Revolutionary ideas

CHRISTIAN EMERY applauds an encyclopaedic yet accessible account detailing how post-revolutionary Iran has been scarred by theocracy and repression

- Christian Emery

On a snowy morning on 11 February 1979, US president Jimmy Carter gathered his advisers to absorb the news - to them, calamitous - that Iranian revolutionaries had succeeded in dislodging one of America's most loyal and powerful allies in the Middle East.

The incredulity of that moment has, sadly, never given way to a deeper understanding of how to deal with post-revolutionary Iran, and 47 years of dysfunctional US-Iranian relations has recently resulted in the outbreak of full-scale war.

There can, therefore, be no more timely moment for Homa Katouzian to help us understand how the 1979 Iranian Revolution brought the despotic Pahlavi dynasty crashing down, and how it then evolved into the Islamist state we see today continuing the cycle of protest and repression.