Toward the Great Civilization

Toward the Great Civilization is the last book of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign, published in Tehran in 1977 on the eve of the revolution. In it, the Shah lays out a long-range vision for Iran’s future.

The book is organized in several parts — a look at today’s world, Iran during the era of the Revolution of the Shah and People, toward the Great Civilization, and a message to the Iranian people. It reviews fifteen years of progress since the White Revolution and projects Iran becoming one of the world’s top five industrial powers, arguing that citizens’ education and awareness must precede full political opening.

Published just before the upheaval of 1978–79, it was in effect the Shah’s final political-philosophical statement before his fall — an optimistic, ambitious plan published roughly eighteen months before the revolution engulfed the country.

Scholars treat it as an indispensable primary source for late-Pahlavi state ideology. A modern scholarly English edition, Towards the Great Civilization (edited by Robert Steele, introduction by Ali Ansari), was published by I.B. Tauris in 2024.