Abbas Amanat’s magisterial work distills decades of interpretative research and teaching into a grand overview of Iranian history from 1501, when the country acquired the contours of its modern identity as the world’s only Twelver Shi‘i state, to the current Islamic Republic. This time frame is unusual. Overviews of modern Iranian history usually start with the “dawn of colonial modernity,” associated with the rise to power of the Qajars and the effect of their confrontation with Russian and British power in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ Peter Avery’s Modern Iran (1965), Nikki Keddie’s Roots of Revolution (1980; repr. 2003 and 2006), Yann Richard’s L’Iran: Naissance d’une république islamique (2006), now available in English as Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars (2019), Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted (Reference Dabashi2007), and Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (2008, rev. 2nd edn. 2018), all follow this model.Footnote ²

Iran: A Modern History happily breaks with this template by adding the three centuries prior to the rise of the Qajars to the narrative. Including the Safavid period as well as the tumultuous three-quarters of a century that followed the dynasty’s fall in 1722 in a synthetic work on modern Iranian history makes sense and has many virtues. Most importantly, a longer time span allows, indeed forces one to identify historical patterns and developments springing from indigenous roots rather than from latter-day external impulses involving the West and its transformative influence on Iran. This begins with the country’s physical environment, its topography and climate, recurring droughts and famines, their causes and consequences for life and society, for the movement of goods and people, for the state of the economy. It also mandates serious engagement with the question of religion and its role in state formation and the creation of a national identity. A longitudinal view, finally, precludes or at least mitigates a teleology of resistance, liberation and redemption that lurks in a narrative organized around dichotomies such as “Iran against the world,” or “the people versus the state,” mellat in opposition to dowlat.

Amanat pays plenty of attention to the materiality of life, to the natural environment, to war and its logistics, economic issues and epidemics, but his story’s frame of reference is essentially ideational. He works from the time-transcending paradigm of an idealized Iranshahr, a celestial garden shielded from the harshness of nature by way of protective walls but in reality a vulnerable land, perennially exposed to outside attack and invasion, yet also remarkably resilient, endowed with a cultural core defined by language, adaptable and creative, centered on cities, urban oases with a strong individual identity. Onto this paradigm he plots a narrative that follows the Iranian state as it was forged in the crucible of competing forces consisting of tribal chiefs on horseback, sedentary kings and a high clergy that occasionally opposed, but typically partnered with, worldly rule. He casts Iranian history, before and after the Islamic invasion, as a tripartite model consisting of kingship, clerical leadership and what the author calls the “prophetic paradigm,” the irrepressible impulse to view revelation not as closed, but as recurrent, open-ended, indeed never-ending. The king represented the unity of the realm; he had a heavenly mandate, which included power over life and death but also the obligation to be just. The clerical establishment was held to see to it that he met that obligation. The two acknowledged each other’s legitimacy and generally adhered to a division of labor whereby the state took care of military defense and material prosperity while the religious estate strove to make society reflect the divine order. They often worked in tandem, and were especially successful when they joined forces to combat heresy. Yet their collaboration was often disrupted by the third force, which typically came in the form of a messianic figure calling for millenarian renewal involving the overthrow of the established order. The author calls the recurrent movements that grew out of this, with their appeal to the unseen and the imagined and their redemptive promises, the “counter-cultural” element in Iranian history, which, expressed in persistent esotericism and perennial skepticism, must be seen as one of its most salient traits. One might add that the tensions thus created account for much of the tumult as well as the creativity in Iran’s history.

The Safavid period is crucial in this regard, and Amanat is right to give the Safavids their full due by devoting a full 150 pages to the ruling house, their ways of administering their realm and the patterns they inherited and reworked or created and transmitted to later generations. After all, no matter how we view and evaluate them—as the avatars of the Iranian nation, as the last dynasty to stand tall for Iran, or as the religiously inspired rulers who prefigured the Islamic Republic—the Safavids are indisputably the dynasty that helped shape modern Iran, that set the plateau off against surrounding empires and principalities and gave it a distinct character, perhaps even “saved” the country, by proclaiming Twelver Shiʿism their religion of state. They gave Iran religious boundaries that largely overlap with territorial ones, and thus a particularism that persists until today. They also endowed Shi‘ism with a devotional dimension that proved enduringly popular.

