The Karbala Story and Early Shi’ite Identity, Edinburgh University Press (2025)

In September 1979, when I began my studies in religion at Uppsala University,

the Iranian revolution had just taken place. The revolution had a huge impact

on the Department of Theology, and in particular the Department of the History of Religions. For decades, in Sweden and elsewhere, religion had been

seen as a private matter, of little or no interest in terms of influencing modern

society. As a consequence, religious studies as an academic discipline had often

been regarded as a rather obscure subject cultivated largely by nerds with little

interest in what went on in society at large – and to some extent this had been

true. The revolution in Iran took politicians, political scientists and scholars of