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The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (Review

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Article in Iranian Studies · March 2004

DOI: 10.1080/0021086042000232983

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 Iranian Studies, volume 37, number 1, March 2004

Brian Spooner

The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

(Review Article)

Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2002).
ISBN 1-85168-234-1.

Many who see this review will recognize the reissue of a book they remember with
some nostalgia from an earlier reading, perhaps as early as its original publication in
1985, when the images of Iran’s revolution were still vivid. The reissue now,
seventeen years later, is particularly appropriate at a time when Iran is once again
reaching a peak of international attention. It differs from the original only in the
addition of a two-page preface: no more was needed.
The original had followed a long stream of publications, academic and trade, on the
causes and consequences of Iran’s violent transformation in 1978-1979. It is
interesting to look back over the reviews of The Mantle of the Prophet from that
time. They are, as one would expect, uniformly good, often (like this one) exceeding
the standard length. However, it was yet too early to recognize some of the book’s
most important qualities, for this work represents perhaps the most comprehensive
exploration of modern Iranian cultural consciousness so far available.
Mottahedeh tells us (p. 8) that he began the project in 1978 before the violence had
begun to escalate out of control. He spent two years reading the time-honored
curriculum that every mulla reads, and interviewing Iranians (and one or two Iraqis)
trained in this curriculum in the traditional seminaries. The “Note to the Reader” (p.7-
10) explains what he was trying to do and how he went about it, as well as his
relationship with “Ali Hashemi,” which was central to the project. The product is
much more than a book about the revolution, and it transcends the literature that the
revolution generated. The author was presumably caught up in the revolution as he
wrote, and the book must have come out very differently than might otherwise have
happened had the events of early 1979 not culminated in such total upheaval. The
final product is about what it means to be an Iranian in the modern world. It is rooted
in the life experience of Ali Hashemi and his friends and acquaintances, and it is
appropriately framed by the historical process of the revolution, reviewing its putative
beginnings but focusing on the generation that brought the revolution. The narrative
brings in the different facets of life peculiar to Iran: rural, provincial, metropolitan;
childhood, adolescence, student, professional; rich and poor. It touches, moreover, on

ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/04/010109-08

©2004 The International Society for Iranian Studies
DOI 10.1080/0021086042000232983
110 Spooner

all the institutions of ordinary daily life: nazr, dowreh, hay’at, popular music, that have
made Iran culturally what it is today, before and after the revolution.

The Mantle of the Prophet is not dated by the revolution: since the mid-1980s it has
matured rather than become obsolete. It is a pleasure to review it now almost a
quarter-century after the revolution, when the perspective with which it was written
comes more easily to the reader. As I write, in August 2003, the politics of the ulama
in Najaf, and of the Shi`i ulama in general in relation to the society they are a part of,
give it a new topicality. At the same time, the conflict that was at the heart of the
revolution may be traced back to pre-Islamic times and compared and correlated with
similar conflicts in the history of the West and other parts of the world, and which
underlies every page of the book, has evolved to a new stage, but is perhaps no nearer
to final resolution. It is important to understand that it is a conflict not peculiar to
Iran. In Iran, however, it has a distinctive cultural color and historical trajectory, and
in recent decades an inevitability, urgency, complexity, and even (the word recurs
conspicuously throughout the book) ambiguity.
What actually is the essence of this conflict? It is so complex that it cannot be tied
down to simple definable factors. It is between old and new, senior and junior, Islam
and non-Islam, religious and secular, elite and popular, Shi‘i and other conceptions of
authority, indigenous and Western. No two of these oppositions, or polarities, overlap
entirely, and none of them quite captures the Iranian dynamic. It is easy to reduce it to
what we recognize as Church and State, but these are misleading terms, for both the
religious and the secular establishments (whatever we call them) have different
connotations in the Iranian and in the Islamic context, and this type of Church-State
conflict has scarcely been seen in the West since mediaeval times.
Why then did the past century become Iran’s revolutionary century, alone (or at
least uniquely) in the Middle East and in the world of Islam? Was it perhaps because
of similarities (and even historical affinity) between Iran and the other non-
Enlightenment countries (Russia, China) that had their revolutions in the twentieth
century? Mottahedeh’s book helps us to meet the challenge of this question in ways
that were not achieved by any other of the multitude of books that have touched on it
since 1979. Of all the books written about the revolution Mottahedeh’s is at once the
most accessible to the general reader, the most successful at imparting the peculiar
Iranian cultural flavor of his subject in a way that is captivating both to the specialist
and the non-specialist, and the most successful at avoiding simple answers and helping
us work out our own ways of dealing with the complexity, or as he writes “the
ambiguity” of the experience. “In fact,” he writes, “Persian poetry came to be the
emotional home in which the ambiguity that was at the heart of Iranian culture lived
most freely and openly” (p. 164), Later: “Among every category of Iranian there seem
to be large numbers who see the love of ambiguity that gave Iranian culture a flexible
exterior and a private interior as something no longer tenable, a freedom that history
no longer permits” (p. 379). This, briefly, is Iran’s version of the type of polarization
 The Mantle of the Prophet 111

