Five years have now provided additional perspective on the Iranian revolution and the nature of Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Bakhash's book is a detailed account of what happened in those years, and especially of the personal and political conflicts in which the clerical fundamentalists defeated all their rivals. In "The Government of God", two political scientists begin by addressing their professional colleagues in the language of the trade, testing theories of development, modernization and revolution as they do or do not seem to apply to the reality of Iran; by the time they have finished, however, they have told us a great deal about the internal problems of the regime and its relations with the outside world. Bashiriyeh's study is concerned above all with how Iran's experience fits classical theories and patterns of revolution and class struggle: he finds the new regime, with its authoritarianism and mass mobilization, a continuation of existing indigenous nationalism re-expressed in terms of Islam. All three books make ample use of Iranian sources.
