After the revolution is before the revolution.

• Author: Kunkler, Mirjam

Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter? Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 268 pages.

Of the three principal values which the Iranian Revolution claimed to embody--nationalism, social justice and Islam--it is social justice that has been least actualized in the Islamic Republic (although pious Muslims might argue that this should indeed be said of Islam).

Not few academic studies of the revolution have elucidated how Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporting faction successfully marginalized, and largely eliminated, rival social movements that had been instrumental in the revolution's success--notably the Marxist movement, the women's movement and secular political elites striving for a democratic republic with limited influence of the houzeh (religious seminaries).

Despite the revolution's failure to deliver on the promise of social justice, which originally had been a major cause for revolutionary mobilization, in its rhetoric the Islamic Republic continues to legitimize itself with reference to its social project. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei regularly emphasizes the creation of justice in economic and social relations as a major duty of his reign and not infrequently dots his speeches with phrases such as "today the servant government has focused its attention on rendering assistance to the deprived regions and we owe this to social justice." (1)

Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad evaluate this ideal alongside the facts. In Class and Labor in Iran the authors test the extent to which the revolution has achieved an equalization of the social classes, alleviated poverty and decreased the rural-urban, as well as gender, divide. That Nomani and Behdad query the revolution's effectiveness in these realms is foreshadowed by the book's subtitle: Did the Revolution Matter? The authors use this question to guide readers through six substantive (of nine) chapters about class developments through the lens of population growth, employment, women's inclusion in the workforce and divergent economic trajectories in the rural and the urban.

The endeavor is admirable and direly needed. In the academic disciplines of economics, political science and sociology, we are short of published studies based on solid economic, demographic and sociological research familiar with both the structures and processes of decisionmaking in the Islamic Republic and with an understanding of its delicate balance between apparent and real centers of power. The authors...