Behrooz Moazami. State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran, 1796 to the Present

In this book, Behrooz Moazami interrogates two truisms about modern Iranian history: one, that Shiʾism has always been an “integral part of the Iranian religious and cultural landscape,” and the other, that clerics “have always played a crucial role” in Iranian politics. Moazami offers a new take on modern Iranian history to portray “state formation and the institutionalization of religion as two distinct but interrelated historical processes” (p. 1). The evolution of the Iranian clergy in its modern form as an important political group paralleled the creation of the “centralized, militarized, and bureaucratic Pahlavi state” between 1925 and 1979 (p. 2). The work covers three main topics: modern Iranian state formation, religious institutionalization, and the final Islamization of the revolution that swept the country at the end of the 1970s. Moazami argues that as the principal agent of state formation, the Pahlavi regime was also responsible for “organizing and extending the religious sphere in Iran.” He makes the case that the 1979 Islamic revolution relied upon the religious transformations undertaken by the Pahlavi regime (p. 5). This work rejects theories linking the late-twentieth-century Islamization of Iranian politics to the resurgence of traditional Shiʾi cultural forces.

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