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A myth-busting insider’s account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that destroyed US influence in the country and transformed the politics of the Middle East and the world.
The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was one of the seminal events of our time. It inaugurated more than thirty years of war in the Middle East and fostered an Islamic radicalism that shapes foreign policy in the United States and Europe to this day.
Drawing on his lifetime of engagement with Iran, James Buchan explains the history that gave rise to the Revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters displaced the Shah with little difficulty. Mystifyingly to outsiders, the people of Iran turned their backs on a successful Westernized government for an amateurish religious regime. Buchan dispels myths about the Iranian Revolution and instead assesses the historical forces to which it responded. He puts the extremism of the Islamic regime in perspective: a truly radical revolution, it can be compared to the French or Russian Revolutions. Using recently declassified diplomatic papers and Persian-language news reports, diaries, memoirs, interviews, and theological tracts, Buchan illuminates both Khomeini and the Shah. His writing is always clear, dispassionate, and informative.
The Iranian Revolution was a turning point in modern history, and James Buchan’s Days of God is, as London’s Independent put it, “a compelling, beautifully written history” of that event.
- Sales Rank: #667467 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon n Schuster
- Published on: 2013-10-15
- Released on: 2013-10-15
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.40" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
British novelist and journalist Buchan traveled to Iran as an undergraduate in the 1970s. Shocked by its dissipated modernity, he says, I thought I had come too late to see what I had come to see, forgetting an ancient lesson: that in a year or two even this, also, would be obliterated. His deep connection to the country serves him well in this sweeping panorama of the Shah's Iran and its rejuvenation, occlusion, and disintegration under Khomeini. Buchan's dry wit suffuses the poetic and philosophical—if not always straightforward—text; characters appear in major episodes before they have been properly introduced, events are mentioned in passing before they unfold. He devotes equal space to critical yet sympathetic portraits of the Rezas and to Khomeini. Of the first Pahlavi Shah, he says, In introducing the notion of a powerful state, Reza was the most influential Iranian of the last century, more influential even than Ruhollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah, pensive and closed to the world, drowned his religion and his country in a ruthless obscurantism: It is said that once in Isfahan, the great Safavid divine Majlisi gave an apple to a Jew.... No such stories are told of Ruhollah Khomeini. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Oct. 15)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The recent history of Iran is a story dominated by stories of pillage by Western powers, swings toward military dictatorship, and promises unfulfilled. In this fascinating work reaching back to the close of the nineteenth century, Persian scholar Buchan has marshaled much of the available documentation and his own personal experiences in producing this definitive account of the long, revolutionary birth of the theocracy in Iran. Along the way, Buchan reveals an Iranian nation ever struggling toward modernity and torn by its past steeped in colonialism. The majority of the work follows the reign of Reza and Mohammad Reza of the Pahlavi dynasty, who attempted to drag Iran out of its “medieval past” on the fluctuating tide of oil prices only to be whisked aside upon the return of the exile Khomeini, in 1979. Buchan strikes a hopeful tone that if Iran can negotiate the nuclear crisis, it can enter the “ranks of the advanced nations.” Readers of Middle Eastern histories and diplomacy will find Buchan’s skillful narrative both edifying and intellectually engaging. --Brian Odom
Review
“The author's grasp of Persian literature and the Persian language allows him to treat Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution with rare insight and compassion.” (Roya Hakakian The Wall Street Journal)
“Magisterial. . . . James Buchan’s Days of God, a survey of the Pahlavi years, with spectacular detail on the revolution itself, includes some deft portraiture and notes of literary grace. Buchan, who lived in Iran in the late 1970s, writes with an irreverence and confidence born of long familiarity, and the Iran of his history feels vibrantly present.” (Laura Secor Foreign Affairs)
"[Buchan] mines the literature in Persian and English to better effect than any historian so far....[a] fine, elegantly written book." (The Economist)
“This is a compelling, beautifully written history of a country which has produced great literature, art and a warm people whose lives have been manipulated by other countries with ulterior motives and by their own autocratic and theocratic dictators.” (Leyla Sanai The Independent)
“A soundly argued account of the causes, course and consequences of the revolution . . . Buchan, a Persian scholar and former Financial Times foreign correspondent, puts his first-hand experience of Iran to perceptive use.” (Tony Barber Financial Times)
“A wonderfully detailed and authoritative account of the Shah’s final days and the murder and mayhem that followed.” (Jonathan Rugman The Spectator)
“A superb and original history of the Iranian Revolution. It’s essential reading.” (Simon Sebag Montefiore Mail on Sunday Books of the Year)
“An outstanding analysis of the legacy of Iran’s revolution.” (Sunday Times)
"A well-informed account of revolutionary Iran." (David Pryce-Jones National Review)
“May be the best single general-audience book on the Iranian Revolution. . . . Days of God is a balanced portrait of an unbalanced time, and one of the most distinguished books about a revolution that has still not reached its conclusion.” (Graeme Wood The Christian Science Monitor)
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A thrilling, magisterial first-hand account of the Iranian Revolution
By Dr Ali Binazir
"Is that the sound of firecrackers, Mom?"
