This splendid book offers an insight into why Iran, once assumed to have one of the most stable governments in the Middle East, crumbled so rapidly in 1979. Amjad's study attempts to answer that question by investigating the socioeconomic and political factors that led to the Iranian Revolution and to the transformation of the Iranian state from a royal dictatorship into a theocracy. The author concludes that a combination of factors such as economic mismanagement, failure of agriculture, inflation, decline in oil revenues, and political repression provided favorable conditions for the...