While the Shiite faithful (along with their Jewish and Christian counterparts) are still awaiting their messiah, the Islamic Republic is investing heavily in the Jamkaran shrine, spending more than half a billion dollars on enlargements that rival those of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, with vast interior courtyards and facilities—including offices, research centers, cultural departments, slaughterhouses, and soup kitchens—not to mention the farms where Jamkaran raises its meat. In a country where the religious establishment dominates state institutions, Jamkaran's burgeoning bureaucracy seems set to outstrip that of the longer- established shrine complexes of Mashhad and Qom.

While external observers perceive the struggle in Iran between conservatives and moderates in political terms, the Islamic Republic's conflicting ideological currents also find expression in the age-old rhetoric of the apocalypse, which originated in the region more than two thousand years ago. As Abbas Amanat explains in Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism, the Jamkaran makeover was part of the campaign orchestrated by conservative clerics in Qom against the government of former President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies.

Unlike many academics, Amanat, a professor of history at Yale, is willing to venture into regions outside his specialty of Iranian studies, which makes his book particularly valuable, as it is informed by the knowledge—all too rare among Islamicists—that Islam is one variant in a cluster of religions rather than a subject to be treated on its own. Messianic expectations are fundamental to all the West Asian religions, articulating forces that are both dynamic and dangerous:

The vast number of visitors to Jamkaran demonstrates the resurgence of interest in the Mahdi among Iranians of all classes—including the affluent middle classes in the capital—and the triumph of the Islamic Republic in capitalizing on symbols of public piety.

Although these symbols, such as the Jamkaran shrine, are specific to Shiism, their appeal—not to mention their mobilizing power—is universal. As Amanat points out, apocalyptic movements have been motors of religious change throughout history. Christian origins are inseparable from the spirit of apocalypticism that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Muhammad's early mission cannot be explained without reference to the "apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgement, apparent in the early suras [chapters] of the Qu'ran." Later examples—to name but a few—include Martin Luther's call for reforming the Catholic Church and Sabbatai Zevi's claim in the seventeenth century to be the Jewish messiah. The Mormon church, the most successful of the new American religions, was born in the millennial frenzy that swept through the "Burnt-Over District" of upstate New York in the 1830s. Amanat sees all these as conscious attempts to fulfill messianic visions conceived on the ancient models preserved in Zoroastrian and biblical scriptures.

In a brief but masterful compression of insights gained from readings of Norman Cohn, founding father of millennial studies, and other scholars in the field, Amanat reviews the dynamics of apocalyptic histories. On the positive side the anticipation of imminent divine judgment can be translated into a message of social justice, with individual choice replacing dogmas handed down by ancestors, tribes, or communities. Historically, apocalyptic movements tend to be socially inclusive, appealing especially to the deprived, marginalized, and dispossessed.