Between 1905 and 1911, Iranians were engaged in a protracted struggle over whether a constitutionalist regime would replace royal absolutism.1 Little in Iran's political culture before 1905 had hinted at this conflict before it broke out, and for the past thirty years historians have been seeking this genealogy for it. Most have searched among the papers of officials and diplomats, often examining unpublished or posthumously published manuscripts with little or no contemporary circulation, at least before the revolution,2 but we might get closer to its context if we look at what was going on outside the governmental elite. Here I will explore the growth of belief in representative government within an Iranian millenarian movement, the Bahai faith, in the last third of the 19th century, as an example of how the new ideas circulated that led to the conflict.3 Historians have noted a link between millenarianism and democratic or populist thought elsewhere, after all; for instance they have long recognized the importance of chiliastic ideas in e English Revolution of the 17th century. The republicanism of American dissidents and revolutionaries was also sometimes tinged with a civil millennialism. The Bahais of Iran, too, combined democratic rhetoric with millenarian imagery in the generation before the Constitutional Revolution.4

Studies of economic activities among the urban poor in various parts of the world have found more variation in the so-called informal sector than they had expected. The urban poor had typically been thought of as a kind of “reserve army” for the formal sector, an underclass at the margins of survival. Even early work that recognized the links between the formal and informal sectors lumped them together as a single class that ranked below all the others. The tendency to regard workers in the informal sector as members of an underclass masked the tremendous variations among them and between informal sectors in different places.

The foundation of Abu ʿAbd Allah's movement was that which God Almighty had ordained concerning the victory of His friends' cause, the strengthening of His True Religion and the exaltation of His Word. Abu ʿAbd Allah al-Shiʿi was an Ismaʿili dāʿĪ and the architect of the Fatimid revolution in North Africa. Mobilizing support among the Kutama Berbers, he was able ultimately to overthrow the Aghlabid house and proclaim ʿAbd Allah as the Mahdi and first Fatimid imam in 909.1 Our primary source for Abu ʿAbd Allah's career is al-Qadi al-Nuʿman's Kitāb iftitāḥ al-daʿwa, completed in 957.2 As the official account of the Fatimid rise to power, it is an excellent source for understanding the ideology and propagands of the North African phase of the Fatimid daʿwa. Although the Iftitāḥ is not devoted explicitly to religious/theological questions in the manner of al-Qudi al-Nuʿ man's other writings, an attempt to establish the historical validity of the Fatimid claim to the imamate is implicit throughout the work.The Iftitah is a text of religious significance precisely because it is a historical account of God's action through His human agents to restore the original Islamic community of the Prophet and a righteous political order governed according to God's will, a theme not uncommon in medieval Islam and one to which we shall return later in our discussion. The Iftitah is thus a superb document for ascertaining the Fatimids' perceptions of themselves and how they wanted to appear to a literate audience. Marius Canard, Farhat Dachraoui, and Tilman Nagel have discussed these subjects thoroughly in several works dealing with the Fatimids' North African propaganda.3 My intent here is not to discuss the specific vocabulary of Abu cAbd Allah's daFwa anew, but rather the environment which Abu cAbd Allah proclaimed his "summons to the truth," an environment which enabled him, both by accident and by design, to pattern his career after that of the Prophet.

It was Europeans who started in Egypt a historic preservationist movement for Arab (or Islamic) art.1 It was they who persuaded Khedive Tawfiq to decree, in December 1881, the founding of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter “the Comité,” the usual French designation). It was the European-dominated Comité that opened the Museum of Arab Art three years later, and it was an Englishman, K. A. C. Creswell, who established the Institute of Islamic Archaeology at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University. Why did the Europeans care? In 19th-century Europe, romanticism gave a strong impetus to writers and painters, scholars, and collectors to search for a lost past, the unusual, the exotic, the “Oriental.” This inquiry into the past, at home and abroad, was intimately bound up with Westerners' search for their own identities and with the triumph of the idea of the nation-state. Historic preservationists and museums selected, conserved, and displayed buildings and objects defined as valuable to their national heritages. Romanticism, in part a revolt against classical styles, also spurred a "Gothic revival movement and a fascination with various Oriental styles.

The study of revolutions now deals as much with states and structures as it does with revolutionaries and their ideologies, in contrast to an older school, which sought their origins in the accumulation of individual grievances. This latter approach inspired many studies of revolutionary “counter-elites,” comparing them in particular to the ruling elites. The new importance placed on structural factors for the genesis and success or failure of revolutions does not render these older studies irrelevant, but it should change the way we understand their results.Revolutionaries,Theda Skocpol argued, are above all would-be state builders, and their origins show as much. In France, Russia, and China they “precipitated out of the ranks of relatively highly educated groups oriented to state activities or employments …[a]and from among those who were somewhat marginal to the established classes and governing elites under the Old Regimes.” ' Studies of many other countries have also found that revolutionary leaders combine an unusually high level of education with a modest social status that blocks their ascent to power under the prevailing regime.2 Revolutionaries are also more likely to have a cosmopolitan or international orientation that inclines them to be critical of their own societies. This orientation at least partly derives from the high incidence of foreign education and travel among them. Higher education and foreign travel provide revolutionaries with links to "fields of power" in the state and the international system.3

As a result of the oil price shocks, the 1979 revolution, and the eight-year war with Iraq, fundamental changes have taken place in Iran's foreign exchange position as well as in its exchange rate policy. The viable data over the period 1979–1980 to 1988–1989 clearly show that, despite the revolutionary rhetoric, very little has been done to reduce the country's dependence on oil exports as a source of foreign exchange and government revenues. Instead, in the face of falling oil revenues and the country's increasing international isolation, coupled with the regime's unwillingness to incur foreign debt, the government has adopted a severe ‘import compression’ policy through selective tariffs and quotas, strict control of private and government imports by means of import licenses, and the imposition of foreign exchange allocations on government agencies. The result has been an ever-rising premium on the U.S. dollar in the ‘black’ market, a highly overvalued official exchange rate, a substantial increase in rent-seeking activities at the expense of production, a severe misallocation of resources, and loss of output and industrial capacity.