The first English-language translation of former Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's penultimate book, published in Persian on the eve of the revolution that brought the downfall of the monarchy.

In the late 1970s, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran published his third book. In it, he gave his assessment of the progress of Iran in the 15 years since the launching of his White Revolution in 1963 and his vision for his country for the proceeding years and decades – the march towards, what he termed, Iran's Great Civilization. An indispensable source for understanding state ideology and domestic and foreign policy in the late Pahlavi period, as well as the shah's personal philosophy and political thought, this new edition of Towards the Great Civilization is based on the original unpublished English-language translation commissioned by the Pahlavi Library, edited by Robert Steele, with an introduction by Professor Ali Ansari.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980) was the last shah of Iran, who ruled the country from 1941 until 1979.

Robert Steele is a researcher at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of The Shah's Imperial Celebrations of 1971 (I.B. Tauris, 2020) and Pahlavi Iran's Relations with Africa: Cultural and Political Connections in the Cold War (2024), and co-editor of Iran and Global Decolonisation: Politics and Resistance After Empire (2023).