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Politics and Democratic Consciousness in Modern Iran

The books under review address different aspects of democracy’s tortuous path as both a much-cherished political value and an institutional arrangement in modern Iranian society. They do so by explaining how the struggle for basic rights and freedoms has over time necessitated a national yearning for a “clear consciousness” that constantly traverses the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, the universal and the particular. It is the great merit of all three works that they approach the troubled pursuit of democratic ideals through a contextual reading of Iranian political and social history over the past century. They are not given to fixed ideas and false binaries so fashionable today in writings on Muslim-majority societies (e.g. Islam vs. secularism, modernity vs. tradition, West vs. East), nor are they guided by melodramatic prophecies about the apparent “End of History” or an impending “Clash of Civilizations.”