Customer Reviews

Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

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As I'm writing this review in mid-2006, Iran is a country that has a great deal of influence in world affairs. Like Iraq, most people (especially Americans) would benefit from learning as much about Iran as they can.

That being said, Modern Iran should be on the reading lists of many, but it will take much more than this book to really gain an understanding of Iran. It's kind of a cheap shot to criticize a history book for not covering enough material. How could any one book adequately cover an entire country's history? I am criticizing this book largely because the amount of material left out really surprised me. Things like the Iran-Iraq war or the actual revolution itself were not covered very well at all. I feel as though I have learned from reading this book, but not as much as I should have.

For readability, I was really let down by this book. The way that Keddie presented this material was incredibly difficult for me to navigate. I read four other books from the time when I started reading Modern Iran and when I finished. I never read more than one book at once anymore, but there were four different times when I had to stop reading this book and pick up something else (and I'm a huge nerd that loves reading about this stuff in his free time, so I find this particularly troubling).

I actually felt that I came away with a better understanding of Iran from Pollack's book The Persian Puzzle. These are the only two books devoted exlusively to Iran that I have read, but the Pollack book was much easier to read and explored topics in much greater depth.

The negative aspects aside, I would still recommend this book to others. But I would recommend reading Pollack's book first.

University of California historian Keddie published the first version of this book, titled Roots of Revolution, in 1981, and a generation of students has read her work in an effort to make sense of revolution in Iran. With Modern Iran, Keddie updates her study to take into account the Islamic Republic's first quarter century.

Modern Iran begins with a brief sweep of Iranian history. Subsequent chapters examine the rise of the Qajar dynasty in the nineteenth century; the period of upheaval and constitutional revolution at the turn of the century; and then the development of dictatorship in the twentieth century.

Keddie's narrative is lucid and generally accurate. Her account of nineteenth-century Iran provides a good, accessible guide for the non-expert, curious about modern Iran's early history. However, she replicates mistakes made in the original, as though two decades had not passed. For example, she says the Iranian telegraph system followed the British-Indian line through Iran when, in reality, the first Iranian lines predated the British effort by a decade. She repeats her assertions trumpeting the importance of the late nineteenth-century pan-Islamist reformer Jamal ad-Din "al-Afghani," without mentioning the dispute among historians over his importance.

Omission and bias then handicap the narrative as Keddie addresses events during her lifetime, that is from the 1950s on. Keddie's failure to address the Cold War context undercuts her sympathetic analysis of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh's 1951 oil industry nationalization and also her condemnation of the U.S.-supported coup two years later, which unseated Mossadegh. She glosses over the Soviet occupation of northwestern Iran and ignores Mossadegh's flirtation with the former Soviet Union and his encouragement of mob violence.

Keddie's treatment of the Islamic revolution is egregious. As Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consolidated power, his militias executed hundreds of officials and intellectuals while Iranian newspapers carried photos of their corpses. These atrocities merit a mere four sentences. Keddie presents the multi-billion dollar Foundation of the Dispossessed, formed from the confiscated fortunes of the shah's family and many supporters, as an economic engine akin to the Peace Corps, never mentioning its corruption or its crushing of labor unions. Keddie also ignores the foundation's role in financing Hizbullah.

Much of her political analysis is wrong-headed, even dishonest. She terms President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-97) a pragmatist who sought to promote technocrats and calls his five-year economic plans "successful," despite the brain drain, unemployment, and corruption that characterized his administration. She also omits mention of Rafsanjani's role in Iran's covert nuclear program or his threatened first use of an atomic bomb against Israel. She is likewise sympathetic to current "reformist" president Mohammad Khatami despite his failure to implement any substantive reform and his silence in the wake of crackdowns against democrats and dissidents. When Keddie speaks of "new independence for girls and women," she forgets to note that, unlike the women in other Middle Eastern countries, those in Iran are fighting to regain rights they once had.

Keddie concludes by juxtaposing Iran's recent "pragmatic and realistic" policy with the "ideological and threatening" stance of the United States. The increasingly frequent anti-Islamic Republic demonstrations taking place in Iran, coupled with voter turnout of less than 10 percent in many provinces in this year's parliamentary elections, suggests that many Iranians have a different view of the results of the Islamic Revolution.

Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2004

This is a great book by a true Iranian expert. Professor Keddie knows Iran well. She is not afraid to tell things that some Iranians do not accept or want to believe. Most of her thesis is based on massive amount of research. This is a very good book for those who know Iran well but might be too hard to read for those with little knowledge of Iran or the MIddle East. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot even though I studied the subject for years at Harvard and UCLA. One of the better books about Iran.

I have used Professor Nikki Keiddie's "Modern Iran" in the classes I teach on gender and women in the Middle East. By far, this updated edition is the most comprehensive yet concise and accurate social history of modern Iran available for the students of the Middle East, especially Iran. This is a well-balanced account of the past two centuries of Iran, written in a lucid and accessible language. Throughout its 12 chapters and conclusion, it remains keen on the role of Iran's internal, regional and international politics, religion and Shii discourse, secular as well as religious intellectuals, socioeconomic factors, culture, women and gender. Highly recommended.

This book was a collection of almost random articles written about Iran. I don't know how to describe reading it except comparing it to walking through a lake. It's really slow and you don't really know where you are going. It is physically difficult to continue reading.

Also, the articles have a very low content to word ratio. Every article is like a column in a newspaper or website where the source only gave a one line statement but their editor made them write an entire column. In addition, each story is written using sources who have a very limited perspective.

Overall this book is a miss. I don't know if you can see my purchases on Amazon, but I have purchased at least 10 books about Iran and I have checked out at least 3 times that many from the library.

If slow news days are your favorite days to read the newspaper, crack this book open. If you have limited intelligence and are unable to assimilate more than 1 meaningful sentence per paragraph, this book is right up your alley. However, if you want to gain an understanding of Iran then buy something else.

Keddie's encumbered prose renders Modern unreadable. Packed with information, the work suffers from run-on sentences and awkward word choice. Her failure to write coherently inhibited my ability to comprehend the account she presents. Wikipedia works just as well.

I like the book by Keddie, but she has stopped short talking about Iran's role in international terrorism. She has devoted only three paragraphs about Islamic Republic's actions in terrorising most of the world. She also says that Iranians believe this myth that the United States under Carter's Administration brought the revolution to Iran. This is not a myth Prof. Keddie, the Carter administration with the help of its Europeans allies brought Khomeini to Iran. Today we are witnessing the same compliance and appeasment by former national security advisor to Carter. Please be little more accurate and try to present reality as it appears.