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Department of History

Shari'a Law and Islamic Government in the Iranian Revolution

Questions for Seminar:
  • Was Khomeini a conservative or a radical?
  • Where lies the ultimate authority behind Islamic law in modern Iran?

Assigned Reading:
Zubaida, chapter 6.
Amr G.E. Sabet, "Wilayat al-faqih and the Meaning of Islamic Government," in Arshin Adib-Moghaddem (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (Cambridge UP, 2014), 69-87.

Primary Source:

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, "Islamic Government" (with introduction), in Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton UP, 2009), 155-80.

Further reading:
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (Cambridge UP, 2014).
Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (Penguin, 2014).
Kingshuk Chatterjee, 'Ali Shari'ati and the Shaping of Political Islam in Iran (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Najam Haider, Shi'i Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2014).
Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale UP, 2006).
Asghar Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic (IB Tauris, 1997).
Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom and Democracy: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (Oxford UP, 2000).
Sami Zubaida, "An Islamic State? The Case of Iran," Middle East Report 153 (July-August 1988), 3-7.
Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State in the Middle East (IB Tauris, 2009).