Confessions of a Green Notebook: Reading Unpublished Documents About the Oppression of Iranian Archaeology Professors During the 1980s

Abstract

A couple of months after the 1979 revolution of Iran, the universities were occupied by the Islamists who oppressed dissident academics drastically. Two years after the revolution, the headquarter of the Cultural Revolution was established, and universities were shuttered to be purified from any other ideology except Islamism. Due to the heavy censorship of the regime, very little is known about the documents and process of oppression during and after the occupation of the universities. In 2010, the author gained access to a ‘green notebook’ found in a trashcan at the University of Tehran, which contains informal minutes of several meetings held by the Islamic Association of Students (IAS). As a direct practice of oppression, IAS had the mission to report the behaviors of the professors working in the department of archaeology to authorities. In this article, the author elucidates the process of oppression of archaeology professors through reading documents of the ‘green notebook.’