Abstract:

In this chapter, I make use of a batch of classified Iranian documents to revisit the question of how the Islamic Republic reached out to the Global South in the early 1980s. I argue that Iran’s export of the revolution in the form of several delegations traversing countries from Gabon to Malaysia was not only ad-hoc and improvised but also affected by the serious tension of navigating pan-Islamic solidarity and Third Worldism. At a time when leftist Iranian groups involved with the revolution of 1978–1979 had become marginalised and eliminated, the ‘travelling revolutionaries’ in Iran’s delegations still tried to play the card of international anti-imperialist solidarity. In 1983, however, they had come to feel much more at home in a specific Islamic idiom.