Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Iranian intellectuals have been preoccupied by issues of political and social reform, Iran's relation with the modern West, and autocracy, or arbitrary rule. Drawing from a close reading of a broad array of primary sources, this book offers a thematic account of the Iranian intelligentsia from the Constitutional movement of 1905 to the post-1979 revolution. Ali Gheissari shows how in Iran, as in many other countries, intellectuals have been the prime mediators between the forces of tradition and modernity and have contributed significantly to the formation of the modern Iranian self image. His analysis of intellectuals' response to a number of fundamental questions, such as nationalism, identity, and the relation between Islam and modern politics, sheds new light on the factors that led to the Iranian Revolution—the twentieth century's first major departure from Western political ideals—and helps explain the complexities surrounding the reception of Western ideologies in the Middle East.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi challenges the way many Americans perceive present-day Iran as well as how Iranians view the West. He examines the works of thinkers seminal in defining modern Iran (virtually unknown in the U.S.) and concludes that Islam was not the primary source of their inspiration. Their efforts forge an "authentic" national identity lay at the heart of Iranian thought. These intellectuals (both religious and secular) appropriated Islam as the vehicle through which they could most effectively challenge or accommodate modernity and Westernization. Through such a fitting appropriation, Boroujerdi asserts, could modern Iranian thinkers lay the foundation for a nativist vision of an unsullied culture, seemingly free of Western influence. Drawing on the works of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, this book explore how Iranians use their own misunderstandings about the West to form their own identity and, in return, how Westerns describe Iran in negative terms to help them reaffirm the superiority of their own culture. Boroujerdi also argues that Iranian intellectuals have been deeply indebted to Western thought, which has served as the cultural reference through which they continue to struggle with issues of identity and selfhood.

In Mapping the Role of Intellectuals in Iranian Modern and Contemporary History, Jahanbegloo and contributors examine the role of Iranian intellectuals in the history of Iranian modernity. They trace the contributions of intellectuals in the construction of national identity and the Iranian democratic debate, analyzing how intellectuals balanced indebtedness to the West with the issue of national identity in Iran. Recognizing how intellectual elites became beholden to political powers, the contributors demonstrate the trend that intellectuals often opted for cultural dissent rather than ideological politics.

This book addresses the ways in which the figure of the intellectuals and their relationship to the public has been theorized through the conceptualizations of bureaucracy, democracy, and communism as universal processes from the 19th century to the present. Starting with Hegel and Marx, the author looks at the rise of the figure of the universal intellectual in various forms, before turning to what is presented as a transformation of the figure of the intellectual into ‘the public intellectual’ advanced by the New Philosophies and the critical response offered by Edward Said. The study presents two comparative case studies: the Iranian Revolution and the public intellectuals in Europe, specifically in Norway, before concluding with a focus on the decay of the figure of the intellectuals and highlighting Ranciere’s critique of the intellectual/masses distinction.

These intellectuals (both religious and secular) appropriated Islam as the vehicle through which they could most effectively challenge or accommodate modernity and Westernization. Through such a fitting appropriation, Boroujerdi asserts, could modern Iranian thinkers lay the foundation for a nativist vision of an unsullied culture, seemingly free of Western influence.

"Impressive [and] cogently argued. . . . shows how and why Iran's secular intellectuals gradually changed their generally negative perception of Islam in the three decades prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. With convincing evidence, [Nabavi] shows that Islam and mysticism had gained growing popularity among the secular intellectuals in the years preceding the revolution. . . . A must read for anyone interested in the intellectual history of pre-revolutionary Iran."--Mohsen Milani, University of South Florida, author of The Making of Iran's Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, secularist intellectuals became a much-forgotten group. As the new revolutionary elite consolidated, secularists were marginalized, stigmatized, and accused of being "Westoxicated" and of "propagating Western values." And yet, Nabavi shows for the first time, the secularists played an important role in enabling the revolution to take the shape that it did in 1978-79. The revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini into power was as much the revolution of the secularists as it was of Islamist forces. Drawing on Iranian intellectual periodicals and journals and focusing on a wide range of liberal, left-leaning writers and essayists--many of whom have never been translated, let alone written about--Nabavi re-creates the changing mood within secular intellectual circles in the decades that preceded the revolution. She provides an account of the intellectuals' trajectory from the old days of their membership in the Communist Tudeh Party in the early 1940s, when there was a party line, to the days when they became confused and constrained about what they could do and say. She discusses their changing perception of what it was to be an intellectual together with their shifting view of religion and Islam in particular, which came to find increasing expression among secular circles in the 1970s, as one of the most forceful components of the idea of "authentic culture." Intellectuals and the State in Iran will appeal to historians and political scientists with an interest in the cultural and intellectual aspects of social change and the question of the synthesis of religion and politics. Negin Nabavi is assistant professor in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Since its revolution in 1979, Iran has been viewed as the bastion of radical Islam and a sponsor of terrorism. The focus on its volatile internal politics and its foreign relations has, according to Kamrava, distracted attention from more subtle transformations which have been taking place there in the intervening years. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini a more relaxed political environment opened up in Iran, which encouraged intellectual and political debate between learned elites and religious reformers. What emerged from these interactions were three competing ideologies which Kamrava categorises as conservative, reformist and secular. As the book aptly demonstrates, these developments, which amount to an intellectual revolution, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the future of the Islamic republic, its people and very probably for countries beyond its borders. This thought-provoking account of the Iranian intellectual and cultural scene will confound stereotypical views of Iran and its mullahs.