"No. That's the sound of bullets, Ali. You should stay inside."
That was my first revolution, in January 1979. We lived in the upper-middle class North Tehran neighborhood of Saltanat Abad ("Monarchyville"), but I could still hear the report of gunshots from Jaleh Square far south. What were people fighting over? To a kid, it didn't make any sense.
The standard narrative of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 reads something like this: The Shah was a dictator who did a fair amount to build up and reform the country, but was also profligate and repressive. He used the Savak, his secret Police, to silence and torture dissenters. Eventually, his time came up, and a monolithic popular uprising brought Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, a.k.a the Ayatollah, to power.
That's not even close to the whole murky, thrilling and heartbreaking story.
James Buchan was a student in Tehran in 1973. From that vantage point, he observed firsthand the gradual unraveling of the regime of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - "the Shah" - and the forces involved in it. Fluent in Persian, he has consulted hundreds of sources to reconstruct meticulously the 20th-century history of Iran - from before the ascension of Reza Shah, Mohammad Reza's father, to the events culminating in the Revolution of February 1979, to the ceasefire of the Iran-Iraq war in 1989. Buchan understands the variables at play in the Shah's ouster:
"It is hard to say at what moment it became clear that Mohammed Reza would go. With the center of his regime disintegrated, both extremes of it required him off the stage: whether for a civilian government headed by an elder statesman or moderate oppositionist, or so the army in the manner of 1953 `rectify the situation.' Few knew of the Shah's illness, but he appeared to be badly in need of rest on the Caspian, or Kish Island or at Bandar Abbas, where, as Mohammed Reza put it later, he could `visit his navy.'"
To this day, people argue over what actually happened in Iran during those times of tumult. Who was responsible for the 1953 coup ousting the popular premier Mossadegh? Why didn't the Shah suppress his opponents when he had the time, resources and political capital? Who set fire to the Rex Cinema in Abadan, killing 400 people and triggering the cascade of events leading to the Shah's abdication? (Answer: a lone, bored twentysomething religious fanatic and drug dealer, who later turned himself in out of unbearable guilt). How did Khomeini, in exile for 14 years, overnight and seemingly unanimously become the leader of the disparate opposition factions? Who decided to take the US Embassy hostages and hold them for 444 days? (Rogue unauthorized students - one of whom a young President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - whose cause the revolutionary leaders retroactively co-opted.) What really happened with Iran-Contra?
Out of disparate, scattered and conflicting sources, Buchan constructs a narrative of modern Iranian history that is the most historically accurate I have encountered. It is a magisterial account of all the different forces pulling at Iran's soul over the course of a century: murderous neighbors, foreign superpowers, oil, greed, imperial ambition, Shi'a Islam, and deeply flawed actors invested with too much power and not enough principle.
