ABSTRACT

Sayyid Abolhasan Bani-Sadr was born on Wednesday, 22 March 1933, in the small village of Baghcheh near Hamadan in central Iran. He came from a distinguished religious family. Bani-Sadr became a significant contributor to the gradual construction of "the Islamic Ideology" more by disposition of character than by any accident or deliberation. Matters of economic mismanagement were high on Bani-Sadr's manifesto against the Pahlavi regime. The centrality of oil in the Iranian economy was of much concern to the Muslim ideologue who wrote his long treatise on Naft va Soltek, a variation on the theme of Petrole et Violence, between 1969 and 1974. Bani-Sadr's attentions to economic issues are more matters of the ideological articulation of a political agenda than the theoretical elements of a political economy. He sees aspects of his Islamically derived political economy as a mechanism for world unification, all under the Islamic banner.