ABSTRACT
Ernest Gellner claims that civil society cannot occur in Muslim communities because the unique and exclusive sacralization of one faith makes pluralism impossible. Gellner's argument against the concept of an Islamic civil society is dubious in the face of historical facts of Iranian society, but also the Arab world's. New institutions and groups, which were created as a consequence of the Constitutional Revolution and Reza Shah's authoritative modernization, new boundaries and alliances were established which came to be the cornerstone of the emerging modern civil society of Iran. The constitutionalism and parliamentarism that was created by the Constitutional Revolution led to the institutionalization of a new political culture in which the new middle occupational groups played a crucial role. Skocpol's structuralist theory of revolution as a 'basic transformation of a society's state and class structure' provides a deterministic framework of structural change with revolution as its medium.
