Religious Minorities in Iran

Abstract

The author is an associate professor of political science at the University ofSouthern California. Her previous publications include a 1982 Praeger publication,"The Women's Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement, andRepression from I 900 co Khomeini."Religious Minorities in Iran is of interest to political scientists, particularlythose focused on the Middle East; Iran experts; Islamic studies experts concernedwith modem-day politics and governance; those in the field of religiousstudies or comparative religion; and also lawyers, academics, and those workingin Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the human rights field whoare interested in issues related to minority rights, freedom of religion or belief,and human rights in the Middle East.The book focuses on those identified as the main ethnoreligious componentsof the non-Muslim religious communities in Iran: Armenians, Assyrians,Chaldeans, Jews, Zorascrians, Baha'fs, and Iranian Christian converts. Themain period of study is the first decade of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, 1979to 1989. The author gives three reasons for focusing on this period; she arguesthat this was the most ideologically charged moment of the revolution, that theposition of recognized non-Muslim minorities was largely routinized by thelate 1980s, and because she wants to avoid the nuances that emerge and complicatethe political scene after the end of the cold war and the formation ofpost-Soviet states. Later periods are mainly considered only when they beardirect relevance to the points being made and in the concluding chapter ...