that has emerged in so many countries over the past generation, producing violent
conflict between competing identities.
As a consequence of this considerable literary achievement, the book is in no way
dated or even tied to a particular historical interest. It is not just a book about the
Iranian revolution: it is a book about Iran. Of all the books on the revolution, and of
all the other books written in English on Iran, it is one of a handful (cf. for example,
E. G. Browne’s A Year amongst the Persians, 1893) that will continue to hold a place
on reading lists for the foreseeable future. The interweaving of history, religion,
politics, and the details of everyday life in various situations, urban and rural,
traditional and modern, is effortless, and remarkable. It provides a critical appreciation
of a revolutionary experience that was first launched consciously and actively over a
century ago, and shows the relationship between the experience of Iran and that of
the whole world, as well as the diversity of understanding and opinion in Iran itself.
As a mass-circulation paperback, it will probably have done more to advance the
understanding of Iran among the general public than any other book.
As we look back over the period since the first edition, it is salutary to remember
how different the world was less than two decades ago. We are still in the early years
of what has come to be called unipolarity in global relations. How puzzling the
revolution was in that earlier period when we assumed that nothing like this ever
happened except as a local expression of the underlying global conflict between the
U.S. and the U.S.S.R. This reviewer has vivid memories of life in Tehran in the later
50s and early 60s when we waited for the revolution. How sure we were that it was
coming! Every week something happened to make it appear closer, inevitable.
Nevertheless, it did not come. It failed to come for so long that we, and, I think, most
Iranians, gradually became accustomed to its not coming and our attention drifted
with the affairs of everyday life.
We forgot about it for a decade or even more. Insofar as it was discussed, people
assumed that the reason lay with the same external forces that were always credited
with the ability to shape events in Iran. In the 1950s and 1960s, the bipolarity of world
affairs certainly was a factor. Why was the same factor not effective a decade and a
half later?
By the time the momentum began to build again in the mid 1970s, after a
succession of ill-advised steps by the regime, many of us had come to assume it could
no longer happen. How could a real revolution still be possible? Then for reasons that
have been worked over repeatedly in so many publications, the momentum became
unstoppable. By the end of the summer of 1978 the only uncertainty for most people
was how much blood it would take. Social forces had emerged that Iran had not seen
before, because they were characteristic of the time. It took ten years of unexpected
war with Iraq to bring them back under control.
The world has not seen many authentic popular revolutions: one could name the
French, the Russian, and the Chinese. There are no others to compare it to except,
perhaps, the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 or the English in the 17th century. Each is
different in significant ways from the others, but there is a recognizable model that
112 Spooner

