The dramatic escalation of tensions in the Middle East in recent years has renewed interest in a long-standing question: how should Iran’s foreign policy be understood? Is the behavior of the Islamic Republic driven primarily by revolutionary ideology and religious fervor, or does it reflect deeper geopolitical and historical forces that shape the Iranian state's strategic outlook regardless of regime type?
Two influential works provide...
The Emergence of the Charter
The German orientalist Wellhausen was the first to introduce the Medina Charter to Western scholarly circles. Most likely after the publication of Wellhausen’s Skizzen und Vorarbeiten in 1899, the attention of other scholars and researchers—among them the German scholar Grimme, the Italian Caetani, as well as Buhl, Wensinck, Korehl, Ranke, Müller, and Guillaume—was drawn to the Charter, and there...
