1. The official Iranian figure for war deaths is 218,867 (172,056 killed in battle; 15,959 killed in cities; and 30,852 died later because of injuries); see http://wvnysharghnewspaper.com /830630/societ.htm#s112668. By contrast, Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II: The Iran-Iraq War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), p. 3, cite Iran’s war dead as between 450,000 and 730,000, using as their source an unclassified CIA estimate.
2. The poor fit between the Iranian revolution and most explanations of it is a theme developed at length in Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), in what is the single best book about the subject, based on an extraordinary wealth of source material. Page 121 is the source for the comparison between participation in the Iranian and other revolutions. The most famous example of a theorist of revolution presenting the Iranian revolution as an anomaly is Theda Skopcol, “Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society, vol. 11, pp. 265–283.
3. The phrase is from Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 464. His analysis of Shariati continues on pp. 464–473 and 534 and in his essay “The Islamic Left: From Radicalism to Liberalism,” in Stephanie Cronin, ed., Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), pp. 268–279.
4. See also Ali Shariati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, Richard Campbell, trans. (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1980).
5. The growth of Islamic associations among the intellectuals is analyzed in Said Arjomand, The Turban fbr the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 96–98.