Iran's Islamic Revolution seems to have taken the world by surprise. The Western mass media have subsequently been alarming their readers with warnings of Islamic “revival,” “resurgence,” “rumble,” and “anger.” Strategists and political practitioners have joined in – invariably using the same or more academic-sounding jargon, such as the “arc of trouble” or the “crescent of crisis.” The area referred to stretches from Morocco to Indonesia, where nearly 800 million Muslims live and in which some of the world's most strategic raw materials and real estate are located. The rising attention and the West' alarm are quite understandable and indeed quite justifiable. After all, most of that alleged anger is directed at the West and its local allies and surrogates - the Shah being a case in point. The seizure of the American embassy in Teheran along with some fifty hostages in November 1979 highlighted this deep-seated resentment. But in neighboring Afghanistan another chapter of the Islamic drama is unfolding - this, time in the form of a resistance to the Soviets and their local surrogates. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December of 1979 compounded an already complicated situation. It plunged the world closer to the brink.

In his collection of essays, Peasant Society and Culture, Robert Redfield stresses that peasants are men of the countryside who are tied to the land and rooted in villages and who, at the same time, must take account of the city — whether that recognition involves its political power, its marketplace, its beliefs, its style of life, or the people it produces. Redfleld calls attention to two aspects of the interaction between town and countryside. On the one hand he focuses on the linkers, whether men (e.g., dons, senoritos, mandarins, mukhtars) or institutions (temples, schools, castes, mosques, or dramatic companies) of peasants and townsmen; on the other hand he focuses on the cultural materials (beliefs, ceremonies, art forms) they exchange. In both cases Redfield is interested in the process of exchange in its “social organizational” context. That is, he is interested in the day-to-day situations in which beliefs from the “great tradition of the reflective few” are heartily rejected or wholly accepted, or more usually tolerated, accommodated, and perhaps reinterpreted by a “little tradition of the largely unreflective many” (Redfield 1958, p. 70). And he is interested in the opposite process by which the beliefs of the many are accepted or rejected, or more usually tolerated, accommodated, and/or reinterpreted by the reflective few

Like many other parts of the world, in the last two hundred years or so the Middle East has gone through a process of de-industrialization followed by reindustrialization.* The decline in handicrafts continued until well after the First World War. But by then another development was under way: the growth of a modern factory industry that started around the 1890s, gathered increasing momentum in the 1920s and 1930s, and since the Second World War has proceeded at a very rapid pace.

The Middle East was the cradle of the World's three great monotheistic religions, and to this day they continue to play a very important role it its affairs.

In several scholarly works it has been asserted that opposition to tyranny is a fundamental and pervasive characteristic of Shi'i Islam.1 Here I shall try to show that the revolutionary character ascribed to the Shi'i ulama in Iran has been greatly exaggerated. I will argue that the ulama's perception of the socio-economic and political structure of Iranian society often did not basically differ from that of the secular power elite. Further, I will analyze the causes of the opposition of the ulama to the state during the early 1960s. It was in large part his analysis of these events that made Algar partially amend his conclusion to his study of the ulama in Qajar Iran, namely “that they failed to perceive the nature of what was being demanded and its implication for Iran and themselves.”2

When discussing the Kuzari of Halevi, Leo Strauss comments in a footnote that “One cannot recall too often this remark of Goethe (in the Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verständnis der West-östlichen Divans): ‘Das eigentliche, einzige und tiefste Thema der Welt — und Menschengeschichte, dem alle übrigen untergeordnet sind, bleibt der Konflikt des Unglaubens und Glaubens.’” It will be argued here that the influence of such a conflict on Islamic philosophy has been much exaggerated, especially by the highly influential approach that Strauss brings to such a mode of thought and its means of expression.