The United States and Israel’s strikes on Iran over the past weekend left many people searching for answers about the origins of the countries’ conflict. Some of the deepest insight may come from books—specifically, works of history, political science, and reportage.
Below, Foreign Policy staff and contributors share their top recommendations for understanding Iran today.
The United States and Israel’s strikes on Iran over the past weekend left many people searching for answers about the origins of the countries’ conflict. Some of the deepest insight may come from books—specifically, works of history, political science, and reportage.
Below, Foreign Policy staff and contributors share their top recommendations for understanding Iran today.
The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
Roy P. Mottahedeh (Oneworld Publications, 432 pp., $30, December 2008, paperback)
It might seem strange to reach for a book first published in 1985 to understand political developments in Iran today. But it’s not an accident that Roy P. Mottahedeh’s study on Iranian religion and culture, The Mantle of the Prophet, is considered a classic. First, there are its aesthetic virtues: The book follows the education and spiritual development of a semi-fictional cleric, Ali Hashemi, thus tracing a thread through some otherwise knotty intellectual and theological movements that are central to Iran’s recent political history.
It also offers a human lens for looking past the simplistic descriptions of the Islamic Republic as a religious regime imposed on the public. Mottahedeh shows that the Islamic Revolution succeeded because its religious currents were fused with distinct aspects of Iranian culture: Shiite piety has never been wholly separable from deep traditions of philosophy, poetry, art, jurisprudence, and language. That Iran’s government is now a dysfunctional dictatorship is clear. But it’s also a dictatorship that has always demanded to be taken seriously for its answers to questions about modernity, tradition, and nationalism. Any contemplation of regime change should begin with some reflection on the regime’s intellectual roots.
—Cameron Abadi, FP deputy editor
The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty
Ray Takeyh (Yale University Press, 336 pp., $32.50, January 2021)
Ray Takeyh’s The Last Shah is exquisite. Full disclosure: Takeyh is a colleague and a good friend. That said, I have a couple of rows of Iran books on a large bookshelf. There are any number that I could have picked that would help readers understand Iran today, but this one is the best. It is methodically researched and beautifully written. What I appreciate most is how Takeyh adds much-needed complexity and nuance to Washington’s role in the 1953 coup that ousted Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. As Takeyh makes clear, it is a much more interesting story than the morality play that many journalists, academics, and activists repeat ad nauseum. The 336 pages are well worth the time.
—Steven A. Cook, FP columnist and Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present
John Ghazvinian (OneWorld, 667 pp., $35.94, October 2020)
My choice for this reading list intersects directly with the tectonic shifts we are witnessing today. While a post-mortem of the current war has yet to be written, John Ghazvinian’s America and Iran serves as the ideal “pre-mortem” for the future that is currently unraveling.
Ghazvinian’s historic lens is indispensable for understanding that U.S.-Iranian enmity was never inevitable. Washington and Tehran just became trapped in two competing, irreconcilable origin myths. For Washington, the story begins in 1979, with those grainy photos of revolutionaries scaling the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, blindfolding 66 Americans, and birthing the image of Middle Eastern fanaticism in the Western mind. For Iran, the story begins in the sweltering August of 1953, with the CIA-orchestrated coup against Mossadegh—a “first sin” that many Americans have forgotten but has remains the beating heart of Iranian nationalism.
Ghazvinian argues that by viewing the relationship only through these traumatic lenses, both sides missed decades of diplomatic exits. As U.S. President Donald Trump’s war now aims for a state collapse and policymakers in Washington anticipate a power vacuum in Tehran, this book offers a haunting warning: No matter how tactically precise a foreign intervention, it often seeds the very destruction that it seeks to prevent. This book isn’t just about history; I see it as a guide to the ghosts that will haunt whatever “Iran 2.0” emerges from the ruins of the current carnage.
—Ali Hashem, FP contributor and research affiliate at the Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
Afshon Ostovar (Oxford University Press, 322 pp., $41.99, April 2018, paperback)
In Vanguard of the Imam, Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, offers the first comprehensive history (up to 2015) of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), one the most powerful institutions in Iran and one of the most influential armed organizations in the entire Middle East. It’s also one of the least understood. Deeply researched yet accessible even for non-expert audiences, Ostovar’s book explains why the IRGC is far more than just a branch of Iran’s armed forces—it’s an entity at the very core of the clerical regime’s ability to maintain its authority at home and project its revolutionary ideology abroad.
—Jennifer Williams, FP deputy editor
The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei: Out of the Mouth of the Supreme Leader of Iran
Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce (Routledge, 382 pp., $62.99, May 2017, paperback)
The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei offers a rare window into the worldview of the man who dominated Iran’s political system since 1989. Drawing extensively on Khamenei’s own speeches and writings, Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce traces the evolution of his thinking from the revolutionary era through his decades as supreme leader, showing how ideology, personal insecurity, and political calculation intersected at the apex of the Islamic Republic.
Khamenei’s authority rested not only on constitutional power but also on his constant efforts to safeguard his position within a fragmented elite system. Episodes such as his 2008 declaration that cutting ties with the United States was among Iran’s fundamental policies, even while hinting that he might one day endorse rapprochement, capture the careful balancing that defined his leadership. Hovsepian-Bearce’s study situates such statements within Khamenei’s broader ideological framework—one rooted in revolutionary suspicion of the West, defense of the Islamist system, and preservation of regime equilibrium—offering insight into how Khamenei’s worldview shaped Iran’s domestic politics and foreign-policy behavior.
—Alex Vatanka, FP contributor and director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute
