Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of Iran in Middle East and world politics over the last fifty years. As the first modern state to enact a revolution that brought to power an Islamist government presided over by one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, Iran not only provided a model for subsequent ventures of this kind, it focused minds on the direction Islamic movements might take in the future. The book under review necessarily covers a lot of familiar ground. Strangely, Abbas Milani’s chapter, “Iran’s Democratic Movements”, is the final one. Proclaiming ‘Democracy has been more than a 100-year old dream in Iran’ (p. 229), it is in effect a survey of Iranian political history of the last 170 years beginning with the Babi movement and ending with the accession to power of Hassan Rouhani’s administration. ‘The battle for democracy in Iran… has not just been a political struggle over who rules the country but also a paradigmatic battle between reason and the rule of men and women on the one hand, and revelation and the rule of God (and His viceroys) on the other.’ A curious statement that appears to elide the fifty-four years of the Pahlavi dynasty which was not – even by the most charitable interpretation – an embodiment of Enlightenment rationality, nor was it a theocracy. His brief allusion to the Shah’s ‘“divine right” conception of power’ suggests Milani wants to align the Pahlavis and the Islamic revolution in this clichéd manner (p. 220), bracketing them both together as authoritarian enemies of democracy.