The most obvious and compelling reality of the contemporary Middle East, as with most of Asia, is the passing of traditional society and the creation, through development and social change, of an entirely new scheme of life with new norms and patterns of behavior, new forms of organization and new directions of loyalty and interest. As Middle Easterners, Iranians are waging their own battle with the complex forces of change and are shaping a new order in terms of their own values and preferences. The process of modernization is generally granted to be stimulated and emanate from a foreign, not to say Western, source—but is also now claimed to be partially self-generating indigenously--primarily in the form of new industries, new technologies and new systems of organizing knowledge and data and putting them to use for the society at large. In the face of this onslaught of diverse and often unfamiliar forces a wide range of responses and reactions may be noted.

The history of Iran, in the years just before World War I is dominated by a general institutional crisis called the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Although the narrative line most often followed through those years is a sequence of political and military encounters, the revolution was in fact a systemic crisis which affected nearly all of the institutions that contained the Persian people. Like all revolutions, however, it had its own idea of what it was up to; in fact, it had several. In common with other modern revolutions, it held the principle to be self-evident that through the revolution a new freedom was being created and a corrupt tyranny destroyed. Such views were, of course,rationales not interpretations of history, but like the latter they extended backward in time to describe the period before the revolution. In short, they explained not only what the revolutionaries themselves were doing, but what much of the history of Qajar Persia amounted to.