"Mottahedeh has drawn on a massive amount of learning, but he has got the scholarly apparatus out of the way and made his book accessible to a wide audience."
New York Times Book Review
"He has a sharp feeling for the sensous aspects of the traditional Iranian town - the texture of bricks and tiles, the movement of ... Read morebreezes, the sound of the side alley, the precious burst of greenery and of trees."
The Times Literary Supplement
"A remarkable treasure."
The Wall Street Journal
"The beauty of [Mottahedeh’s] book is in his ability to explain sophisticated ideas and difficult subjects in a way which is widely accessible… an extraordinary book."
London Review of Books
"One of the top 75 books of the twentieth century"
Foreign Affairs
"The graceful prose and factual command… make [this book] a fascinating read."
San Francisco Chronicle
Even with news breaking daily in Iran, the first book I send myself and other readers back to has to be Roy Mottahedeh’s “The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran,” which was first published in 1985. A professor at Harvard, Mottahedeh has written an intellectual history as stirring and graceful as any novel. He sets the intimate biography of a young cleric against the vast epic of Iranian thought from Zoroaster to Avicenna, Kasravi to Khomeini. “The Mantle of the Prophet” is literary, learned, and deeply felt; the writing is splendid, and the story is an education for the Western reader unaware of the powerful tides of Shi’ite and Persian thought over a period of centuries.
The New Yorker
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