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Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) became one of the most important secular leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the group. A Guerrilla Odyssey presents the first comprehensive examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla movement in Iran. Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of archival material and interviews with activists, the author demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that defined Iranian political life in the 1970s. Vahabzadeh offers a critique of various aspects of the Fadai’s theories of national liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary Iran. In addition, the author makes a compelling case explaining why older revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed into the new democratic social movements that emerged from the 1980s onward in the form of today’s women’s, student, and youth movements in Iran. A Guerilla Odyssey is a meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.

In the early twentieth century, the Iranian Reza Shah state (1925–1941), in conjunction with the emerging group of state-trained scholars, called the status of ulama as knowledge producers into question. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the impact of state modernization on the Muslim clergy and their responses to modernization but has paid lesser attention to the passive role of the ulama or their representation in modernist intellectual and literary discourses. I examine two major Persian sources of the period to argue that intellectual representation of the ulama, in both polemics and academic critique, aided the state in its attempt to push the ulama from the center of intellectual and social life to the margins of ritual purity. Among my primary sources is a previously unexamined academic thesis authored by Qasim Tuysirkani in 1938.

While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam’s role and those who take a hardline defensive stance. Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajaee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology. Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha’eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari‘ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.