they all to a degree conform to (cf. for example, Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of a
Revolution, New York, 1965). Only when the Iranian revolution was technically
accomplished in February 1979 did its trajectory begin to conform unmistakably to
this general model. The paranoid arrogance of the victors demanded still more blood.
Before the flow could be staunched, the same arrogance was force-fed by the Iraqi
invasion, which may eventually have aided the process of post-revolutionary
routinization as much as inhibiting it. Unlike the internal wars fought by Lenin and
Stalin in the 1930s, the Iraqi invasion helped to keep alive the spirit of revolution
more productively by focusing it on an external enemy. Expiation of ten extravagant
years of war, as well as the revolution itself and the Reign of Terror that followed it,
was perhaps further delayed by the eventual demise of Khomeini in 1989.
Routinization is still not complete. It would not be unusual if few benefits of
revolution were to survive the final return to normality, other than, perhaps, the
memory of catharsis and an increased political and cultural awareness throughout the
country.
The Mantle of the Prophet is a landmark study in the literature on revolutions. But
what about Iranian Studies more generally? It is one of the great ironies of this field,
both in its early stages and since its inclusion in the curricular category of “area
studies,” that most of the academic work that succeeded in penetrating into the
mysteries of culturally specific Iranian experience has not been illuminated by any
comparative context. One of the great virtues of this book that raises it to an unusual
level of significance among books on Iran is the pervasive comparativism, the global
contextualization of the Iranian experience that continues unobtrusively throughout.
Mottahedeh works with Iranian detail, but the larger canvas is global history. For
example, the preface to this reprint defers to Macaulay for an appropriate introduction
to revolution (p. 5). The “Note to the Reader,” which follows it, suggests that “This
book is, in some sense, the story of all of us in the last part of the twentieth century...”
(p.10). At the level of detail, the relationship between the scholasticism of the madrasa
and our mediaeval Western trivium is noticed with advantage. The drama cycle of
Moharram is introduced as the only indigenous theater known to most Iranians (ru-
howzi might also have been mentioned). It is compared to Greek tragedy as religious
in origin, and comparable also to the Stations of the Cross. The associated flagellation
survives in the Hispanic world. A penchant for celebrating the martyrdom of heroes is
associated with Savushun. There is much to delight the comparatist here, as well as to
edify the general reader, and combat any lingering assumption that Iranians are
different, Muslims are different, and Iranian Muslims are doubly different.
Comparison generates a wealth of ideas here not only about the Iranian revolution
and its place in world history, but about Iranian history in general (Islamic and pre-
Islamic), and Iranians’ historical awareness and the previous regime’s efforts to
manipulate it. The Shah’s effort to preempt Iranian nationalism had appealed to the
memory of Cyrus and Darius, taken from the Western history of Iran as handed down
by the Greeks, not the kings (nor of course the regicides) of the Shahnama. The
 The Mantle of the Prophet 113

