How did Iran's clergy justify their country's devastating eight year war with Iraq? This is a closely argued and extensively documented study of the rationalisation of Iran's war in Islamic theological terms.

How did Iran's clergy justify their country's devastating eight year war with Iraq? This is a closely argued and extensively documented study of the rationalisation of Iran's war in Islamic theological terms.

After the Islamic revolution in Iran, revolutionary leaders had to compromise their ideology. The Iranian ship of state continues to drift in search of an equilibrium between revolutionary convictions and the demands of governance, between religion and state, and Islam and the West.

Since the 1979 revolution, scholars and policy makers alike have tended to see Iranian political actors as religiously driven—dedicated to overturning the international order in line with a theologically prescribed outlook. This provocative book argues that such views have the link between religious ideology and political order in Iran backwards. Religious Statecraft examines the politics of Islam, rather than political Islam, to achieve a new understanding of Iranian politics and its ideological contradictions. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar traces half a century of shifting Islamist doctrines against the backdrop of Iran’s factional and international politics, demonstrating that religious narratives in Iran can change rapidly, frequently, and dramatically in accordance with elites’ threat perceptions. He argues that the Islamists’ gambit to capture the state depended on attaining a monopoly over the use of religious narratives. Tabaar explains how competing political actors strategically develop and deploy Shi’a-inspired ideologies to gain credibility, constrain political rivals, and raise mass support. He also challenges readers to rethink conventional wisdom regarding the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, the Green Movement, nuclear politics, and U.S.–Iran relations. Based on a micro-level analysis of postrevolutionary Iranian media and recently declassified documents as well as theological journals and political memoirs, Religious Statecraft constructs a new picture of Iranian politics in which power drives Islamist ideology.

How did Iran's clergy justify their country's devastating eight year war with Iraq? This is a closely argued and extensively documented study of the rationalisation of Iran's war in Islamic theological terms.

DIVAn ethnography of secular youth culture in Tehran and its resistance to post-Revolutionary Islamicist politics./div

In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy offers a richly textured and authoritative history of Iran from the 1979 revolution to the present.