Email: marketing@brill.com Sociology of Shiʿite Islam is a comprehensive study of the development of Shiʿism. Its bearers first emerged as a sectarian elite, then a hierocracy and finally a theocracy. Imamate, Occultation and the theodicy of martyrdom are identified as the main components of the Shiʻism as a world religion. In these collected essays Arjomand has persistenly developed a Weberian theoretical framework for the analysis of Shiʿism, from its sectarian formation in the eighth century through the establishment of the Safavid empire in the sixteenth century, to the Islamic revolution in Iran in the twentieth century. These studies highlight revolutionary impulses embedded in the belief in the advent of the hidden Imam, and the impact of Shiʻite political ethics on the authority structure of pre-modern Iran and the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Sociology of Shiʿite Islam: Collected Essays

Mohammad Ali Khan, Zokā’ al-Molk, later Forughi, became Minister of Justice in December 1911 (until June 1912 and again from August 1914 to April 1915), following Moshir al-Dawla Pirniā and continuing the legal reform the latter had initiated in 1911. Forughi also served as Prime Minister of Iran several times, lastly in 1941-42 (1320), when he arranged the abdication of Reza Shah and the succession of his son, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, shortly before his death in November 1942. This lecture was given at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the new University of Tehran is an important historical document that throws considerable light on the early stage of the modernization of Iran’s legal system. We are therefore publishing it in a translation which preserves the lecture format with only slight abridgement. Forughi’s informed account of legal modernization is prefaced by acute observations on the intrusion of modernity into the culture of Iran in the early twentieth century. (The Editor)

Mohammad-Ali Forughi

Papers

The History of Modernization of Law