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A Modern Theocracy

Iran's Anti-Enlightenment Revolution Endures

John Limbert, Mansour Farhang

Availability: Forthcoming
Published: 2025
Page #: xxiv + 240
Size: 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-56859-415-6, 978-1-56859-452-1
bibliography, index, notes

Quick Overview

The Islamic Republic of Iran emerged in 1979, replacing the 74-year-old Pahlavi monarchy in what remains the only explicitly anti-Enlightenment revolution in modern history. Over the past forty-five years, the Islamic Republic has defied expectations by transforming a nation long governed by autocrats into a totalitarian theocracy. In this all-encompassing political order, religious authority supersedes all, and the Supreme Leader serves as the earthly representative—or viceroy—of the Hidden Imam, the messianic figure in Shi`a Islam. Clerics occupy positions of power throughout the state, serving as ministers, legislators, and presidents.





This work—intended for students, scholars, and informed general readers—seeks to answer enduring but still vital questions: How did revolutionaries dismantle a seemingly stable monarchy in just one year? How did the religious extremists, after the Shah's fall, outmaneuver their former revolutionary allies—social democrats, Marxists, and religious conservatives—to seize uncontested control? And how has such a seemingly anachronistic system—a modern theocracy—persisted into the 21st century?





While these questions are not new, the perspectives offered by the book’s two authors are. Both experienced these historic events not just as observers, but as participants—sometimes unwilling ones. They met firsthand with key figures, including Ayatollahs Khomeini, Montazeri, and Khamene’i. With academic backgrounds in history and political science, government service, and deep personal involvement in Iranian affairs before and after 1979, they bring unique insight. Both have taught in universities in Iran and the United States. Their diplomatic careers were upended by the revolution: one was forced to flee Iran to escape arrest; the other was imprisoned for fourteen months.

author

John Limbert

During a 34-year career in the United States Foreign Service, Ambassador John Limbert served mostly in the Middle East and Islamic Africa, including posts in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Guinea, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. He was president of the Foreign Service employees’ union, the American Foreign Service Association (2003-2005), and ambassador to Mauritania (2000-2003). In 2009-2010, on leave from the Naval Academy, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Iran, in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. After retiring from the State Department in 2006, he was Class of 1955 Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he taught history and political science until retiring in 2018. In the academic year 2015-16 he held the Gruss-Lipper fellowship in Middle East policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. A native of Washington, D.C, Ambassador Limbert attended the D.C. public schools and earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, the last degree in History and Middle Eastern Studies. Before joining the Foreign Service in 1973, he taught in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kurdistan Province (1964-66) and as an instructor at Shiraz University (1969-72). He has written numerous articles and books on Middle Eastern subjects, including Iran at War with History (Westview Press, 1987), Shiraz in the Age of Hafez (University of Washington Press, 2004), and Negotiating with Iran: Wrestling the Ghosts of History (U.S. Institute of Peace, 2009). Ambassador Limbert was among the last American diplomats to serve at the American Embassy in Tehran. He holds the Department of State’s highest award – the Distinguished Service Award – and the department’s Award for Valor, which he received in 1981 after fourteen months as hostage in Iran. He and his wife, the former Parvaneh Tabibzadeh, currently live in New York City. They have two children and four grandchildren.
author

Mansour Farhang

Mansour Farhang, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Bennington College in Vermont, where he was awarded the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair of Distinguished Teaching.  In early January 1980, following the hostage taking at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, he was appointed as Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations to mediate the release of the American hostages. He resigned four months later when it became clear that Ayatollah Khomeini had decided not to release the hostages before the November 1980 U. S. Presidential election. He is the author U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference, and U.S. Imperialism from the Spanish-American War to the Iranian Revolution. His articles and opinion pieces have been published in academic journals, popular periodicals and newspapers. He serves on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch/Middle East and is a media commentator in both English and Persian. 

Introduction.
Chapter 1: History, Religion, and Dissent.
Chapter 2: How Khomeini Did It.
Chapter 3: Imagining a Shi`a Theocracy.
Chapter 4: Theocrats Seize the State.
Chapter 5: The Workings of Theocracy.
Chapter 6: The Islamic republic and the Great Satan.
Chapter 7: The Islamic Republic’s Regional Ambitions.
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Creating a Democratic Iran
Bibliography
Index.

5/18/2025

 
There are plenty of books on democracy, on autocracy and on Islam, but what Limbert and Farhang do brilliantly is tie the three themes together in a sweeping account of the Iranian Revolution. The book comes at a propitious time. Iran over the next several years will likely experience a succession of leadership when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei leaves the scene. The authors give us something to consider about what we realistically can expect given Iran’s troubled history with democracy and how easily the Shah’s apparatus could be dismantled in less than a year and replaced with a Shi’i theocracy. Both authors played roles in the post-revolutionary context of Iran: one as an Iranian diplomat and the other an American diplomat in Iran who was held for more than a year during the hostage crisis. Taken together, they met Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, and plenty of other pre-and post-revolutionary Iranian political and religious figures. This unique access to historical figures and the dialectic of their two very different backgrounds adds an unparalleled richness to the book. It will be part of the historical record and is essential reading for students, policymakers and anyone interested in the past present and future of Iran
Ross Harrison, Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute.
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