What Minnesota Taught Me About Misreading Iran

Originally posted at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack 23.04.26 . AI translation into Hebrew and Portuguese found there.

In the summer of 1978, before the Iranian Revolution dominated every conversation, I was introduced to the newly appointed chair of the comparative literature department at the University of Minnesota. I was just beginning my doctorate in Islamic literature, working within a comparative literature setting, and still learning the unspoken rules of academic life — rules that would later shape how an American generation misread Iran, and, eventually, itself.

When I met the new chair of the department, I felt a wave of fear that surprised me. Sweat ran down my back. I was not trained as a psychoanalyst yet so I did not know I was having a panic attack. I could not explain it, but I sensed immediately that I lacked the skills — intellectual and political — to engage him directly. I excused myself and only later understood that I had experienced a full panic attack. At the time, I knew only that something in the room felt dangerous in a way I could not yet name.

Several months later, I attended a cocktail party at the home of a prominent professor of Spanish. The occasion was celebratory: the new chair had arrived, and the department was marking the moment. History, however, had its own plans.The Iranian Revolution was the dominant topic of conversation. Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Tehran. Events were unfolding in real time, and the room buzzed with confidence and certainty. I mostly listened.

What struck me was not the intensity of interest in Iran, but the framework through which it was being discussed. The revolution was read almost entirely through a Marxist and post-colonial lens. The Shah was described as a Western puppet. The uprising was framed as anti-imperialist liberation. Religion appeared largely as surface detail — useful for mobilization perhaps, but ultimately secondary to economic and political forces presumed to do the real work.Something about this made me deeply uncomfortable.

At the time, I could not fully explain why.

I had encountered this way of thinking before. In conversations with a medieval Spanish literature professor, the Islamic conquest of Iberia was discussed less as a religious or civilizational rupture than as a matter of social adjustment. He spoke of celibatos concubinatos — ostensibly celibate Christian priests who took concubines after the Reconquista, justified as a way to repopulate the frontier. The emphasis was on everyday life, demographics, and continuity. Belief, intention, and religious meaning were treated as secondary — almost an inconvenience to the analysis. This style of history, associated with the Annales school and figures like Fernand Braudel, favored structures over conviction and long processes over rupture. What unsettled me then, and still does, was not the material itself, but what disappeared in the telling. When belief vanishes from analysis, so does responsibility.

The same instinct was at work in how Iran was being discussed that evening.As a newcomer to this particular academic setting, I lacked the language and authority to challenge what I was hearing. But my body registered what my intellect had not yet learned to articulate: something essential was being left out. The conversation was fluent, assured, and strangely incurious. No one asked what Shi‘a theology meant to those in the streets. No one wondered how clerical authority functioned psychologically or emotionally. No one raised the question of Jews, Israel, or antisemitism — except indirectly, through the language of colonialism that hovered in the room and made me uneasy.

It was my first real exposure to academic antizionism — not shouted, not explicit, but assumed. It was also my first encounter with a mode of analysis in which moral conclusions preceded observation.

Around the same time, I noticed something else. When I first moved to Minnesota, people would often ask me if I was from “New York.” The question puzzled me. I later understood that it was not really about geography. It was a way of asking whether I was Jewish — without having to say so. Difference was noted indirectly, displaced onto place rather than named. What was unspoken socially did not remain without consequence institutionally.

Years later, after long professional engagement with Muslim societies, my work drew me increasingly into Somali history and culture through the research and writing of my fifth book, The Last Two Jews of Mogadishu Living Under Al Shabaab’s Fire. That work led me into sustained contact with Somali scholars, elders, and civic figures, and ultimately to an invitation to attend the Hargeisa International Book Fair in Somaliland, where I spent one week in the city of Hargeisa presenting the book and engaging with local intellectual life. 

By then, I had already been working for quite some time as a citizen diplomat with both Pakistan and Somalia, supporting normalization efforts and maintaining close contact with scholars, elders, and civic leaders. I came to know Somali interlocutors not as symbols or case studies, but as people with histories, rivalries, ambitions, theological debates, and political instincts as complex as any found in the West.

What struck me was how different lived Muslim societies were from the ideological projections I had encountered in American universities. Belief mattered there. Clan mattered. Honor, grievance, pragmatism, and survival mattered. Politics was never abstract. No one mistook theology for decoration, or treated martyrdom narratives as literary flourishes. Religion was not an accessory to revolution; it was one of its engines.

That difference taught me something essential: American institutions were not misreading Islam because they lacked information. They were misreading it because they were committed, often unconsciously, to a framework that could not tolerate religious seriousness without dismantling its own moral assumptions.

Nearly five decades later, reading firsthand accounts of Iran in 1978 brought me back to that room. They underscore how badly the Iranian Revolution was misread — not because information was unavailable, but because certain interpretations were ideologically rewarded while others were quietly dismissed. Hindsight alone does not explain the blindness.

What was missing was not data. It was permission to see.

Revolutions are not only political events. They are psychological ones. They mobilize fantasies of purity, redemption, humiliation, and revenge. In Iran, Shi‘a martyrdom narratives were not decorative; they were central. Yet in that Minnesota living room, religion was treated as something to be explained away rather than understood on its own terms.

Minnesota has long prided itself on a culture of civility — the ethic often described as “Minnesota nice.” But that surface restraint has always coexisted with cycles of unrest, denial, and violence. Antisemitism did not suddenly appear with recent movements. It was present, normalized, and routinely denied. Over time, it seeped quietly into the university as well, shaping who could speak freely and which moral frameworks were treated as beyond question.

The lesson of 1979 is not that revolutions fail because outsiders are cynical. It is that they are misread when ideology replaces curiosity — and when observers project their own redemptive fantasies onto societies they do not fully understand.

What I did not have then was the authority to speak. What I have now is the memory of what happens when certainty replaces attention, and when institutions reward comfort over comprehension. Minnesota taught me that first. Iran confirmed it.

We are still living with the consequences.