Rethinking Iran Iranian Studies

"Employing a novel combination of theoretical insights into International Relations and Historical Sociology, this book investigates the nature of modern social change in Iran. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that there is a previously neglected international dimension to social change that, when analytically incorporated, sheds a new light on the specificities of Iran's distinctive experience of modernity. This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is manifest in the formation of hybrid patterns of development that have taken both modern and traditional forms. It is, Kamran Matin argues, the tension-prone and unstable nature of these hybrid forms that mark Iranian modernity and which fuelled the socio-political dynamics of the 1979 revolution and the rise of political Islam. Challenging solely comparative approaches to the Iranian revolution that explain it away either as a deviation from, or a reaction to, modernity on the grounds of its religious form, this book offers an alternative approach to the Iranian revolution, modern Iran and political Islam"--