When I wrote this chapter in early 2025, I could not have imagined in which situation we would find ourselves roughly one year later:
“The article explains the extent to which the clerical actors in the Iranian Revolution have been underestimated ever since. Precisely because of their supposedly outdated religious background, their secular and left-wing allies, as well as Western observers, all too easily dismissed them in the early 1980s as backward-looking men of the Middle Ages. Hardly anyone anticipated how skillfully they would maneuver between the poles of revolution and reaction, between drastic change and its suspension – and hardly anyone anticipated that they would even be prepared to innovate in theological and ideological terms, as the integration of the concept of maslaha (public benefit) shows. Moreover, through their synthesis of Islam and revolutionary anti-imperialism, the ‘underestimated mullahs’ proved not only willing to transcend confessional boundaries. Rather, they were also able to offer an alternative in foreign policy that continues to meet with great sympathy in parts of the Global South to this day.”
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, “Unterschätzte Mullahs: Schiitischer Islam und der lange Schatten der islamischen Revolution in Iran von 1978/79”, in Revolution. Reaktion. Religion Geschichte und Gegenwart eines komplexen Verhältnisses, Hrsg. Birgit Emich et al. (Campus, 2023), 201-222, https://www.campus.de/buecher-campus-verlag/wissenschaft/revolution_reaktion_religion-18453.html