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Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper's important new book, Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, tells the story of the struggle for democracy in Iran through the writings and experiences of a dissident, mid-ranking cleric Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari. Religiously liberal and politically progressive, Eshkevari is a prominent member of the Iranian National-Religious Alliance, an association of political activists, intellectuals, and writers whose worldview is inspired and shaped by the legacies of Muhammad Mossadeq, [MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING]Ali Shariati, Mehdi Bazargan, and Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani.
Through the translation of his key writings and interviews from the late 1990s, the volume provides a window into Eshkevari's political and religious thinking and, by extension, into Iranian politics. This time period coincided with the liberal opening under Muhammad Khatami's presidency as Iranian society was engaged in full debate about the relationships between Islam and democracy, religion and state, reason and revelation, and tradition and modernity. Although further public articulation of these debates has been squashed by a conservative crackdown against Khatami's reformist agenda, it is widely believed that Iran's political culture underwent an important transformation during this period. One indication of this is how today even Khatami's detractors often invoke the rhetoric of freedom, rights, and democracy in ways unheard of prior to his electoral victory.
Mir-Hosseini and Tapper, respected anthropologists at the University of London, divide their book into five chapters, including a prologue and an epilogue. Each chapter begins with a detailed explanation of the background and political context necessary to understand Eshkevari's selected writings. The book commences with a chapter for the nonspecialist reader on the history of the Islam-democracy debate inside Iran, which covers most of the key events during Iran's 20th century and focuses on the postrevolutionary period in general and the Khatami period in particular. With the possible exception of Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi's essay, "Iran's Torturous...