Introduction

The second decade of the twenty-first century saw emergent social movements challenge the authority of the Islamic Republic. The pattern prompted competing notions of revolution in public debates about Iranian politics. This introductory chapter posits questions regarding the subject of revolution in the debates. It identifies a shared rhetorical pattern between competing parties, who, despite their differences, construe revolutionaries as partisans. The chapter proposes an inquiry into the 1979 revolution, recovering an unexamined archetype of collective action to reframe polemics. The archetype of an insurgent witness describes the millions of people who joined mass demonstrations from December 1978 until the fall of the Pahlavi state on February 11, 1979, as both partisans and spectators. The idea departs from prevalent templates in social science studies of revolution, political theories of agency in revolutionary contexts, and extant studies of modern Iran. To see it more clearly, we may consider a perspectival comparison with Taziyeh mourning processions, in conversation with Ali Shariati’s insurrectionary speeches about the Karbala paradigm.