Revolutionary Iran

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a defining moment of the modern era. Its success unleashed a wave of Islamist fervor across the Middle East and signaled a sharp decline in the appeal of Western ideologies in the Islamic world. And the reaction it inspired testified to its importance: as with the Russian and French revolutions, outsiders tried to crush it in its crib. A year after the mullahs' assumption of power, Iraq, with aid from other Arab states and the US, declared war on Iran. Yet the revolution prevailed, and the Islamic Republic persists to this day. And despite the deep rifts separating Sunnis and Shiites, the regime motivated successive waves of revolutionary Islamism across the entire region, from Afghanistan in the 1980s to Lebanon in the 200s to Egypt to Algeria today. In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy offers a richly textured and authoritative history of Iran from the 1979 revolution to the present. After an opening section that focuses on the sources of the revolution, Axworthy takes readers through the major periods of the era: the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of the new one; the Iran-Iraq war; the reconstruction era following the war; the reformist wave led by Mohammed Khatami; and the current era, in which reactionaries have re-established control. Throughout, he emphasizes that the Iranian revolution was centrally important in modern history because it provided the world with a clear model of development that was notrooted in Western ideologies. Whereas the world's major revolutions of the previous two centuries had been fuelled by Western, secular ideologies, the Iranian Revolution drew its inspiration from Islam. Both erudite and accessible, Revolutionary Iran is the definitive account of this epoch in all its humanity.