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Geneva, and New Yorkand involve British military action in remote Buraimi and a spell of broken relations. Aldamer attributes responsibility for the revival of this vexed issue to Ibn Sauds quest for territorial gain, reinforced by a bid for additional oil reserves. Given her obligations to the Gulf sheikhdoms, Britain had little option but to take a rm stand while trying every avenue of diplomacy, partly with American help. It was a poisoned ending to an Arab champions relationship with his oldest Western ally, and would eventually take the statesmanship of King Faisal to undo the damage and restore the close association with Britain by which Ibn Saud had once set such store.

Alan Munro London

doi: 10.1093/jis/eti011

Mystic Regimes: Sufism and the State in Iran, from the Late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic. By MATTHIJS VAN DEN BOS (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), 286 pp. Price HB E73.00. ISBN 9004128158.
Most studies of Islam in Iran over the past two centuries have concentrated on the Sh;6; 6ulam:8justiably so, in view of the high degree of inuence they have continually exerted. The Su orders of Sh;6; obedience active in Iran have been far less successful in capturing popular allegiance. Mutual opposition between 6:lim and Su has, moreover, been the general order of the day, not the symbiosis between the two classes that once existed in many Sunn; contexts, above all the Ottoman and the Indian. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that the 3ar;qat Susm of Sh;6; Iran has remained largely unstudied, the only major exception being Richard Gramlichs exhaustive bio-bibliographical survey (Die schiitischen Derwischorden Persiens, (Wiesbaden, 3 vols., 1965, 1976, 1981)). Now, in an excellent and highly original study based on extensive eldwork and archival research in Iran, Matthijs van den Bos has presented a detailed history of the orders in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with emphasis on their manoeuvrings between the state and the 6ulam:8 as competing sources of authority. This is an essay in sociology, as well as an account of one aspect of religion in Iranian society; hence the somewhat curious title of the book, Mystic Regimes, by which the author means modes of domination, as well as the often ponderous theoretical lucubration. He is concerned primarily with the 4af; 6Al; Sh:h; and Sul3:n 6Al; Sh:h; (also known as Gun:b:d;) Sus, preferring to regard each group as an order in its own right, rather than as branches of the Ni6matull:hiyya from which they are both descended. This is defensible, in that 4af; 6Al; Sh:h;s and Sul3:n 6Al; Sh:h;s have little in common except a reciprocal denial of the others legitimacy. Questionable, however, is the authors exclusion from his study of a third Ni6matull:h; line, that inaugurated by Dh<8r-Riy:satayn (d. 1953)

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and now headed by Jav:d N<rbakhsh, on the grounds that he was unwilling to succumb to the proselytizing pressures of its adepts (p. 9); a critical examination of the unusually abundant literature produced by this line, in English as well as Persian, could surely have permitted a useful comparison with its 4af; 6Al; Sh:h; and Sul3:n 6Al; Sh:h; competitors. His occasional references to the Kh:ks:r and Dhahab; Sus also make one wish he had covered them more completely. A particularly interesting segment of the book relates to what van den Bos felicitously calls the regime religiosity of the 1960s. This was a period when the mutual attractions and interrelations of royalty and mysticism (p. 112) came to the fore, as the Pahlav; monarchy enlisted a certain type of Susm in its ideological struggle against the burgeoning Islamic movement led by Imam Khomeini. Players in this episode included MuAammad 6Anq:, protagonist of a so-called Uvays; order who sought to achieve true harmony between ruler and ruled by penetrating the illusions of the senses; Mas6ud Hum:y<n;, a Ni6matull:h; afliate who was a founding stalwart of the Shahs Rast:kh;z Party; and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the well-known scholar and author who was linked to the royal family, especially Farah, in a variety of personal and institutional capacities. Quite plausibly, van den Bos compares their collective role to that of the Opus Dei in Francos Spain (p. 111). Somewhat in the background was Henry Corbin (d. 1978), the celebrated French scholar and panegyrist of Iranian Islam, to whom van den Bos devotes an insightful chapter at the beginning of his book. Corbins privileging of Iran as the true homeland of Islamic spirituality and his insistence on what he regarded as the quintessentially esoteric nature of Sh;6ism both dovetailed fortuitously with the Pahlav; agenda of the 1960s and 1970s. As van den Bos points out, however, neither the death of Corbin nor the rise of the Islamic Republic has put an end to his renown in Iran: his deprecation of the spiritual poverty of the West and exaltation of Sh;6ism as supposedly the only religious tradition still truly alive, thanks to its belief in the Occulted Imam, are still appreciated in Iran. Despite his ties to both Nasr and Corbin, 6All:ma Fab:3ab:8; does not belong where van den Bos places him, among the exponents of regime religiosity; it is entirely untrue to say that the Shahs government, for Fab:3ab:8;, apparently was an Islamic government (p. 117). Fab:3ab:8; was certainly no activist, but he never endorsed the Shahs regime, and he cannot be assumed to have shared the preferences of Nasr simply because the latter was entrusted with the English translation and presentation of some of his works. Indeed, as early as 1962, Fab:3ab:8; penned an essay on governance in Sh;6ite Islam whichwithout any particular urgency, it is trueadumbrated the theory of the governance of the jurisprudent (Vil:yat va Za6:mat, in Bahs; dar b:ra-yi Marja6iyyat va R<A:niyat (Tehran, 1341/ 1962), 71100). With the onset of the Islamic Revolution, the two sources of authority between which the Su orders had to negotiate a path collapsed into each other, and the option of alignment with the monarchy to counterbalance pressure from the fuqah:8 no longer existed. Some accounts would have it that the

