The Turban for the Crown

"Said Amir Arjomand is another leading historian of modern Iran . He is probably better classified as an historical sociologist. Whereas Abrahamian comes from a Marxist outlook and uses a Marxian approach, Arjomand is someone who applies Weberian concepts to Iranian history and development. He also works with the long view and he looks at religious historical developments. So he looks at the history of the country from the early 19th century through to the contemporary period. There are, for me, two really influential English-language histories of the 20th century and this is one of them. And he is really showing that element of continuity of the monarchy and the Islamic republic that overthrew it – the way in which the concept of the supreme jurist came to replace the monarch as the supreme arbiter and also in some ways the autocrat of the estate. He makes people think about the historical context of more recent developments. Yes. But people like Arjomand have been writing about the revolution for the best part of two decades, so it is something they do very well. And you have to remember that back in the 1980s there were very few accessible scholarly texts on modern Iran, unlike Europe and the US. So their contribution is important. They try to explain things using concepts that are familiar to us in the West to show that although this was ‘a religious revolution’, which seems unlike anything we expected in the West, nonetheless it is explainable using methods and tools that are very common to Western sociologists and historians."