The Mantle of the Prophet

"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 breezes, 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 *