evolving Iranian experience of the West that began in the 19th century had subsumed
one pole of the conflict, exposing Iran to Western military organization, Western-style
education, nationalist ideology, and models for separating religious and secular
organization at the national level and defining the relationship between them. The
same ideas had hastened the revolution, even though they did not win it. Underlying
the whole narrative is the struggle for authority, framed in the ideas of the time,
conservative vs. ideological, local vs. globalizing. If there is to be a single central
national authority, should it lie with strong men— sultans, shahs, presidents—or with
God, to whose authority Muslims by definition submit? If with God, how do we
recognize His authority?
Shi`ism offers an answer to this question, but the answer creates additional
problems. It is interesting that it matches the scholasticism of historical learning: all
knowledge is in the text, but the student can understand the text only through a
teacher. Earlier teachers have passed on the text adding their own commentaries to it.
Only the best living teacher can pull it all together for the current time. The text does
not change, but times do change. Therefore, reading the text alone is only half the
training. The correct relationship with the pre-eminent teacher in the scholastic
system is crucial. This is of course exactly the position of the Catholic Church.
However, the Church is formally structured to speak with one voice of authority. The
Church, too, which is the guardian of scriptural truth, is maintained independently by
the laying on of hands. In Islam, and especially in Shi`i Islam, the living tradition of
interpretation makes the authority accessible to those with the necessary talent and
dedication in each generation. To begin with, the supreme authority in the
interpretation of the text was the Imam in the sense of the direct descendent of the
Prophet, who provided the same complementary assurance as the Christian laying on
of hands. During the Greater Occultation (since 896 AD), as the history of the world
is worked out, we must resort to the most distinguished living Schoolman. How can
we know who is the most distinguished? It took a thousand years to work out the
answer to this question. It was worked out with relentless logic in the history of the
Shi`i community. The idea of a single model for all to emulate emerged finally only in
the formal introduction of Models of Emulation (marja`u’l-taqlid) in the nineteenth
century (pp. 211-3), interestingly very close to the date of the comparable
announcement of the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope (1870). Khomeini’s
formulation of the velāyat-e faqih (p. 247) was a further logical development of the
same process. Strong men always represent an elite, and rule through traditional
structures. Religious authority depends on popular support, and must create a
structure. The revolution was faced with the task of creating a national structure that
would legitimize God’s authority in the management of national and local life. It
matches well with the steady increase in the rationalization and centralization of
authority and political power that larger and larger parts of the world have
experienced over the past two centuries.
The success of Mottahedeh’s work lies not in the presentation or even the
suggestion of such new formulations or ideas, but rather in its texture. As a read, it
114 Spooner

resembles more a good novel than a work of historical or philosophical

demonstration. To create its effect it uses rich detail, narrated with deep empathy. We
are made to feel the difference from English or other Western history, but we are
made to feel it as though it were our own. We are taken inside the complexity of the
religious institution, exploring a special Sufi path among the ulama, as well as the
standard Shi`i hierarchy, the Najaf connection, and the significant details of
divergence from the Ahl-e Sunnat (p. 206). The complex history of relations between
what we would call church and state receives extended attention. The problem of
authority is a recurrent theme because it provides the essential religious justification
for the abandonment of quietism for a religiously led modern revolution. The special
Shi`i sense of leadership, authority, reason, and the science of law, the logic of which
is worked out over centuries, culminates not as we might have thought in the
emergence of the idea of the model (marja`), but in the culminating velāyat-e faqih.
This is the most momentous cusp so far in the struggle between shah and mulla,
which was staged by the establishment of Ithnā ‘Ashari Shi`i Islam as the state religion
by Shah Esmā`il in 1501. At last the Faqih, preparing for this culminating role, was
able to mobilize the general population and turn the urban proletariat back from its
pursuit of temptations imported from the West to support a monolithic Islamic state
structure without precedent. As we follow this narrative we learn much historical
detail about how the principles of Islam, rationalized by the Shi`i ulama, may be
ideally applied. We are shown examples of traditional justice, in the hands of a good
judge (p. 209), and the Islamic conception of law (p. 225) in its practical application.
We arrive finally at a historical juncture where the argument for realizing the structure
of Islam as the structure of society is self-evident in the imperative need for an Islamic
Republic (p. 285). Mosaddeq’s political skills, Reza Shah’s career, and what he did for
the definition of mullah (p. 234) are episodes in the larger story.
The spirituality of Islam also receives full attention. Apart from the acolyte’s Sufi
quest within the hierarchy mentioned above, the role of the mullah as pastor is also
treated (p. 337). The sermons of `Ali come up repeatedly in stories of individual piety.
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, even Bahaism, are not ignored. The role of
Satan is explored: in Islam he is “a remarkably complex personality,” perhaps more so
than the Zoroastrian, Judaic, or Christian versions, because among other things he is
the ultimate monotheist, taking towhid to the point of refusing to obey a divine
instruction (to bow before man) that would appear to conflict with it (p. 166). Satan is
used to deny the Christian doctrine of the Fall. Instead, with God’s acquiescence he
accepts the historically significant role of perverting those who are not God’s servants,
and therefore not pure in heart. There is also a passage on clerical sex, both in the
madrasa and in the morid relationship (pp. 180-3), and on the use of the institution of
sigha, both perhaps more topical now than on the book’s first appearance in 1985. It
is characteristic of the style of the book that the seriousness of the subject is balanced
by a typical mullah joke (p. 352).
 The Mantle of the Prophet 115

