Homa Katouzian and Hossein Shahidi, eds. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. 300 pages.

This multidisciplinary study addresses a host of issues facing Iran. Through a comprehensive study of political, economic, cultural, social, and security related questions, seventeen Iranian researchers tried to create a book that is, as Katouzian states in her preface, “likely to become a standard text for the relevant academic courses.”

In an elaborate introduction, the editors paint a quick picture of events endured by the Iranian people during the twentieth century up to the advent of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Farideh Farhi examines the question of crafting a national identity as a national preoccupation in modern Iranian history. She points to the central role of a narrative reference that brings together and connects all Iranians. The second main point of her analysis is the ongoing tension between what she calls autocratic/theocratic/arbitrary rule and democracy/chaos and Iran’s relationship with the outside world. Farhi studies three sets of discursive transformations to illustrate her main points: the transformation of the national question into an ethnic challenge, of the Islam/pre-Islam dichotomy into a confrontation between popular sovereignty and patrimonialism, and of how “Iran” sees itself in the world.

In his chapter, Hamid Ahmadi studies the concept of national interest in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic and depicts the state of orphanage of the term national, which the new revolutionaries considered anti-Islamic. After a quick review of the question of national interest in the Islamic Republic’s constitution, the author applies conceptual and theoretical models to Iran’s performance in the realm of foreign policy to present a better understanding of the status of national interest in Iran’s policy. He asserts that Iran’s foreign policy is essentially idealist, indicating the existence of contradictory trends regarding the question of national interest. Touraj Atabaki, who examines concerns over Iranian territorial integrity with respect to ethnic identity throughout the twentieth century, concludes that reforming multiethnic Iran’s political structure is the most important factor in preserving its territorial integrity.

Mahmoud and Ahmad Sadri’s analysis of the cognitive, expressive, and traditionalist discourses of discontent in Iran caused them to reiterate the threat of erosion to the clerical system’s legitimacy in the absence of reform, just as collective action brought down the monarchy. Azadeh Kian-Thiébaut investigates the patriarchal order’s weakening via an exhaustive qualitative survey of the public and private activities of a number of women whose social conditions have greatly improved in recent years and who aspire to equal rights and opportunities. The irony of the Islamic Republic is that women’s liberation and education erode the patriarchal grip over political order and contribute to the advent of a democratic system, the prerequisite of which is the separation of religion and state.

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