based in part on Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn, a historical personality who was also a theologian and revolutionary, dares to reject the veil and begin agitating for female literacy, her campaign shakes the very foundations of Persian society. Nakhjavani tells the story of the poet’s campaign through the eyes of the women of Iran—officially excluded from power, yet finding unexpected, subversive ways to exercise it nonetheless. Through these women, we see a society on the brink of change—and the deadly political maneuvering and violence that will accompany it.

Enter your name and email below for a chance to win one of five author signed copies of the novel which Kirkus describes as a "haunting . . . expertly crafted epic" and, in 2007, was counted among the "best three books" of the year by the Time Literary Supplement (£). Winners will be randomly selected and announced on Friday.

Also see book tour details for Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's The Woman Who Read Too Much.