Books like King of Kings

Sick, Carter’s White House adviser on Iran, offers a cogent, deeply insightful account of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the seizure of American hostages in Tehran, and the Carter Administration’s inadequate response to the unfolding crisis. In a later book, The October Surprise, Sick falls just short of proving that the Reagan campaign conspired with the Iranian government to delay the release of the hostages until after the 1980 election. But he is convincing in his claim that the truth in this sordid affair has never fully come to light.

In this book, Sandal and Fox directly connect religion to mainstream international relations.

They survey the “grand paradigms” of international relations theory and discuss the various ways religion can be integrated into each. This was a useful exercise as both skeptics and champions of religion’s role in international relations have argued it is wholly separate from existing theories.

To me, its most valuable contribution was their suggestion that religion can be a source of the power and resources states struggle over, in contrast to many scholars on religion and international relations who assume religion overcomes power politics.

They also discussed religious legitimacy as a potential tool for states. These provided a useful starting point for my exploration of religion as an often-disruptive force in foreign policy.      

The US is indisputably the hegemonic power in and the gendarmerie of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. And the Arab states on that Gulf’s southern littoral are perfectly content with that and even concerned that the US might no longer serve in that role. This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth historical account of how that happened, weaving together a complex set of factors, regional and international events and developments, into one coherent narrative. As such it is the first to be picked and consumed by any inquirer into the topic.

I well remember following the sequence of events–a terrible fire that killed 430 trapped in a cinema in Abadan, riots, mass shootings by the army, strikes, politicization, and Islamicization of students–which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Like many others I was both excited and filled with foreboding at the time. To read Desmond Harney’s eyewitness account is to be carried right into the middle of things. I was utterly gripped as the Iranian middle classes grasped at forlorn hopes and as those hopes faded away in the face of the ‘single-mindedness, implacability, fierce puritanism and commanding authority’ of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

This novel was banned in Iran and published outside of it by a renowned Iranian author who grew up in a village and moved to Tehran, where he became a prominent writer and political prisoner. It lends a surreal and personal perspective to the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War – the two most dramatic and formative events in the Islamic Republic’s forty-year existence. It tells the haunting and heart-wrenching story of an unnamed and disgraced former army colonel, who futilely tries to keep his mind intact and his family together during this tumultuous period. The novel poignantly demonstrates how the revolution and war tore individuals and their loved ones apart to the point of madness and death. It is a microcosm of the deep-seated dissonance and disillusionment that Iranians have experienced over aspirational nationalism and piety, on one side, and endemic fragmentation and repression, on the other. A difficult… show more.

Importantly, this book reminds the reader that the Iranian Revolution and others are rare and unpredictable events in human history that breed chaos and uncertainty. The book systematically and convincingly debunks the conventional explanations for the revolution related to static structures and processes in the government, military, economy, society, and culture. Instead, the book argues that what ultimately turned the tide of the revolution was the agency of activists who purposively created and exploited these structures and processes, translated initial fear into intensified outrage, drew power in numbers, and became convinced that success in the form of regime change was possible.       

Written in a powerful journalistic style, this short but compelling book tells of the last years of the Shah’s reign, focusing in painful detail on the brutality of Savak, his secret police force, his detachment from his subjects, and setting the scene for the inevitable revolution that would seal his downfall. The fear on the streets is palpable.

Over the past forty-plus years, the Middle East has seen more than its due of wars and chaos. Kim Ghattas, a Lebanese journalist who currently writes for The Atlantic, writes in Black Wave of the impact throughout the Middle East of three heavy-duty events—the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and gives a sense of the why and the how behind the events she documents.

Ghattas tracks the impact of these events throughout Iran and Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. She handles the sheer volume of material by focusing on the repression of regimes and the ideologies they represent as seen through the voices of novelists, journalists, intellectuals, and religious figures. Her account emphasizes issues often seen as… show more.

This book was written by one of the few Americans, who lived in Iran during the revolution, and helped inspire and inform my own monograph on the rural politics of the country. Based on years of painstaking ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this anthropological work traces the sociopolitical transformations that transpired in an Iranian village located outside the city of Shiraz before and after the Iranian Revolution. The book demonstrates the increasingly blurry boundaries between rural and urban geographies and identities as the country modernized, and the opportunities and challenges behind this process. While previous scholarship contends that villagers refrained from supporting or participating in the revolution, this book paints a more nuanced and complex picture by showing that some in fact did while others did not and explains why this was the case.   

My family fled Iran a couple years after the Islamic Revolution, but growing up, my parents didn’t talk about that period in their life all that much. It was sort of like my friend whose dad never talked about Vietnam. So, even though I was born in Iran post-revolution, I didn’t learn much about the history of the Shah’s downfall until I read Marjane Satrapi’s incredible graphic novels – Persepolis, Books One and Two. Satrapi manages to create a funny and heartbreaking memoir about her adolescence during the revolution and her life as a young ex-pat living in Paris. 

Follow it up with her graphic novella, Embroideries—which delves into the sex lives of Iranian women. Another topic that was generally off-limits in our household.