With the advent of the Iranian Revolution in 1978, the Western world became aware to a much greater extent than before of the significance and the emotional and intellectual power of Shī‵ite Islam. Serious students and observers of world affairs at that time began to cast about for Western-language studies of Shī‵ite history, only to find that there was much less scholarly work available than might have been anticipated. Aside from the studies of Hamid Algar, Alessandro Bausani, Henri Corbin, Michel Mazzaoui, and, somewhat later, Shahrough Akhavi, Michael Fischer, Said Arjomand, and Abdulaziz Sachedina, one could find few substantial examinations of “Twelver” (Imāmī or “moderate”) Shī‵ism in Iran for the past four centuries. This was true in spite of the fact that it has been the state religion of Iran since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Since the Iranian Revolution, not surprisingly, a number of important works have appeared, for example, those of Yann Richard, Heinz Halm, Moojan Momen, and Hossein Modarressi, just to mention a few, which have given us a much better understanding of Shī‵ism in Iran and, in some cases, elsewhere. Now, happily, one may also point to a number of studies of non-Twelver Shī‵ism (e.g., Ismā‵īlism), for example, the works of Farhad Daftary, Paul Walker, Abbas Hamdani, Wilferd Madelung, Heinz Halm, and Ismail Poonawala.