Intellectual biography as a discipline assumes that the life and thought of an individual can shed light on an epoch. In some cases such a claim is justified, especially where the epoch is obscure and the thinker genuinely representative of the culture of a profession in a city or region. I shall argue the validity of this principle with regard to eighteenth century west-central Iran and Mohammad Mehdi Niraqi (d. 1794), a prominent Imami Shi˓i religious scholar who wrote prolifically and authored a huge three-volume work on ethics. Most of his voluminous writing remains in manuscript, but enterprising scholars in Najaf published the book on ethics, Jāmi˓ as-sa˓ādat (Compendium of Happiness), and it has recently been reissued in Beirut.

The political turmoil of eighteenth century Iran at least partially explains the difficulty modern historians have in understanding its cultural history between the fall of the Safavids in 1722 and the rise of the Qajars around 1785.

Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has attempted to bring about a cultural revolution, aimed at replacing the old value system with new norms, building an ideal society based on Islamic criteria, and creating a New Islamic Person. In fact, one of the most important slogans of the postrevolutionary period has been: “Our revolution is a revolution in values.” Recognising the importance of the school in the process of character formation, the Iranian government has assigned the task of bringing about a revolution in values to the educational system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Islamic Republic's efforts to create a new generation of committed and doctrinaire Muslims through the study of socialization in schools. Socialization in this context is defined as “the process by which people learn to adopt the norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and practiced by the ongoing system.”

Among the demands formulated by the ˓ulamā and the tujjār (merchants) who took bast in the shrine of Shah ˓Abd al Azim in December of 1905 was the establishment of an ‘Edālat Khāneh (House of Justice).

The significance of the House of Justice was that it proved to be the prototype for what later became the Majles-e Shūrā-ye Mellī (National Assembly). Paradoxically, this also proved to be obstructive to its becoming a focus for scholarly attention, in the sense that it was soon superseded by the Majles itself, which began to function in the summer of 1906. The role of addressing public grievances was in fact the basic function of the Edalat Khaneh. However, the basic engraving on the society that the Majles was a substitute for the Edalat Khaneh is well illustrated by the fact that during the early period of the Majles over 1000 petitions and complaints were addressed to it.