Mehdi Mozaffari was an anti-shah activist, but equally against Iran’s 1979 Islamist revolution—which led to his escape "from the revolution ... leaving behind my country, my birthplace, my belongings, my career at Tehran University, my friends, my family." His subsequent academic career has been motivated in no small part, as he writes, by "the thirst to understand this phenomenon that so drastically changed my life, as well as the lives of all Iranians, and even the general situation in the Middle East, with an important impact on world politics." He is now professor emeritus of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark.