Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

Nikki R. Keddie was a historian of Iran and the modern Middle East, and this Yale University Press book is her standard scholarly history of modern Iran, covering the roots and consequences of the 1979 revolution. Its strength, and the reason this atlas cites it for wilayat al-faqih, the 1979 constitution and the position of the clergy in Iranian society, is Keddie's standing as one of the field's most cited historians of Iran, drawing on a career of primary research into the country's political and religious history. Its limit is that it is a broad political history covering more than a century, so a claim needing close theological analysis of wilayat al-faqih as a specifically juristic doctrine, rather than its political history, is better served by a source focused on Shia legal theory.