Answering Only to God : Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran

by Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons

• ISBN13: 9780805075144
• ISBN10: 0805075143
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2004-05-01
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

Taking the reader inside Iran's key institutions, Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons argue that the 1979 Iranian revolution, long viewed in the West as the pursuit of an imagined medieval Utopia, was in fact a political movement designed to modernize Islam. Twenty years later, a power struggle between conservative and reform elements provoked a clash that has destabilized the country and limited Iran's ability to integrate with the world community. Answering Only to God challenges the prevailing Western belief that the Islamic world is an undifferentiated mass of disaffected and dangerous fanatics or that a Western-style democracy will soon transform this ancient land of Shi'ite and Sufi tradition. Instead, the authors explore the controversial view that beyond their quarrel with the West, stemming from decades of exploitive foreign policies, the real struggle in Iran is between reformers and conservative mullahs.

Author Biography

Geneive Abdo reported from Islamic countries for The Guardian and The Economist for over a decade. She is the author of No God But God, a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, and a commentator on NPR and the BBC. Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001–2002.

 

Jonathan Lyons served as the bureau chief of an international news agency in Iran and in Turkey. Before that, he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union. They both live in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Note to the Reader	p. ix
Islam versus Islam	p. 1
The World of the Clerics	p. 19
The Man from Yazd	p. 56
The Shadow of God	p. 90
Reinventing the Islamic Republic	p. 123
The Press Revolution	p. 151
The Next Generation	p. 196
Every Day Is Ashura	p. 231
Blood and Tulips	p. 258
Notes	p. 277
Principal Characters	p. 283
Selected Glossary	p. 286
Selected Bibliography	p. 289
Acknowledgments	p. 294
Index	p. 297
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.