His aim is not to belittle the reader but to re-inform. Axworthy’s modern history of Iran is a thick, educated, and brilliant look into this often-misunderstood country.Axworthy allows his readers their misconceptions, though. With the Iranian revolution of 1979, however, we see the nation of Iran enter into a new era, one where the traditions and battles of the past come head-to-head with the beliefs of its people and the pressures of a global society. Iran (and the Middle East) has been a focal point for civilization in all its good and bad forms for the last ten millennia. In Revolutionary Iran, Michael Axworthy makes a wonderful observation: “Iranian history can be seen as a microcosm of human history as a whole: empires, revolutions, invasions, art, architecture, warriors, conquerors, great thinkers, great writers and poets, holy men and lawgivers, charismatic leaders and the blackest villains.” I whole-heartedly agree with this statement. Revolutionary Iran is both richly textured and from one of the leading authorities on the region combining an expansive scope with the most accessible and definitive account of this epoch in all its humanity. Whereas the world's major revolutions of the previous two centuries had been fueled by Western, secular ideologies, the Iranian Revolution drew its inspiration from Islam. Throughout, he emphasizes that the Iranian revolution was centrally important in modern history because it provided the world with a clear model of development that was not rooted in Western ideologies. Michael Axworthy takes listeners through the major periods in Iranian history over the last 30 years: the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of the new one the Iran-Iraq war the reconstruction era following the war the reformist wave led by Mohammed Khatami and the present day, in which reactionaries have re-established control.

Its success unleashed a wave of Islamist fervor across the Middle East and signaled a sharp decline in the appeal of Western ideologies in the Islamic world. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a defining moment of the modern era.

Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy