Khomeini’s Rule

Nikki Keddie

• The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution by Shaul Bakhash
  Tauris, 282 pp, £13.95, January 1985, ISBN 0 85043 003 8
• The State and Revolution in Iran: 1962-1982 by Hossein Bashiriyeh
  Croom Helm, 203 pp, £16.95, April 1983, ISBN 0 7099 3214 6

To the student of revolution, the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 must appear both strange and strangely familiar. It appears familiar because the revolution, in its causes and us course, fits largely into the pattern of ‘great’ revolutions set out by such students of comparative revolution as Crane Brinton. Brinton’s typology, more descriptive than explanatory, sees revolution as starting with an internal crisis in the old regime, proceeding to a government of moderate revolutionaries, then to a radical ‘reign of terror and virtue’, which leads to a ‘Thermidor’ in which order is restored but some gains of the revolution are maintained. Both books under review, Bashiriyeh’s explicitly and Bakhash’s implicitly, present the Iranian revolution as fitting into this general pattern – a pattern discerned by Brinton in the French, American and Russian revolutions, but which is also largely applicable to the English Civil War, for example, or the Chinese Revolution.