Understanding the Gap Between American and Iranian Students’ Views

One of the most disturbing images associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks was the media’s depiction of young Palestinians celebrating in support of the violence and destruction perpetuated against the United States. From my experience in Iran, I (Simine Vazire) suspected that these clips were not representative of Middle Eastern young adults and that the inevitable prejudice that they would breed was unwarranted. Unfortunately, Americans have little exposure to the trends and values of younger generations in the Middle East. What little media coverage we get usually focuses on political figures and religious zealots, ignoring the growing voice of young people open to new ideas.

This may be due in part to the history of conflict between the U.S. and Iran, dating back to 1953 when the CIA planned and funded a coup that put the Shah in power. This had serious repercussions, culminating in the role of the U.S. in the dictatorial government and the 1979 revolution against the Shah’s power. After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran and fueled anti-American sentiment, leading to the 1979-1981 hostage crisis in which 52 Americans were held captive for 444 days. The Iran-Iraq war, lasting from 1980 to 1988, did little to improve this tension. During the war, which resulted in 600,000 Iranian casualties, the U.S. supplied weapons to Iraq and, to a lesser, more secretive extent, to Iran. Soon thereafter, the U.S. Navy committed a blunder that further complicated Iran-U.S. relations. In 1988, the American cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner, claiming to have mistaken it for an F-14 fighter. Two hundred and ninety people were killed in the accident, although the U.S. apologized, replaced the aircraft, and paid 62 million dollars in compensation for the loss of lives.

In the last decade, Iran-U.S. relations have been improving. After 14 years of separation from my Iranian family following the revolution, I had a chance to witness the changing culture firsthand in my visits to Iran in 1994 and 2000. In contrast to 1994, I noticed signs of Westernization in 2000, indicating Iranians’ desire to move towards better relations with the U.S. In addition, the last two presidential elections in Iran saw an overwhelming majority of young adults voting for the reformist candidate, Mohammad Khatami rather than the conservative hard-line party. Despite these rapid changes, I feel there is still very little understanding by Americans of the cultural climate in Iran and the similarities and differences in opinion between Iranians and Americans. The September 11 attacks gave me a unique opportunity to document cultural differences in young people’s sentiments on this historic event.

With the help of my uncle, the Vice President of Culture at the University of Damghan, Iran, I constructed a brief questionnaire tapping into the students’ perceptions of and reactions to the terrorist attacks. These questions addressed issues such as students’ beliefs about the motivation behind the attacks, the morality of the attacks, how the U.S. should respond to the attacks, and general sentiments towards the U.S. and Americans. The questionnaire was translated into Farsi and distributed to over 100 college students in both countries five weeks after the attacks. The University of Dam-

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ghan’s enthusiastic cooperation in this research suggested that there is a wealth of potential for cross-cultural research on a wide variety of topics, including social psychological, political, and cultural phenomena.

The data I gathered revealed many significant findings. The questionnaire tapped into two major constructs, pro-U.S. patriotism and emotional threat/reactance. As expected, the American students scored higher on both factors than did the Iranian students. More specifically, the pattern of results suggests that the American students had stronger opinions about the attacks, circling more extreme answers than the Iranian students. In addition to the intensity of their responses, the two groups also differed on the direction of their responses on several items. In particular, the Iranian students expressed much less favorable views of Americans and much less support for military retaliation against the attackers. The two groups agreed, however, in their strong opinion that the attackers’ actions were morally wrong and that the attacks were of international significance. The students’ comments on the questionnaires also indicated that there was a broad range of reactions to the attacks among Iranian college students and that they were very interested in contributing their views to the dialogue.

Turning to the implications and conclusions, if both groups of students agreed that the terrorist actions were morally wrong, why would retaliation seem so much more necessary to American students? One explanation is that whereas American students remain mostly unaware of the United States’ role in world politics and how we are perceived by other countries, Iranian students may have a deeper understanding of the complexities of the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. Thus, although Iranian students noticed the antecedents of the September 11 attacks, the strikes seemed to come from nowhere to the American students, leading to more extreme reactions.

The September 11 attacks changed the face of international relations beyond the obvious military and political consequences. Middle Easterners in the U.S. have suffered from prejudice due in part to an overly simplistic view of cultural differences. The attacks should encourage American social scientists to examine the role of Middle Eastern culture in shaping people’s reactions to global events. From the present research we can catch a glimpse of where these differences lie and perhaps foster a greater level of understanding between two cultures with a long history of both cooperation and hostility. Though President Bush’s recent State of the Union Address condemnation of Iran as part of a terrorist “axis of evil” has set back this movement towards understanding, it may not have ended a process of reconciliation.

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