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Sus fell prey to immediate and comprehensive persecution (see, e.g. L. Lewisohn, An Introduction to the History of Modern Persian Susm, BSOAS, 61: 3 (1998), 43764 and 62: 1 (1999), 3659). This authors more nuanced presentation of the matter makes it clear, however, that adjustment to the new conditions has enabled organized Susm to survive. The Sul3:n 6Al; Sh:h;s have been particularly successful in this respect, in part because of their longstanding reputation as Shar;6a-observant and the distance they generally kept from the court in the pre-Revolutionary period. Their leader, Ri@: 6Al; Sh:h, was briey arrested after the Revolution, but Khomeini ordered him to be released (p. 153); he even received him publicly, not in 1978, as van den Bos speculates, but on 1 July 1979 (see anon., MaA@ar-i N<r (Tehran, 1374/1985) i. 132). It was signicant, too, that the Sul3:n 6Al; Sh:h;s now designated their meeting places as Ausayniyya instead of kh:naq:h and began to host in them all the traditional Sh;6; devotions as well as the rites of the order. Riven by internal rivalries, the 4af; 6Al; Sh:h;s made a less successful transition, but by discarding the masonic afliations which had weighed heavily on them for decades, some branches gained a new lease of life. Only the group led by Jav:d N<rbakhsh, now ensconced in his English exile and preaching a Susm increasingly detached from its Islamic roots, has found no place in the Islamic Republic, although some of his earlier writings can still be bought in Tehran (pp. 14853). Van den Bos suggests that the early years of the post-Khomeini period were characterized by the states appropriation of mystical notions (p. 171). This seems questionable, in that the longstanding 6irf:n; propensities of Imam Khomeini had been evident to a broad public since 1979, most remarkably in the series of televised lectures on s<rat al-F:tiAa that he delivered in December of that year. Fallen combatants in the IranIraq war were moreover regularly eulogized in almost Su terms as martyrs of divine love. As for the period inaugurated by the rst election of MuAammad Kh:tam; to the presidency in 1997, the Third Republic, van den Bos suggests that the Su orders might now function as units of the civil society he and his associates have striven to construct. Sometimes van den Bos seems to have misunderstood the sense of what his interlocutors were telling him. When he was told r:h b:yad raft, surely what they meant was it is necessary to engage in spiritual wayfaring [in order to benet from the path], not to go all the way (p. 27). Sul<k-i b:3in (inward wayfaring on the Su path) cannot reasonably be translated as inner sophistication/dealing with people properly (p. 243). The mistranslation of sang as blood (p. 176, n. 15) derives presumably from a temporary confusion between Persian and French; nor would Gun:b:d mean place of blood (p. 79)only Kh<n:b:d would yield such a meaning. Some names are misspelled, e.g. the name of one of Khomeinis instructors in 6irf:n8 was 6Al; Akbar Eak;m8, not Eakem (p. 175, n. 11). Despite legends to the contrary, Timur was not a Naqshband; afliate (p. 55, n. 45), and the comparison between MuAammad Shah Qajar and Shah Ism:6;l is somewhat inept (p. 65). These are, however, minor blemishes in a commendable and highly informative work,

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one which makes an important contribution to understanding the complexities of Iranian Islam.

Hamid Algar University of California, Berkeley

doi: 10.1093/jis/eti012

The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 19211941 Edited by STEPHANIE CRONIN (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 290 pp. Price HB 50.00. ISBN 0451302846.
This excellent collection of essays, on the foundation of the modern Iranian state under Reza Shah Pahlavi, represents the proceedings of a conference held in the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1999 (though it should be noted that three of the articles have previously been published elsewhere). As the editor Stephanie Cronin notes, this vital period in the formation of the Iranian state remains relatively under-researched, in part (one suspects) as a result of the continuing passions that the period excites among Iranians of various political hues, but also, as is noted, because of the relative paucity of sources. The passage of time appears to be addressing both these issues. While, as a number of articles in this collection indicate, passions remain high, a more balanced assessment of the achievements and failures of Reza Shahs reign is facilitated by the increasing historical distance, and as more archival sources are released for scrutiny. That said, it is worth remembering that the very importance of the period in laying the foundations of the modern Iranian state ensures that judgements passed by historians enjoy an unusually sensitive contemporary relevance. Reza Shah, and the drive for modernization he represents, is not so much part of the Iranian past as of the Iranian present. The volume is divided into a number of distinct sections, looking in turn at specic aspects of political and social development. The rst section deals with the construction of the new state, with contributions by Homa Katouzian, Stephanie Cronin, and Vanessa Martin, casting a critical eye on the limits of modernization. Cronin in particular lays to rest the general belief that the army created by Reza Shah remained implacably loyal to his will, noting his own very patrimonial anxieties about the potential threat posed by competent senior ofcers. The result was a senior ofcer corps driven by loyalty rather than military merit, and an army that was, as a consequence, less effective in the eld than parade ground presentation sought to intimate. More interesting was the growth regardless of a distinctly modern corporate identity among junior ofcers within the army, in particular the Jahansuz group (named after its erstwhile leader), whomuch like the Young Turksbecame disaffected with the limitations of modernization. Unlike their Turkish predecessors, the Jahansuz were routed and their leader shot, but as Cronin notes, The presence of such a group within the army, the quintessential institution of Pahlavi Iran, showed that even this prized and pampered institution