Bücher von Mehran Kamrava

An innovative and comprehensive exploration of revolutions from the French Revolution of 1789 to the most recent 2011 Arab uprisings, which presents a new framework for the study of revolutions, and marks not only the political conditions leading to revolution but also the human emotion bound up in these tumultuous events.

Since its revolution in 1979, Iran has been viewed as the bastion of radical Islam and a sponsor of terrorism. The focus on its volatile internal politics and its foreign relations has, according to Kamrava, distracted attention from more subtle transformations which have been taking place there in the intervening years. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini a more relaxed political environment opened up in Iran, which encouraged intellectual and political debate between learned elites and religious reformers. What emerged from these interactions were three competing ideologies which Kamrava categorises as conservative, reformist and secular. As the book aptly demonstrates, these developments, which amount to an intellectual revolution, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the future of the Islamic republic, its people and very probably for countries beyond its borders. This thought-provoking account of the Iranian intellectual and cultural scene will confound stereotypical views of Iran and its mullahs.

Examining the social and cultural forces that have hindered the emergence and widespread development of democratic polities in the Middle East, the author analyzes the effect politics, in particular, and society-based dynamics, in general, have had on the nature and evolution of Middle Eastern culture.

The twentieth century has been witness to a number of historic revolutions, beginning with the Mexican and the Russian revolutions at the turn of the century and leading up to the Iranian and Nicaragua revolutions in the 1970s and 1980s.