"While Ayatollah Khomeini is considered the face of the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, Ali Shari'ati is considered a much greater influence on shaping the revolutionary consciousness than Khomeini. Acceptable to both modernists as well as Islamists, Shari'ati's radicalism inspired much of the resistance in urban Iran in the closing years of the Shah. Ali Shari'ati and the Shaping of Political Islam in Iran tells the story of how Shari'ati developed a language of political Islam, speaking in an idiom intelligible to the Iranian public, and subverting the Shah's regime and its claim to legitimacy"--