History occasionally produces events that overturn the intellectual frameworks used to interpret the modern world. The French Revolution did this in 1789 by demonstrating the political power of mass mobilization, and the Russian Revolution did it again in 1917 by introducing an ideological state built on Marxism. Yet the Iranian Revolution of 1979 posed a challenge even more unsettling to modern assumptions. It had become a modernizing state that many believed was steadily moving toward secular development, given Peter Burger’s at that time on the secularization thesis, which he later rejected. It argued that as societies modernize, religion gradually loses social, political, and cultural influence.

Yet, suddenly, Iran produced a theocratic government led by clerics. For many scholars and policymakers, the outcome seemed almost inconceivable beforehand, given its shift to a more secularized government. The shock was not simply political; it was intellectual as well. The Iranian Revolution revealed a blind spot in modern political theory: the enduring political power of religion.

Prior to the revolution of 1979, most academic work, led by Burger, which was built upon the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, assumed that modernization caused religion to retreat from politics as secular regimes rose to power. Industrialization, urbanization, and advances in education pushed religion away from the public sphere and toward private life. Indeed, Iran appeared to be heading in this direction under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah, whose regime was committed to economic modernization and an alliance with the West. Industrial growth, land reform, and the increasing importance of the state bureaucracy all suggested that Iran was well on its way to becoming a modern secular nation-state. In theory, all these developments should have pushed religion to the sidelines. Yet, in Iran, modernization actually contributed to the politicization of religion.

Many analysts misunderstood the revolution because they relied on assumptions shaped by Europe’s own historical experience. These assumptions were rarely examined closely. The prevailing belief was that modernization would result in secularization, urbanization would give rise to liberal political movements, education would undermine religious authority, and economic development would foster political moderation. Iran defied all of those expectations. Urbanization empowered the organizing networks of mosques; education begot political students who used moral and religious language to frame their dissent; and economic development led to increasing inequality and a weakened legitimacy for the monarchy. What appeared contradictory to outside observers were in fact all forces coalescing in the same direction within Iranian society. The issue was not just that experts failed to anticipate events. More fundamentally, many failed to recognize the structural role religion could play in modern political change.

Historian Abbas Amanat has argued that the revolution cannot be understood as a sudden explosion in 1978 and 1979. It did not happen in a vacuum. Instead, it was the result of a long historical process defined by the interplay between religious and political authority in Iran. Since the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, Iran had operated under a weak dual system of........

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