With this lucid, judicious and vividly written exposition of the ideological foundations of the Islamic revolution, Dabashi has rendered the educated public a valuable service.
-- Said A. Arjomand, author of The Turban for the CrownIn brilliant, figural strokes, Dabashi arrays EuroAmerican sociological theory as the crucial backdrop to a deeper, fuller understanding of contemporary Iranian history ... Even while recognizing all ideologies as `terrible simplifiers' and particular ideologies as exhausted, Dabashi stresses the recurrent human need to locate meaning along the spectrum of possibility from ideology to utopia. His is at once a comparativist and interdisciplinary tour de force. Though the symbolic force of Iranian Shi'ism remains inexhaustible, insofar as it can be kneaded into words, Theology of Discontent succeeds as no other work can or will in the English language.
-- Bruce B. LawrenceDuke UniversityWith resolute dispassion, Hamid Dabashi argues that the eight key figures who helped construct the rhetoric of the 1978 Iranian revolution, while intellectually shallow, had tremendous rhetorical force which came not from their depth or exactitude of knowledge, but through a series of articulations of protest which they built into a theology of discontent. A welcome contribution to the recognition that the Iranian revolution was an outcome of contesting perspectives, partially analyzed discontents and understandings of society, and various roots of identity and belief.
-- Michael M. J. Fischer, Rice University