The historical culture is illustrated through the stories of great men of the past who
live in the modern consciousness: Khayyam, Ghazzali, Avicenna, Sohravardi, Mullā
Sadrā, Kasravi, Mossadeq, Āl-e Ahmad (Gharbzadegi was popular in Qom), and more
recently al-Afghāni, Isā Sadiq, Shariati, and Khomeini himself (who is compared with
al-Afghāni). The complexity of the religious support for the revolution is also brought
out similarly through stories of individuals. The account of Tāleqāni is particularly
interesting (p. 325). It happens that most, if not all of, the prominent modern
secularists were sons of clerics.
All this is framed in the story of the evolving relation between friends over a period
of some thirty years, from boyhood to maturity, including spells in SAVAK prisons
(which appear to have been an important educational experience, a club for
revolutionaries). The idea that “God was the ‘prime mover’ who put the process
called ‘dialectical materialism’ into the fabric of the universe, after which God had no
more need to interfere” was one brilliant formulation in typical club discussion! Islam
becomes simply “‘the highest synthesis’ of the dialectical process” (p. 282). But some
may think the whole too romantic, which might be a natural fault in a writer so
obviously emotionally involved in the full range of everything that is culturally Iranian.
The book as a whole is written in the style of the long New Yorker articles of the
1970s, which could be read in snatches on longish commutes. There is no table of
contents or chapter headings, but there is a very useful index. The 390 pages of
narrative text are divided into ten chapters of unequal length, and I suspect it may be
difficult to find two readers who would agree on the rationale for the breaks between
chapters. The particular charm of the style includes the liberal use of proverbs and
other popular touches: a crowd is so thick “a dog wouldn’t recognize its master” (p.
16); knowledge passes “from chest to chest” (p. 111); “in no place do things wet and
dry burn together as they do in Iran” (p. 282); “either choose not to make friends with
elephant drivers, or build a house fit for an elephant” (p. 337); “if the water has risen
above your head, what difference if it is too deep.”
The narrative raises issues in general terms and explains them in terms of the
Iranian experience. Iran’s problems are special cases of the problems that all societies
have faced. Iran’s experience is colored by its own peculiar heritage but can be fully
appreciated only when seen in the larger context of world history. This is, after all, the
crux of the struggle between disciplinary and “area” studies: Only the Iranist is
sufficiently trained in the history, language, and culture of Iran to understand its
peculiar richness, but only the disciplinary specialist has the wider view that
illuminates its significance. Perhaps the historian is better situated to resolve this
paradox than others. Mottahedeh is particularly successful.
Reading the book again now, a quarter of a century after the revolution it addresses,
accustomed as we have now become to the idea of Iran without a shah, we have
gained the distance to ask a range of questions that barely occurred to us before—
questions that are more interesting with hindsight than they were when Mottahedeh
was writing. We can do this because he addresses not so much the revolution but the
cultural community in which it took place. With an historian’s sense of time and detail
 116 Spooner

the book shows us the social and intellectual threads that finally forced revolution on
Iranians at this particular time. In his earlier work, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early
Islamic Society (Princeton,1980), he had already demonstrated that the historian can
write an ethnography of an historical society. In The Mantle of the Prophet he has
combined a historian’s perspective with an ethnographer’s participant observation to
provide what was recently named by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the top 75
books of the twentieth century (cited on half-title page).

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