ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the phenomenon of 28-Mordadism as a political paradigm that peaked in modern Iranian political culture and has now finally exhausted itself. With the commencement of the Reform movement in late 1990s, 28-Mordadism began losing its grip on Iranian political culture, after decades of abusing it to sustain an otherwise illegitimate state apparatus. The same collective sentiments and the same multifaceted political culture that caused the 1979 revolution in the first place, and that has been systematically suppressed for over three decades, has now come back to torment its tormentors. The Iranian Revolution of 1977–1979 was a magnificent manifestation of the multifaceted and polyfocal Iranian political culture against a tyrannical monarchy in which anticolonial nationalism, grassroot socialism, as well as militant Islamism had a fair and balanced share. The Green Movement has emerged from the very depths of Iranian political culture to surpass and transcend any exclusionary and absolutist claim on it.
