Islam in Practice: Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village

"This is a well-argued and long overdue articulation of a situation already perceived intuitively by many observers of traditional communities professing a salvation religion--especially Islam--but generally obscured in the literature by the observer's preconceptions. Here, by contrast, Iranian peasants and settled tribesmen talk directly to us for the first time: their attitudes and Loeffler's conclusions are a salutory and necessary counter to all the recent studies of Iran's urban-based 'Islamic Revolution' and of 'Islam' as an artifact of the establishment clergy, or of Marxist revisionists, or of western and westernized scholars." -- John R. Perry, University of Chicago