Amanat’s treatment of the Safavids, presented in three chapters, one on the rise of the dynasty, one on their heyday, and one on their decline and demise, admirably synthesizes the scholarship on the period that has come out in the last quarter-century. He narrates the story of the Safavids from their rise as a heterodox, millenarian movement from charismatic tribal leadership to Persian-style kingship buttressed by an increasingly institutionalized form of religion, part of it transmitted by “Arab” ʿulemā, the jurists who in the mid-sixteenth century migrated to Iran from Lebanon and Bahrain to teach the Safavids the tenets of the faith they had adopted. He does not prettify this story, he does not shy away from the violence that accompanied their conquest of Iran, the terror they sowed among the Christians of the Caucasus in their bloody campaigns of conversion. He sees Shi‘ism as the single most significant factor in the survival of the Safavid state, yet doesn’t attempt to reconcile that notion with the brutality with which the creed was imposed.

Interestingly, Amanat combines the entire Safavid period after Shah ‘Abbas, both their lingering high noon and their descent into failure and defeat, and the tumultuous eighteenth century, the period following their fall, the “unhappy interregnum” as he calls it, all the way to the ascent to power of Āqā Mohammad Khān, into one long chapter. This dilution makes the question of what caused the edifice to crumble less urgent, yet no less necessary. Here is where the analysis gets muddled, amounting to a grab-bag of talking-points rather than a discussion ranking proximate causes. The overview of the forces that brought down the Safavids offered here puts too much emphasis on unproven “climate change” as an independent variable, and refers to an ill-defined and largely unexplained “tribal resurgence”—a legacy of Ann Lambton’s well-known article under that titleFootnote ³—but pays insufficient attention to what, in this reviewer’s opinion, was the key factor, the loss of loyalty that came with a demonstrable neglect of the periphery on the part of an increasingly insouciant center. The author next quickly cuts through the thicket of the bewildering array of ephemeral warlords that populate the period, to present a rather conventional account of the two who stand out: Nader Shah, the national liberator turned crazed mass murderer who failed to break Iran’s attachment to Shi ‘ism, and Karim Khān Zand, Nāder’s benevolent counterpart who made Shiraz momentarily great again. His portrayal of Nāder Shah as a military genius forging a quasi-modern army betrays the influence of Michael Axworthy’s insightful study of the warlord.Footnote ⁴

Leaving the way the author acquits himself regarding the Qajar period, his real specialty, to other reviewers, I will only make a few more comments on the remainder of the narrative. As said, Amanat casts Iranian society, before and after the Safavids, not along the dichotomous lines of mellat versus dowlat, but rather as a series of creative tensions and paradoxes— examples being the battle between frenzied modernization and equally furious reaction to it on the part of the “conservative” forces, clerical and non-clerical ones. He does the same with the battle over popular sovereignty and representation and the role this came to play in the late nineteenth century culminating in the Constitutional Revolution.

Just brilliant is Amanat’s analysis of the radical change in Iran’s political culture that came with the adoption of a constitution and a parliament in the early twentieth century—the fruit of an unlikely coalition of reformist intellectuals, disgruntled merchants and a clerical class suspicious of weak kings ready to hand the fortress of Islam over to the infidels. This set the stage for a confrontation between secular modernism and a (novel) clerical claim to executive power. During the Pahlavi dictatorship that followed, the clerical estate, shocked into submission, initially went underground, only to reemerge as a resentful resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. What followed was the eruption and success of the Islamic Revolution, described here as a blend between Third Worldism and religious symbolism. All along, the book deftly navigates various controversial episodes in Iran’s history, most notably the rise and fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, who in 1953 was brought down in a British‒American-sponsored coup.

