Abstract
This paper is an examination of the historiography of the 1979 revolution in Iran with the goal of highlighting aspects of the history that are marginalized or remain unwritten. It identifies two dominant strands in the historiography: scholarship produced inside Iran and scholarship produced outside of it, particularly in the United States. Borrowing from David Scott, it argues that the same anti‐colonial “problem space” has shaped both strands, leading to a preference for a positivist historical arc in the historiography over one that highlights historical contingencies. As a result, the messy intermingling of Islamist, socialist, secularist, and Third Worldist ideas in the post‐colonial world that gave birth to the revolution itself is ignored, and events that actually do occur at their intersection are disavowed. The article ends by noting that a focus on the revolution's multi‐layered, contingency‐laden, and transnational roots can re‐position it both as one of the last great successful revolutions of the post‐colonial world and as one of the first to answer the questions and anxieties of its global south ethos in an Islamic form.