Book Review: Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber’s Idea of Modernity

aware of this (as was Ali Shariati later as an intellectual in exile who prepared the way for the 1979 revolution). Further research into this stereotyping Orientalist ideology could further illuminate how Western imperial powers have for generations been evoking revolutionary movements among supposedly “backward” peoples, particularly among Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, etc. Are scholars of the “Middle East” investigating the ways in which the intensification of Orientalism, for example, in Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” ideology, has been generating further ferment in majority Muslim countries? The revolutionary ideology and movements that came together in the Constitutional Revolution did not simply subside and disappear after the Pahlavi regime consolidated its power in Iran. Aslan’s book offers a lively sketch of the players in that coalition whose continuing operation or transformation could be traced toward their reemergence in the 1950s and early 1960s as a new elected parliament that, under the leadership of Mohammad Mosadegh, boldly nationalized oil reserves and oil–production in 1963. This led to the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh and the new parliamentary government and the consolidation of power by the Shah sponsored by the US government. This government replaced British imperial control of Iran with systematic suppression of a burgeoning civil society that had enabled the reemergence of a nascent democracy. An elementary knowledge of Shi’a Islam enables the recognition that the US stumbled right into the role of the oppressive Yazid and even became the embodiment of the “Great Satan.” Now that Iranians are again protesting tyrannical suppression of their rights, in this case by an oppressive Shi’ite hierocracy, it would be helpful to understand the various oppositional groups and forces in Iran, including strands of Shi’ite Islam other than the currently entrenched “Supreme Leadership.”