The Legitimacy Crisis in the Emergence of the Mashrooteh Movement and the Islamic Revolution

This article is an attempt to study two historical
junctures in the history of Iran: from the Qajar era to the
Mashrooteh Movement; and from the Pahlavi era to the
Islamic Revolution. The two junctures have been studied
from different perspectives; however, this article
concentrates only on how political legitimacy emerged
and diminished in the the above-mentioned revolutions.
The basic question to be addressed in this study is:
what is the relationship between the emergence of the
legitimacy crises and the decline of the dominating
political systems in the two eras? This question leads to
other questions: What resources fed the political
legitimacy in the Qajar and Pahlavi eras? On what other
factors and events is the collapse of the political
legitimacy in the Mashrooteh and the Islamic Revolution
dependent? And by means of which alternative
legitimizing element do the Mashroote Movement and
the Islamic Revolution evolve? This article attempts to
answer the above questions.