English in Post-Revolutionary Iran

English in Post-Revolutionary Iran is a very thoughtful, provocative and intelligent book on the inevitable tension between the globalization and the domestication of the English language in post-revolutionary Iran, and how the two forces, in fact, constitute two sides of the same hegemonic coin. Bold and compelling in argument and richly eloquent in style, it succeeds in raising profound questions about Iran in the 21st century: a discursive trope, a predicament whose social and political order continues to unfold in bewildering ways. Borjian helps us understand some of the complex interrelations between language and political-economy, and the transformative dialectics underlying the story of English in Iran since 1979.

-- Alamin Mazrui, Rutgers University, USA

Maryam Borjian's pathbreaking study of English language teaching in the Islamic Republic of Iran carefully demonstrates the paradoxical growth of English, the language of Khomeini's "Great Satan", alongside the increasing political and diplomatic isolation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and despite the revolution's initial impulse to indigenization. There can be no clearer indication of the desire of the Iranian people and civil society to belong to the global culture and community despite continued government ambivalence in educational policy and its outright hostility to the transfer of foreign ideas.

-- Said Amir Arjomand, State University of New York,