The seizure of American diplomats in Tehran in November of 1979 precipitated the well-known Iranian Hostage Crisis. The action exceeded most norms of international conflict (short of war), but in Iran it marked just a stronger expression of the anti-American and anti-Western sentiment felt by many for a long time. The scene at left shows a movie theater in Mashhad, a large city in northeastern Iran, set on fire in December of 1978 by militants opposed to the Shah of Iran (I took the shot from the roof of one of the buildings at the local university where I had been hired to teach English). In eyes of those who torched the theater, the management was guilty of showing American films such as Rocky.

The movie house was not the only building to be burned that month. The picture below shows smoke rising from a library sponsored by the US Information Agency, and another library belonging to the British Council also went up in smoke at that time. While the overthrow of the Shah was the initial goal of the armed revolt that took place in Mashhad and other Iranian towns in 1978 and 1979, the anti-Americanism which accompanied the Islamic Revolution has continued long after the fall of the Shah, who left Iran in January of 1979 and who died of natural causes the following year. At the university, books in English and other Western languages were burned, and zealots have tried to continue the cultural purge by, for example, outlawing satellite dishes capable of picking up foreign television. Highly incensed by the fashions of Western women, Islamic fundamentalists have tried to make all females wear a head-to-foot veil known as a chador (literally, 'tent'}, and women opting for simply a head-scarf have been derided for wearing an "American chador"-even though such a garment is rarely seen in the United States! The suspicion of extreme Islamists has not been confined to women, however, as seen in some recent paranoia about squirrels.

The anti-Western and anti-American reaction of highly conservative Islamists is not shared by all Muslims or by all Iranians. Indeed, many still show a strong fascination with the West, as seen in the recent book Reading Lolita in Tehran. Moreover, the Islamic Republic continues to support the teaching of English, and it has avoided the worst of the reactionary policies that afflicted Afghanistan in the period of rule by the Taliban (1995-2001). Nevertheless, any perception of English as "the language of the enemy" no doubt channels English-teaching in some directions and not in others. English for science and technology might be safe to teach in Tehran, but not writing in English by authors such as Salman Rushdie or Daylle Deanna Schwartz. The cultural divide seen in contemporary Iran is also evident in the political strife of the 2009 elections. There appears to be a generation emerging who will call into question the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. If so, the days of the current regime may be numbered, and the status of English in the country may grow more influential.

Until the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979, most Westerners did not take Islamic fundamentalism seriously, and Iran was often called a "pro-Western" country, i.e., one opposed to the Soviet Union, which bordered on Iran before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Similarly, the conflict which began in Afghanistan in 1978 was viewed as a Cold War struggle, which indeed it was until the end of the Communist regime there. However, in Afghanistan as well as in Iran and other Muslim countries, Islamic fundamentalists have made it very clear that the end of the Cold War does not translate into an acceptance of American or any other Western influences.