A new edition of Mottahedeh's gripping account of Islam and Politics in revolutionary Iran.

Drawn from the first-hand accounts of eyewitnesses, Mottahedeh's absorbing tale of Islam and politics in revolutionary Iran is widely regarded as one of the best records of that turbulent time. This revised edition includes a new chronology detailing events in Iran from the revolution up to the present day.

Even with news breaking daily in Iran, the first book I send myself and other readers back to has to be Roy Mottahedeh’s “The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran,” which was first published in 1985. A professor at Harvard, Mottahedeh has written an intellectual history as stirring and graceful as any novel. He sets the intimate biography of a young cleric against the vast epic of Iranian thought from Zoroaster to Avicenna, Kasravi to Khomeini. “The Mantle of the Prophet” is literary, learned, and deeply felt; the writing is splendid, and the story is an education for the Western reader unaware of the powerful tides of Shi’ite and Persian thought over a period of centuries.