Drawn from the first-hand accounts of eyewitnesses, Roy Mottahedeh's absorbing tale of Islam and Politics in revolutionary Iran is widely regarded as one of the best records of that turbulent time ever written.This revised edition includes a new chronology detailing events in Iran from the revolution right up to the present day and Ahmadinejad's controversial regime. There is simply no better resource for understanding Iran's past, present, and future.

Even with news breaking daily in Iran, the first book I send myself and other readers back to has to be Roy Mottahedeh’s “The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran,” which was first published in 1985. A professor at Harvard, Mottahedeh has written an intellectual history as stirring and graceful as any novel. He sets the intimate biography of a young cleric against the vast epic of Iranian thought from Zoroaster to Avicenna, Kasravi to Khomeini. “The Mantle of the Prophet” is literary, learned, and deeply felt; the writing is splendid, and the story is an education for the Western reader unaware of the powerful tides of Shi’ite and Persian thought over a period of centuries.

Autorentext

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh was the Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He served as the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard from 1987 to 1990 and as Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard from 2006 to 2011. His first book, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, gained him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was among the first to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. His history of modern Iran, The Mantle of the Prophet, is an international bestseller which has been translated into numerous languages, and both this and his translation of Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence by Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr are also available from Oneworld.

Klappentext

On 11 February 1979, a mullah listens to the radio as he plants seeds in his Qom garden. What he hears will define Iran’s modern history: ‘The ill-omened regime of the Pahlavis is finished, and an Islamic government has been established under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.’ Crowds pour into Qom’s streets, jubilant. In The Mantle of the Prophet , the late pre-eminent scholar of Iran Roy P. Mottahedeh weaves a tapestry of the Islamic Revolution and its deep roots in Persian culture. We witness prisoners chanting Ferdowsi and Rumi verses against the Shah’s regime, mullahs writing about Che Guevara and Islam and students in Paris debating Algeria and Cuba. This is a unique glimpse into the extraordinary Iranian twentieth century, as it was lived and suffered by its people.

Zusammenfassung
The best book ever written about revolutionary Iran a modern classic