Understanding Iran

Iran's senior leadership and government officials claim to be pursuing a legitimate, civilian nuclear energy program. However, many believe Iran is also operating a secret program to develop nuclear weapons. What is the truth? This book takes an evenhanded approach to looking more closely at the Iranian nuclear energy program and its global implications.

Iran and Iraq, though neighbors for many centuries, share both a common and a contentious history. Though both are Muslim nations, they have long been divided by their differing affiliations with the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam and by a cultural tension between Persian and Arab. These tensions have occasionally erupted into all-out warfare, most recently in the 1980s, when half a million Iraqis and Iranians were killed in a decade-long war. Today, however, following the toppling of the repressive Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq's previously oppressed Shia majority is forging ties with Shia-dominated Iran and creating a new, potentially destabilizing balance of power in this part of the Middle East. This book explores the long, rich, complex, and charged history between these two Muslim nations and analyzes what path they seem to be heading down in the future, a journey that has weighty consequences for the western world and the United States.

Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran's conservative Muslim religious leaders assumed all positions of power in the new regime. This timely and thorough book discusses Iran's ruling clerics and their immense influence in both Iranian public and private spheres.

The history of Iran is a long, rich, multi-layered one. Iran was once known as Persia and was devoted to an ancient religion known as Zoroastrianism. The Persian people converted to Islam following the Arab conquest. Persia contributed as much to Islam as it received. Indeed, it eventually developed along a separate path from most Arab Muslims, as it adopted the Shia branch of the faith. Though the Shia would always be a minority within Islam, the Shia would nevertheless develop a complex and powerful faith, and Persia would experience several periods as a mighty and sophisticated empire. In the modern age, Iran came to be ruled by secular shahs, or kings, who tried to remove religion from the public sphere. Yet with the overthrow of the last Shah in 1979, Iran became a Shia state, ruled by conservative religious clerics. It has since come to occupy a central role in Middle Eastern and world affairs, and its Shia government exerts a tight grip on its citizens and their lives. This book introduces readers to the vast sweep of Iranian history and religion. Shi'ism and Iran cannot be separated-they are so tightly entwined. The role Iran comes to play in world affairs in the 21st century will have everything to do with religion and its government's use of it. The consequences for the Middle East and the world at large could be dramatic.