This book is an ambitious study of Iranian modernity through the lens of intellectual history. It tells the story of modern Iran by identifying the influential ideas that captured the imaginations of writers, thinkers, and activists at different points from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the 1979 Revolution. In so doing, Afshin Matin-Asgari has two aims: first, to bring attention to the important role that the global context (rather than the West alone) has played in the shaping of Iranian modernity. Secondly, to propose a “genealogy” for the 1979 revolution and show that despite the dominant “Islamic discourse” of the Revolution, there was indeed a “continuity of political culture across the pre- and post-revolutionary divide” (p. 6).

Matin-Asgari’s account begins with the “genesis of Iranian modernity” (p. 21) and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, which, he reminds his readers, was perhaps more indebted to Ottoman and Russian models, and a result of the interactions with activists based in Russian-controlled Caucasus, than it was to the “West.” Subsequent chapters proceed to discuss the ensuing decades and the dominant discourses and/ or ideologies that characterized them. These range from nationalism and nation-state building in the 1920s and 1930s, to socialism and Marxism, which dominated much of the intellectual scene in Iran from the 1930s all the way to the 1970s, and Third-Worldism and Islamic leftist ideologies in the 1960s and 1970s. At each turn, he shows how different generations of intellectuals in Iran engaged with these global ideologies, giving shape not only to the debates in their own intellectual circles, but also to Iranian politics and political culture at large.

In expounding the various “visions of modernity” articulated by Iranian intellectuals, Matin-Asgari builds on existing scholarship. He not only engages with all the major studies on the political and intellectual history of modern Iran, but he also makes much use of primary sources, which also include a wide range of Persian journals and intellectual publications and magazines. In this way, he is able to broaden the scope of his study and bring attention to what he calls the “missing pages” of Iran’s intellectual history, whether they be debates, publications, or writers and intellectuals who have remained either “underappreciated” or simply “absent” in the studies of this period so far. Thus he sheds light on the “Berlin Circle,” a group of Iranian emigré intellectuals whose conceptions of nationalism as developed in three Berlin-based expatriate periodicals from 1915 to 1926, he argues persuasively, provided both the basis and the legitimizing factor for the rise of an authoritarian nationalism under Reza Shah Pahlavi. In a different context, another little-studied movement that he highlights is that of the God-worshipping socialists (sosialist-hā-ye khodāparast), a group of young, politicized Muslims, and their leader Mohammad Nakhshab, in the 1940s and 1950s. While it is generally acknowledged that this movement was an early example of the blending of Islam and socialism, and that it played a part in the shaping of some of Ali Shariati’s ideas, here, Matin-Asgari considers some of the writings of Nakhshab in their own right, albeit briefly, to identify the trends, both local and global, that influenced the shaping of his worldview. In a similar vein, Matin-Asgari devotes much space to a detailed examination of the many facets of thinking of Ahmad Kasravi, the well-known historian and cultural reformer, because he views them as having been much more impactful in the long run than they have hitherto been given credit for. In particular, he draws attention to Kasravi’s understudied critique of Europeanism (Orupāʾi-gari), which together with his calls for moral reform and radical religion seem to have laid the ground for what he calls “the ideological projects of the 1960s and 1970s that merged Marxism, third-world nativism and revolutionary readings of Shiʿism, producing the particular eschatology of the 1978‒1979 revolution” (p. 113).

However, it is in the last three chapters covering the 1960s and 1970s Iran that his close reading of Persian sources enables Matin-Asgari to capture the intellectual mood of the country at this time in all its contradictions. He outlines the growing appeal of an anti-West rhetoric as popularized by Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s gharbzadegi alongside different expressions of a “cultural authenticity” that gained ground, to greater or lesser degrees, among circles of dissident intellectuals, secular and religious, liberal and conservative, as well as members of the academe, in response to the challenge of Third-Worldism. While aspects of this nativist discourse have been covered in previous studies, what is novel, or at least what is discussed in much more detail here, is the extent to which this discourse overlapped with that of the state in its promotion of a “national culture.” If the state, too, became interested in “upholding Iranian authenticity vis-à-vis Western intrusions” (p. 191), Matin-Asgari explains, it was in part because those who played a part in shaping official cultural policy, whether it be in the state-run media, the growing number of festivals, study groups, and cultural institutions, were former dissident intellectuals who had been coopted by the state in an attempt to encourage political compliance. Yet the hold of the discourse of cultural authenticity on state and society became such that by the mid-1970s, when the shah was in search of a philosophy for his ill-fated Rastakhiz party, he, too, insisted that it be “revolutionary, authentically Iranian, neither Eastern nor Western and rooted in the mystical dialectic of shi’ism” (p. 14).

This is a thought-provoking, informative, and well-documented book (with eighty-five pages of endnotes). It deliberately keeps away from abstract theorization. What sets it apart from previous studies of intellectual history is its scope and attention to detail and contextualization, both local and global. It makes a persuasive case for not only how ideas came about and captured imaginations but also how they impacted politics and the state at certain points in time and contributed to events taking the shape that they did. Other than occasional inconsistencies in transliteration and spelling of names, this is highly readable and a major contribution to the field.