Two basic related arguments have informed and shaped much of the scholarly discourse and public consciousness of recent Iranian history. The first is that Shiism is an integral part of the Iranian religious and cultural landscape. The second is that the ulema have played a crucial role in the Iranian political structure despite their internal theological differences and political divisions. I challenge these assumptions and propose a different line of inquiry in studying the role of the religious institution and the ulema in Iranian history and politics. My overall argument is that certain historical conditions and adopted strategies of state making in Iran gave rise to the power and the institution of the ulema and consolidated Shiism as a part of the Iranian national identity. Ironically, this process was intensified during the Pahlavi secular regime (1926–79), and the Islamization of the 1979 revolution and the formation of Iran's first theocratic state, the height of the power of religion and the ulema, could be also the starting point of the constitutional separation of the state and the religious institution.

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Eric Hobsbawm, who died on October 1, 2012, was one of a handful of extraordinary labor historians who emerged from the British Communist Party Historians' Group in the 1940s and 1950s. Today he is widely acknowledged as one of the great historians of our era. His influence is truly international. For a long time, a significant limitation on the extent of his renown was the USSR where, during the era of “actually-existing socialism,” his works were never translated or published. This was ironic since he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1936 until its dissolution in 1991.

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