In the eyes of this reviewer, the book is evenhanded and measured, which, in the contested field that Iranian history is, does not mean that it will be accepted as such. Many Iranians, for instance, are likely to find fault with the way the author portrays Vosuq al-Dowla, the politician forever associated with the Anglo accord of 1919, not as a nefarious traitor, but, prefiguring Oliver Bast’s forthcoming study of the period, as a hamstrung diplomat who played a weak hand to the best of his ability. No doubt both the champions and the detractors of Prime Minister Mosaddeq will criticize the account of his rise and fall for having distorted the record—which probably means Amanat got it about right.

Naturally, Iran: A Modern History has some shortcomings and blind spots. Amanat pays attention to the interaction between the Persophone, Twelver-Shi‘i center and the periphery, but not enough. He views the people of the periphery mostly as invaders, and all but ignores the formative contribution of “minority” forces, Georgian and Armenian gholāms, “slave-soldiers,” Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, all equally important for a proper understanding of a country to which the term “unity in diversity” is singularly applicable. This comes out, for instance, in the scant attention paid to officials like Allāh Verdi Khān and his son, Emām Qoli Khān, Georgian-Armenians who ruled Fars and much of southern Iran between 1595 and the early 1630s, and in this period only ceded to the shah in power and wealth; or to the Kurdish Ganj ʿAli Khān, who under Shah ‘Abbas I created a serious powerbase for himself while administering Kermān and later Qandahar for over three decades. Importantly, the author does not see the Safavids as having forged a nation—that would come much later—nor as having created a political entity called Iran—that had been a reality for many centuries—yet he does argue that the Safavid state helped anticipate the one and solidify the other. Consequently, I would have liked to see some reflections on the remarkable and curious resonance of the Safavids for much of the period that followed their fall, when Iranian elites were grasping for a new legitimizing force or family—a rare example of identification with a non-religious cause prior to modern nationalism.

Amanat manages to portray Iran at once as a normal country and as an exceptional place in the way its multiple religious and political paradoxes and ambiguities have always manifested themselves. Teleology is not entirely absent in this portrayal. There is a certain unarticulated linearity in the account that is perhaps inevitable in a national narrative like this. The Safavid period is, despite its “impressive achievements,” one of “unfulfilled potential” (p. 125). The tumultuous eighteenth century showed “flashes of national awareness” (p. 173). The book is far better than most of its kind in refraining from presenting a triumphalist history, yet could have done more to treat Iran both as a country sui generis and as a realm situated in a larger context, showing its embeddedness in the surrounding Islamic universe and the world of west and south Asia—the Ottomans and the Mughals being the most consequential interlocutors until the Russians and the British assumed that role in the course of the nineteenth century.

Finally, Amanat hews to the prevailing interpretation of the Iranians as victims rather than as masters of their own fate. In his hands, they largely act as recipients of the semi-colonial status their country was subjected to in the course of the nineteenth century. Subscribing to the verdict of the much-celebrated American advisor Morgan Shuster, who called Iranians “hapless victims of the game of cards” played by outside powers, he offers virtually no discussion about the role that Iranians themselves played, about the tendency of the upper classes from the shah on down to align themselves with foreign actors, to seek protection from the Russians or the British against domestic rivals, taking and offering money, promising access to power, all of which facilitated the presence and impact of these foreign powers throughout the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth. One looks in vain for a discussion of how to evaluate this type of venality—which today one would label “treasonous”—and how it relates to the pride Iranians tended and still tend to display about their own country and their attachment to it.

None of this detracts from the value of this work. Evenhanded without being bland, argued with passion and verve, animated by an obvious love of Iran and its complicated people, Iran: A Modern History will surely remain the standard synthetic work on the country’s modern history for many years to come. All future interpretations of that same history will have to take its measure before offering an alternative reading.