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In After Khomeini, Saïd Amir Arjomand, a prolific writer and a leading sociologist in Middle East studies, presents a sophisticated analysis of Iranian politics and society from the death of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1989 to the present. In many ways, the author's recent work should be seen as a continuation of his earlier book, The Turban for the Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), in which he argues that the 1979 Iranian revolution was a result of complex social transformations, including the expansion of educational institutions, urbanization, state centralization, and changes in the Shii hierocracy. In that book, Arjomand also provides a historical-sociological account of the consolidation of the Shii Islamist theocracy in the early postrevolution years. A tense battle occurred over the new political order's constitutional definition, and the clergy eventually gained the upper hand. Along with Ervand Abrahamian's Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), The Turban for the Crown remains the definitive scholarly work on the 1979 revolution to this day.
In After Khomeini, Arjomand continues his 1988 argument, though now with an emphasis on the dynamics of constitutional politics that led to a new form of factionalism within the state apparatus over the past two decades. He argues that with the death of Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary state continued to experience a struggle among the "children of revolution" despite the introduction of new amendments to the constitution in 1989, which were meant to serve as a routinization of charismatic authority but in...