sociology of islam 4 (2016) 403-413

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Book Reviews ∵

Moazami, Behrooz State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran, 1796 to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 208, $110.00 (cloth). isbn: 978-1-137-32585-3, $36.00 (paper) isbn 978-1-137-32588-4.

State formation and institutionalization of religion have attracted much at- tention in scholarship focused on modern Iran. In terms of temporal scope, however, research literature has tended to be contemporary-minded, dismiss- ing the historical trends and events that shaped sociopolitical life in Iran un- der the 19th-century Qajar dynasty. State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran by Behrooz Moazami has the merit of coalescing the complexities of these two centuries of socio-political transition and religious transformation into a well- researched, analytical narrative that contributes a fresh interpretation of Iran’s religious and cultural landscape over the course of the last two centuries. It hinges on the assumption that the transformations of political and religious spheres in Iran were closely interrelated. It drives as well on the proposition that “[t]he state, by virtue of being the dominant form of political organiza- tion, determines the organizational character of all institutions in any given society” and that “the state and religion converge, but depending on the so- ciopolitical and cultural conditions of their interaction, they also diverge” (1). State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran is structured into three thematic sec- tions. The first focuses on the formation of the state in Iran, re-conceptualizing and elaborating the country’s administrative centralization from the advent of the Qajars in 1796 up until 1963, the year in which the Pahlavi shah Muhammad Reza (1941–79) staged his White Revolution, a series of far-flung, land-centered social and bureaucratic reforms that aimed at sapping traditional classes, in- cluding the Twelver Shiite clergy, of their sociopolitical relevance. The first chapter highlights the trends and events that exacerbated Iran’s political and administrative fragmentation under the Qajars, concluding that even the Con- stitutional Revolution of 1906 did not led to the formation of a state-nation

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404 Book Reviews in Iran (29). Moazami’s interpretation of the Qajar political order revolves around the evolving patterns of alliance and confrontation among the ruling elites as well as the dynamics of political and administrative fragmentation. It then closes with an account of the downfall of the Qajar dynasty and the onset of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. The chapter’s closing part is packed with a hodgepodge of details concerning the fall of the Qajars, falling short of analysis. In a sense, it fails to supply disciplined, diagnostic considerations il- luminating and contextualizing the failure of the Constitutional movement to form a modern, centralized state in Iran. The closing chapter of the first section explores the formation of the Pahlavi dispensation, characterizing it as “a utilitarian buffer state.” State-making strat- egies and changes in power structure under the Pahlavi rule between 1921 and 1963 are the main issues examined in this chapter. Moazami narrows the focus of his analysis on the formation of a unified national army as the pillar of a centralized state in Iran in the 1910s and 1920s and subsequent rise to power of a militarized state headed by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah. He argues that the “British colonial maximalist policy” in Iran with “encircling the Bolshevik expansion in the East” as its mainstay stimulated the creation of a unified national army in Iran and the country’s status as a “buffer state.” The infamous Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, which the last Qajar king Ahmad Shah (r. 1914–25) and his appointees, including the prime minister Hasan Vu- suq al-Dawla (d. 1951), had been bribed into signing, constituted the driving force behind the sociopolitical and military policies adopted and pursued by Reza Shah. Underlying these policies were anti-Soviet stance in foreign rela- tions and the use of iron fist in stabilizing the internal affairs of the country (41–42). The rest of the chapter outlines the history of the opening decades of the reign of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, with special reference to the disin- tegration of the national army, the relative democratization of political sphere in the years leading up to the formation of Muhammad Musaddeq’s cabinet, and the 1953 cia-backed coup that brought down the Musaddeq government. Moazami highlights the anti-traditional potentials of the 1953 coup, arguing that it prepared the way for the White Revolution of 1963, during which “the landowning system, the social base upholding both divani tradition and elite politics, was attacked” (51). This trend, according to Moazami’s unwarrantedly linearizing analysis, “took its final turn with the 1979 revolution, when the anti- elite Islamized mass movement wiped out the remaining political and social power of what had been known as “the rule of a thousand families”” (52). Chapter 4 is devoted to the intellectual and institutional history of Twelver Shi’ism in 19th-century Iran. Internal crises originating from the Akhbari-Usuli conflict and the advent of the heterodox Babi movement have received the

sociology of islam 4 (2016) 403-413