Ayatollah Mohammad Hossein Nai’ni was perhaps the most important theoretician of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). Among his myriad influential works was Tanbih al-Umma wa Tanzih al-Milla (Enlightenment of the Community and Purification of Religion), published in 1909 at the height of the revolution and often cited as one of the most religiously authoritative expositions of democratic Islam. Shortly after the end of the civil war it was supressed and was not unearthed until more than 40 years later by Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqhani, who published a new edition complete with introduction and extensive annotations in 1955. This later interpretation of Nai’ni’s work is arguably almost as important as the original itself and Taleqhani’s analysis was highly influential in debates leading to the 1979 Revolution and the foundation of the Islamic Republic. Nai’ni’s original text and Taleqhani’s later edition and annotations are both here reproduced in English for the first time, alongside an authoritative socio-historical introduction and commentary to contextualise these important and divisive agents of reform and revolution. The volume reassesses their complex legacy today and sheds vital light onto the two modern revolutions which bookended Iran’s twentieth century and the subsequent, and unfolding, post-modern reformation. This unique book is essential reading for understanding Iran, past and present, and political Islam.