It's a riveting account and a real-life thriller - especially if you were a boy who lived through the decline and fall of the Shah, the rise of the Islamic Republic, and the Iran-Iraq war. Today, 34 years later, I finally realize how little I understood of what happened in that swirl of passion, gunfire and fate that was the Iranian Revolution. For example:
--Outside of Tehran, the average Iranian is far more religious than I had imagined. Shi'a Islam dominates their minds in a literal, unquestioning way as Christianity does the American Bible Belt.
--The revolution started out with democratic intention and then, echoing 1789 France, quickly morphed into a bloody, autocratic one.
--Far from being a bullying dictator, the Shah's cardinal sin was "discomfort wielding power," directly leading to his demise.
What broke my heart reading this book were the accounts of near-misses and dumb luck that could have dramatically shifted the fortunes of Iran. For example:
--In 1978, the Rex Cinema arson and a 7.8 Richter earthquake killing thousands in the provinces happened in rapid succession. The opposition blamed the regime for both, fanning the fires of foment.
--At the same time, the Shah contracted lymphoma, and his doctors hid it from him, delaying treatment for an already weakened, vacillating man.
--Khomeini almost got crushed by the crowd of welcomers upon his arrival from exile in Tehran. Were it not for a helicopter that materialized deus ex machina, the 76-year old leader would have perished on the first day of the Revolution.
--Khomeini's designated successor and favorite student, Montazeri, openly criticized Khomeini for the torture and mass murder of political prisoners. Furious, Khomeini disowned and banished him and picked the far less moderate Ali Khamene'i as his regent, who has been the bugbear of the West ever since.
--And in 1982, Saddam Hussein offered Khomeini a cease-fire -- plain admission of defeat. Khomeini rejected it; hundreds of thousands of young men perished for 7 more years of pointless war.
Khomeini died in June 1989, soon after the end of that war. Buchan's account of the funeral encapsulates the events of the book and all of Iranian history:
"Amid clouds of dust and in blinding heat, the Tehran fire brigade sprayed the mourners with jets of water, both to calm the excitement and also as an element of ritual. Iranian history is a sort of passion play, a constant recitation of the foundation tragedy of Shi'a Islam, which is the Prophet's family, ringed by murderous enemies and tormented by heat and thirst, at Karbala in Iraq in October 680. Many in the crowd were mourning not a revolutionary leader or a canon juris, but the "Imam," a title applied in Iran up to then only to the perfect Shi'a saints of the Middle Ages."
I managed to escape that war in 1985, when the rain of Saddam's bombs on Tehran could no longer be sanely ignored. We restarted from zero in West Los Angeles, where this once-pampered kid had to share a bedroom with his mother. To support us, she talked herself into a job as a seamstress at the only laundromat that didn't ask for her Green Card. I got into Harvard and turned out okay. In the meantime, a kind, hospitable and ingenious people were set back a century and consigned to status of pariah nation for the next 34 years.
The best history is the kind that bears useful instruction for its living readers, and Days of God is such a book. I'm grateful for James Buchan's lucid account, which provides a salve of understanding for both the bereaved Iranians who lived through the Revolution, and the rest of the world that feels its aftershocks to this day.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
days of god
By Ed Deisley
i have read about a half dozen books which cover this same time period & i rated them all four or five stars; however, buchan's book is the best by far, most informative, best written covering time period from before first palavi shah, thru rise & fall of last shah and the rise of kholmeni til his death in 1989 with some info since in epilogue; also has some good insight into iraq/iran war but does best detailed account of the 1978-81 time period compared to the other books i have read; tells of events from all sides, i.e. iran, USA, israel, iraq others; i recomend this book highly for anyone who wants to know more about this important time period which still effects world events today
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Best Read Thus Far
By Carly e Putnam
Of all the books I have read and studied through my years of self-education and college this one is by far the most informative in my opinion. The attention to detail and perspective given is flawless and completely worth every penny. I found more information in this book than I have sitting in any lecture or in reading any textbook. I highly recommend this book.
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