Of all the dilemmas and challenges facing contemporary Iran, one of the most pressing is the force and momentum of modernity. Modernity is a phenomenon that cannot be stopped. It is a phase in the evolution of humanity that started in earnest in eighteenth-century Europe and has now come to engulf all aspects of human life and thought. Those societies and governments that somehow try to resist or negate this inevitable process only marginalize themselves and the communities they govern. At best, they selectively pick and choose those aspects of modernity that they find politically and culturally least objectionable. At worst, in an attempt to safeguard some supposed social, cultural, and political authenticity, they erect ostensibly insurmountable barriers to what they perceive to be the intrusion of modern norms, practices, and institutions. The central task facing those hitherto robbed of the fruits of modernity is to articulate and implement their own conceptions of modernity. What needs to occur is first to understand the nature and gravity of the problem of being unmodern, and then to devise feasible and meaningful strategies of reaching and accommodating modernity.