Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison

with Perin Gürel

hosted by Chris Gratien

| Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today.   

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Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today.

Contributor Bios

Perin Gürel is an associate professor of American Studies and the director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She's the author of Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison: America's Wife, America's Concubine (Cambridge University Press, 2025); The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017); and the forthcoming ecofantasy novel, Laleh and the Language of the Birds (Wildling Press, 2026).

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

Credits

Episode No. 573
Release Date: 31 October 2025
Recording Location: University of Virginia
Sound production and music by Chris Gratien
Bibliography and images courtesy of Perin Gürel

Images

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, his wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, at the White House dinner in their honor. Also pictured: Chief of Protocol Angier Biddle Duke, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and President John F. Kennedy, 1962. Photo by Warren K. Leffler. Source: Library of Congress

Further Listening

	Ozan Ozavci	526 4/22/22	A New History of the Eastern Question
	Aslı Iğsız	189 4/3/15	Cultural Policy and Branding in Turkey
	Cemil Aydın	313 5/16/17	The Idea of the Muslim World
	Sarah-Neel Smith	243 4/29/16	Ecevit, Art, and Politics in 1950s Turkey
	Mostafa Minawi	540 3/27/23	Arab-Ottoman Imperialists at the End of Empire
	Suzy Hansen	386 10/15/18	America, Turkey, and the Middle East
	Nicholas Danforth	136 12/26/13	Arabs through Turkish Eyes
	Susanna Ferguson	569 9/30/24	Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

Further Reading

Adalet, Begüm. Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Atabaki, Touraj and Erik J. Zürcher, eds. Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization Under Atatürk and Reza Shah. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

Aydın, Cemil. The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Bein, Amit. Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Chehabi, Houchang Esfandiar. “Staging the Emperor’s New Clothes: Dress Codes and Nation-Building under Reza Shah.” Iranian Studies 26, no. 3–4 (1993): 209–29.

Gürel, Perin E. The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Hazır, Agah. "Comparing Turkey and Iran in Political Science and Historical Sociology: A Critical Review.” Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 1–30. 

Jacobs, Matthew F. Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh. Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Mirsepassi, Ali. Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Olson, Robert. Turkey-Iran Relations, 1979–2004: Revolution, Ideology, War, Coups and Geopolitics. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2004.