It has long been held that the eighteenth century was a pivotal one in the history of Imami Shi'i thought and jurisprudence in Iraq and Iran. At the beginning of this era, it is said, the previously dominant Usuli school declined, and the conservative Akhbari school came to the fore. This intellectual revolution coincided with the fall of the Safavid dynasty in Iran and the disestablishment of Shi'ism under the Afghans and then Nadir Shah. Standard accounts would have us believe that Akhbarism became dominant. Then late in the century, as the Qajars came to power, the Usuli school staged a comeback in the shrine cities of Iraq and subsequently in Iran.

This version of events, deriving from published nineteenth-century Usuli works, contains elements of truth. But an examination of manuscript sources from the period and of later biographical dictionaries suggests that the standard view needs revision.

Nineteenth-century Iran witnessed the advent of a new socioreligious institution. While the theory of a divinely appointed Imam (Imām al-Manṣūb) increasingly became eschatological in nature, a highly centralized religious position came into being whose source of power was not to be found in the classical Shi'i doctrine. The position of marjaᶜ-i taqlīd is a product of several religious developments that characterized the nineteenth-century Shi'i community. The prevalence of the Uṣūlī school and the formulation of two important doctrines, i.e., aᶜlamiyyat (more knowledgeability) and vilāyat-i faqīh (the governance of the jurist) are held as three major juridical impetuses underlying the birth of the institution of marjaᶜiyyat-i taqlīd. Therefore, we will first deal with the Uṣūlī process, then the doctrines of aᶜlamiyyat and vilāyat-i faqīh, then with the qualifications of a marjᶜ, and the question of who the first marjaᶜ of the Twelver-Shi'i community was, and finally the place of marjaᶜ-i taqlīd in the political life of Shi'i Iran.

On his return to Qom on March 7, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini announced during a remarkable speech the intention to create a ministry having as its main task amr bi'l ma'ruf wa nahi ‘an al-munkar, or to promote the good and forbid the bad. What is so astounding about this is the fact that a government institution charged with this task has long since ceased to exist. Moreover, the charge of amr bi'l ma'ruf has been historically associated with an official known as muhtasib. In view of the planned resurrection of this office, a historical analysis of the functions of the muhtasib and his office, the hisba or ihtisab, would seem to be in order.

Before describing the historical development of the function of muhtasib, two questions are posed. The first is: Does a direct relationship exist between pre-Muslim officials such as the Byzantine agoranomos and the Muslim muhtasib?

This essay has two purposes. One is to compare the agrarian mode of production in Iran during the 7th through 12th centuries with the mode of production in European feudalism, searching for clues as to why Europe--but not Iran--developed a capitalist mode of production. The second, accompanying purpose is to evaluate the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, a theory developed mainly within the Marxist tradition, in the context of medieval Iran.

A few Persian writers of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with the question of why non-European societies failed to experience a transition to capitalism, but their writings were not convincing. If the transformation from a feudal mode to a capitalist mode is due to feudal evolution, then a rigorous comparative approach is necessary in order to see why such an evolution took place in one society and not in another.

Back in the fall of 1980, Edward Keenan, then Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, asked whether I would organize an oral history project on Iran. A Soviet specialist, Keenan saw certain similarities between the Russian and the Iranian revolutions and considered the immigration to the West of hundreds of former Iranian officials to be an exceptional opportunity to collect and preserve valuable historical data.

In our subsequent discussions it became clear that an in-depth study of the internal workings of Iran's former regime was difficult, as few reliable primary sources are available for this purpose. Because of the autocratic nature of Iran's political system, government papers, documents, and reports were (and still are) infrequently prepared prior to major decisions and subsequent to important events. Moreover, the relevant documents that were produced have not been preserved systematically and, in cases where they do exist, are not generally available to researchers.