Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
He is really showing that element of continuity of the monarchy and the Islamic republic that overthrew it – the way in which the concept of the supreme jurist came to replace the monarch as the supreme arbiter and also in some ways the autocrat of the estate. He makes people think about the historical context of more recent developments.
What about The Turban for the Crown by Said Amir Arjomand?
Said Amir Arjomand is another leading historian of modern Iran. He is probably better classified as an historical sociologist. Whereas Abrahamian comes from a Marxist outlook and uses a Marxian approach, Arjomand is someone who applies Weberian concepts to Iranian history and development. He also works with the long view and he looks at religious historical developments. So he looks at the history of the country from the early 19th century through to the contemporary period.
There are, for me, two really influential English-language histories of the 20th century and this is one of them. And he is really showing that element of continuity of the monarchy and the Islamic republic that overthrew it – the way in which the concept of the supreme jurist came to replace the monarch as the supreme arbiter and also in some ways the autocrat of the estate. He makes people think about the historical context of more recent developments.
There is this idea that people in the West are often baffled by how the revolution came about.
Yes. But people like Arjomand have been writing about the revolution for the best part of two decades, so it is something they do very well. And you have to remember that back in the 1980s there were very few accessible scholarly texts on modern Iran, unlike Europe and the US. So their contribution is important. They try to explain things using concepts that are familiar to us in the West to show that although this was ‘a religious revolution’, which seems unlike anything we expected in the West, nonetheless it is explainable using methods and tools that are very common to Western sociologists and historians
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Ali Ansari is the Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, as well as Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He has just finished a study of the recent presidential elections, to be published this month. He is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, and has recently been appointed Editor of the Cambridge History of Iran Vol 8 (The Islamic Republic). It is difficult for Iranian people within the country to freely express their views, although the internet makes it easier, he says. But what has been published in the last decade before the current crackdown reflects the fact there is a literate readership that hungers for history.
