Homa Katouzian is an economist, historian, political scientist and literary critic. He has been senior lecturer in economics at the University of Kent; visiting professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles; visiting professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego; and research fellow at St Antony's College and member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. His numerous books include The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran; Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer; Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectic of State and Society; and Humour in Iran: Eleven-Hundred Years of Satire and Humour in Persian Literature.

Part I: History and Politics Introduction 1. Iran in the Middle Ages: From the Islamic Conquest to the Rise of the Qajars 2. Arbitrary Despotism and Taxation in Iran 3. Iran: Developments in the Nineteenth Century: Encounters with Modernity 4. The Fall of the Qajars 5. Miracles at the Saqqa-khaneh: Power Struggles, Baha'i Pogrom and Murder of the American Envoy in Tehran 6. Politics and Poetry in Iran: 1919-1925 7. Iran Under the Pahlavi Monarchy 8. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 Followed by the Islamic Revolution of 1981 9. Weststruckness: Its Trials, and Its Tribulations (With Morad Moazami) 10. Hamid Dabashi, The Last Muslim Intellectual, The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Review Article 11. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Crisis Revisited: Iran's Rejection of the World Bank Intervention and the 1953 Coup 12. Of the Sins of Khalil Maleki 13. Interest Is Not Riba: A Critical Study of Riba and Interest in Islam Part II: Modern and Classical Literature 14. Sadeq Hedayat, Modern Iranian Fiction and the Experience of Modernity 15. Humour in Hedayat 16. Was Forugh Farrokhzad a Sinner? 17. Sa'di, Lover of Beauty and Advocate of Human Morality 18. Sa'di and the Others: The Semi-Rhymed Prose, and 'Inimitable Facility' Art Forms