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Rating: 
Summary: The Constitution of Iran
Review: Close observers of the Iran have long puzzled over the paradox of the anti-Western Khomeini founding a republic based on a constitution that represents the nation via the decisions of a parliament which is chosen through popular elections-for these are all Western concepts. In a exquisitely detailed and revealing study of Iranian politics, Schirazi (a researcher at the University of Berlin) makes this paradox the center of his research and provides an important new understanding of the ideas that have dominated Iran for nearly two decades. In particular, Schirazi notes two giant contradictions at the heart of the Islamic Republic: a government that supposedly rests on the pure principles of Shi'i Islam in fact draws heavily from Western secular sources entirely alien to the Shari'a (Islamic sacred law); simultaneously, its authority also rests on the authority that derives only from God but also from the will of the Iranian people. The author shows the historical roots of these contradictions (in 1906 the mullahs looked to a constitution to make the government more Islamic), then devotes the bulk of this fascinating book to the practical working out of the dilemmas they create and showing how these have molded contemporary Iranian life. In a word, secular defeated Islamic, God defeated the people. Middle East Quarterly, Sept 1997
Rating:
Summary: Important, but needs an editor
Review: I admit it: I ordered this book on the basis of its title. I was researching the Republic of Iran for a comparative government class, and the university library is woefully short on books about non-Western civilizations. Schirazi is the sort of professorial writer who needs an editor as good as his ideas. He is comprehensive, but not exhaustive, in explaining the contradictory origins of the written constitution that resulted in its inherently flawed nature (the very idea of a Republic is Western in origin, which is hard to reconcile with the "Islamic" nature of the Republic.) He writes like an academic, and would benefit greatly from having an outsider to reorganize his work and challenge him to pare down his ideas to make them more manageable. I don't think that the translation is his problem. Schirazi certainly does bring up several points that were nowhere else in my reading (and I read A LOT of books for an undergraduate paper); a great example is "maslahat," the legal practice of meeting necessity instead of traditional or "feqh" law. Khomeini's attempts to press the clerics into using maslahat, in order to build a judiciary that could be both Islamic AND run a modern state, is emblematic of the picture of Khomeini that emerges from other authors. Abrahamian's "Khomeinism," for example, establishes rather well that he was not a fundamentalist at all, but a pragmatist; Schirazi ties this surprising truth to the actual CONSTITUTIONAL practices of the state. Schirazi does not closely examine the parastate in this work, which I would argue is its main fault. One cannot understand the institutions of the clerical state without understanding that the real power has always lain in the bonyads, control of the paramilitaries, and the informal structures of the Majlis. I hope that the renewed sense of openness in Iran will spur closer examination of the parastate by political scientists, sociologists, and others. Otherwise, Schirazi and his translator have done something sorely needed in America: they have brought a poorly-understood, under-studied government of great geopolitical importance to better light.
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