Islamism and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran (CMES Modern Middle East Series)

While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam's role and those who take a hardline defensive stance.

Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajahee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology.

Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha'eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari'ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.

Farhang Rajaee is Professor of Political Science and Director of the College of Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He previously taught at the University of Tehran and the Iranian Academy of Philosophy.