ABSTRACT
This study is an attempt to read Shi’i discourse in Iran over the last 60 years as a theological discourse, a discussion about God and God’s relationship with humanity. I have suggested, and will suggest repeatedly throughout this study, that such a reading is significant for two main reasons. The first is that this theological dimension is, to all intents and purposes, missing from most of the scholarly analyses dealing with this discourse as a cultural phenomenon, or even with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 as a historical event. Much discussion is given to class relations and to the formulation of Neo-Marxist understandings of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Iranian history.1 These understandings focus on the stratification and resource allocation within Iranian society, integrating into these in different degrees the ideational encroachments of western modernism. Attempts to construct an intellectual history of Iran during the last 150 years focus on the roles of intellectuals trained in the west. These analyses highlight the role played by different perceptions of modernity in the formation of an Iranian public sphere, cultural and political.2
