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It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that the crafting and re-crafting of national identity through actions of authorities and/or political mobilization and struggle has been a national preoccupation in modern Iranian history. This is not to imply that Iranians and their political leaders, going through the global process of modernity, have been any more or less creative than others in the world in re-inventing their "national" selves. However, a case can be made that in the past century Iranians have been afforded, or have produced, more opportunities to re-create themselves in a bombastic and dualistic fashion, energetically vacillating between extremes of contentious Islamism and secularism, pre-Islamic and Islamic imagination, and avid anti-imperialism and absorption in global trends.

In recent years, there has been a plethora of commentary, at times revised daily, regarding the
nature of factional conflicts and the marketplace of ideas that elite competition has brought into
the open in Iran. Much less analyzed or thoughtfully reflected upon are the kinds of subtle
changes that have occurred in different layers of the society that allow Iranians to breathe meaning
into, and make sense of, the fast pace of changes at the political top, and to fuel those changes.
Precisely how Iranians have fashioned, and are fashioning, their daily life—or, as Adelkhah
puts it, "reinventing their modern life"—is the tantalizing focus of this very
interesting, albeit rather scattered and cumbersome, book about Iranian culture and politics.