4: Islam, Politics and Power in Transition: Prologue to the 1979 Revolution

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Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Islam has emerged as both one of the world’s fastest-growing religions and a major political force. These developments coincided with the end of the Cold War and the advent of ‘globalization’, regional integration with the global economy, and cultural homogenization. On the contrary, the Islamic revival is perceived as nationalist, inward looking and tending towards anti-imperialist extremism, threatening secularization and democratization (Zubaida, 1989; Arjomand, 1989; Esposito and Voll, 1996; Roy, 2004).

In Iran, both Islamists and secularist organizations competed to win the hearts and minds of the people. They both championed social policy measures meant to address excess poverty and inequality and the pervasive sense of alienation that had accompanied the nation’s rapid modernization.

This was given a global dimension by the 1979 Revolution, which established the world’s first Islamic Republic in a revolutionary movement that, rather surprisingly, happened in one of the most modern and secular countries in the Middle East, raising various questions in the process, not least among them the possible relationship of Islam to the character cieties and economies. Various scholars and politicians in the West spoke of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, most often defined as some ‘return to 7th-century Islam’, in attempting, somewhat reductively, to define the new regime (Abrahamian, 1993). In this clichéd and polemical view, Iran had now become ‘traditionalist’, and its Revolution and the new government were said to be against ‘modernization’. Islam was portrayed as a static and anachronistic religion, which was incompatible with modernization and threatened instead to hold back development.

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