“The past,” R. H. Tawney famously said, “reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing.” He could have added: “and what current historiography is interested in.” For much of the twentieth century, historians—influenced by sociology—investigated the role of various social forces in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. For some, the leading force was the rowshanfekrān (intelligentsia), helped to some extent by the craft-trade guilds and to a lesser extent by the religious minorities such as the Azalis and the Armenians. For others, the driving force was the ‘ulama backed by the wider masses. This debate produced much spilled ink, ruffled feathers, and personal mudslinging. This was not surprising since the debate was related to current politics. In the words of Benedetto Croce, “all history is contemporary history.”

Vanessa Martin, in her highly readable new book Iran Between Islamic Nationalism and Secularism, which in many ways is a worthy follow-up to her previous Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of 1906, tries to change the whole focus of discussion. Keeping pace with recent fashions in history, she moves away from social forces to popular religion, from the intelligentsia and clergy to national culture, from sociology to political theory. Her main concern is to evaluate the consistency of political thought among secularists as well as conservative and reformist clerics. A recurring question throughout this book is how far secularists and Islamists were aware of the logical underpinnings of their political philosophy. Did they realize that Islam and the central ideas of secularism and constitutionalism were contradictory, and therefore Islam and democracy were incompatible? In other words, were the leading figures in the constitutional movement systematic political thinkers worthy of Aristotle and Descartes? Not surprisingly, she finds them wanting.

The book also has separate chapters on the local politics in Tabriz, Isfahan, and Bushire. Making excellent use of British and Iranian archival materials as well as the often-overlooked minutes of provincial and town Anjomans (Councils, Assemblies), these chapters provide rich insight into local concerns. They vividly show how far these were, or were not, related to the unfolding of the revolution at the center. These chapters inevitably have some repetitions since the different regions were affected by the same country-wide trends—the introduction of new schools, the influx of foreign goods, the export of agricultural products such as opium and tobacco, the frequent debasement of the coinage, the fall in the value of silver, the resentment against foreign customs officials, and the increasing influence of the British-owned Imperial Bank. These chapters tend to emphasize the role of local clerics, but underemphasize that of regional magnates. One cannot fully analyze the Constitutional Revolution and its eventual outcome without taking account of the decisive role played by such notables as Sepahdār and Sardār Asʿad Bakhtiyāri. But then to do so would be to return to the old-fashioned search for social forces.

The book's main difficulty, however, is its tendency to project a very contemporary question—is Islam compatible with democracy?—back into the past. As the very first page of the book admits, its central question is pertinent simply because it is “timely.” The difficulty is that this question was not raised by the actors of the time simply because for them democracy—meaning constitutional and representative government—could be compatible with Islam since the vast majority of the country were Muslims and as such would not elect representatives who would threaten Islam. Moreover, if society required changes in the shari'a it could be done legitimately since Shi'ism permits ijtihad (independent legal authority to update traditions). Thus reformist senior clerics such as Tabātabāʾi, Behbahāni, Māzandarāni, Khorāsāni, Nā'ini, Aqā Nurallāh, and Thiqat al-Islam were not indulging in fuzzy and confused thinking. Rather their thinking reflected, as the book admits, the contemporary notion that Shi'i identity was readily compatible with constitutional government (p. 111). This notion is more understandable than the much later one that claimed a narrow stratum should have the institutionalized power to override the will of the majority and its representatives. Even the later notion that the ‘ulama should be seen as a special stratum separate from society would have sounded strange to them. In places, Vanessa Martin seems to credit royalist clerics led by Fazlallah Nuri for “understanding” that there was an inherent contradiction between Islam and constitutional government.

The book starts intending to be “timely” but ends up being anachronistic, projecting a contemporary problem back to the past. By doing so it judges historical figures not by yardsticks of their own time but those of much later decades. As R. G. Collingwood stressed in The Idea of History, we should always be on guard against thinking that people in the past would have raised the same questions as us and would have answered them in the same way as ourselves. Their concerns should be discussed in the context of their own time.