After last summer’s anti-government protests following the disputed presidential election in Iran, authorities set up show trials of over 100 alleged opposition leaders. One of Stanford’s own came into focus: Dr. Abbas Milani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and director of Iranian Studies at Stanford.
The statement read that Milani was even more important to the CIA than Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son because of Milani’s close contact with reformists and his position at “an institute called Hooffer”–the most important of the American foundations behind the Velvet Revolution, according to the court’s statement.
In the U.S., Milani is one of the most respected scholars on Iranian politics. He is the resident Iran expert for The New Republic magazine and has been interviewed on CNN. In July 2009, he testified before the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives.
His path to success, however, was all but straight. Milani was born into a prominent Iranian family–one uncle a senator, another a minister in the cabinet. At age 15, he was sent to study in the United States and enrolled in Oakland Technical High School, from which he managed to graduate only a year later.
Milani went on to Oakland’s Merritt College where, as he writes in his 1996 biography “Tales of Two Cities,” the two founders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, “gave [him his] first taste of radicalism,” just at the emergence of the Black Power Movement.
Having transferred to Berkeley in 1968, Milani joined a Marxist student group opposing the Pahlavi regime in power in Iran. He remained stateside until receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1974, at which point he was ready to return to his homeland.
“I really wanted to go back quickly to Iran,” he recalled. “I was a radical student. I wanted to go back and make the revolution.”
In Tehran, he began teaching political science at National University. The revolution that Milani had envisioned, however, never came. Coating his Marxist ideas in metaphors while lecturing, Milani failed to carry on unnoticed. After just two years back in Tehran, he was dealt a five-year prison sentence for opposing the regime, despite his family’s ties in government.
“In Iran at the time,” he said, “and in Iran today, I think, the one crime that connection cannot solve is political.”
However, after plea bargaining and agreeing not to attack the regime in a media-packed courtroom, his sentence was shortened to one year. During this time, Milani spent six months in the notorious Evin Prison.
“Because I was a university professor and came from a prominent family, I was placed in Cell Block Number One, [a division of the prison reserved for special inmates],” he said.
But despite this, he was granted no special treatment.
“The head of domestic intelligence told me during one of my interrogations, ‘Don’t think your family can save you. Your ass is mine,’” he recalled.
At the time, Cell Block Number One held some of the most influential leaders of the revolution yet to come; among them, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani. Milani’s close contact with them turned him into a skeptic of the flowery speeches of democracy that Ayatollah Khomeini delivered from exile in Paris and of the Islamic Revolution itself once it hit the streets of Tehran in 1979.
“I spent time with these guys in prison. I knew how intolerant they would be,” he said. “I sensed that what was coming was a form of despotism worse than what was leaving us. Mixing religion and democracy would not be an option.”
Upon his release, the shah’s regime kept barring Milani from the classroom because he was considered a leftist. He believes that the shah’s fear of communism blinded him from the foe that would eventually overthrow him.
“They thought we–a group of small students–were their main enemy and they allowed the clergy to do anything they wanted,” he said.
The political science professor also draws a parallel to the Cold War.
“The US made the same mistake in Afghanistan,” he said. “They thought they could use the Islamists against the Soviet Union and they were successful in doing it. But they created a monster bigger than, or at least as big as, the monster they were fighting.”
Milani laughs as he recalls the chaos surrounding the hottest days of the Islamic Revolution in ’79. He joined a group of professors with the endeavor of keeping Teheran University a non-militarized zone.
“People had ransacked army depots–everybody carried a machine gun. Somebody even brought a tank into the University,” he said, pausing with a smile as he remembered the events that followed. “So we asked them to take it out. And they did.”
According to his students, his apparent ease and lightheartedness are translated into his teaching.
“[He is] one of the most laid back and personable professors I’ve ever had at Stanford,” said Andi Harrington ’12, one of his students in this quarter’s Polisci 245R: Politics in Modern Iran. “His class offers relief even though the content is so dense through his simple and concise descriptions and of course with a little humor.”
One of his advisees, Miguel Molina ’11, said that keeping in mind his close interaction with Iranian politics, including imprisonment, makes his impartial work in the classroom all the more impressive.
“His unbiased scholarship and teaching is remarkable and commendable,” he said. “After each class session, you walk away with the sensation of not just having learned a great deal, but with the intellectual comfort of having the ability of fomenting your own educated opinions.”
After the Islamic Revolution, Milani went back to teaching, but encountered the same types of barriers to his scholarship that he had under the shah–popularity among students intertwined with suspensions and dismissals.
In 1986, while Milani sought a second opinion before undergoing open-heart surgery, an American doctor, Dr. Childs at UCLA, said there was nothing wrong with his heart and instead diagnosed the scholar with “Khomeini Syndrome.” Milani understood the time to leave Iran had come once again.
“I left a job at the top university in the country and came here with no job,” he recalled. “I literally had to work as a bartender initially to make ends meet.”
The university professor joined the ranks of Spangler’s Bar in Berkeley. Luckily, Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif. soon appointed Dr. Milani as Chair of the Department of History and Political Science, where he stayed for 12 years.
But his longtime comfort at Notre Dame de Namur would soon be briskly disrupted. Milani was again put in the spotlight of Iranian expatriate political life when a group of Persian Americans raised enough money through donations to create the Iran Democracy Project at Hoover.
Milani speaks lovingly and proudly of the project. Although the Bush administration allocated $75 million in efforts to promote democracy in Iran and, according to Milani, offered him one of those millions, he kindly declined.
“We decided that we were going to be a grassroots, non-government endeavor and we have remained that,” he explained.
Only hours prior to speaking to The Daily, Milani went on the Voice of America and addressed this issue of government funding.
“If you can find evidence that we got one penny from the U.S. government–one penny–I will never utter a word about Iran again,” he stated. He reinforced this to The Daily: “It is absolute, utter nonsense.”
Khamenei’s government has been the project’s most outspoken opponent, linking it to American imperialism and the CIA. It even named Milani an enemy of the state and now Stanford University is–along with Yale–on the regime’s list of “subversive organizations.”
The regime that denounced him, Milani explained, is fractured and scared. Even Ahmadinejad’s supporters are leaving what seems to be a sinking ship.
“They know they are sitting on a seething volcano. They know people hate them,” he said. “Any sudden move can unleash this wrath. If they thought they could’ve gotten away with killing Mousavi [the “runner-up” in June’s presidential election], they would have killed him yesterday. Not only haven’t they killed him, they’ve increased his bodyguards.”
Even if it wanted to, the Hoover Institution inspiring a democratic revolution in Iran would be a major long shot, if not impossible. But what about a revolution from the Iranian people themselves?
“Unless people want a potentially bloody civil war, you can’t be looking for a revolution in that sense,” he said. “I think Iran will need a transitional phase before democracy. For that to happen, you need the will of the people and I think we have that.”