Iran: From the inside as well as outside

4 books, 4 vivid renderings of the country

Shah of Shahs (1982) by Ryszard Kapuscinski is a reporter’s account of the days leading up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It paints a vivid picture of Iran’s evolution from the rise of the Pahlavis– how a young Reza Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, went on to stage a coup with the help of the British and become the new Shah – through premier Mosaddegh ’s burst of nationalism and democracy that was again sabotaged by Western oil interests, to finally the backlash against the throne that coalesced around Ayatollah Khomeini .

Interestingly, a 1978 article aiming to discredit Khomeini by alluding to his foreign origins – his grandfather came from India – and casting aspersions on his mental health, was the trigger for the revolution. This history weighs heavily on Iran even today, with the struggle for “dignity” animating internal political discourse.

Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoirin Books (2003) by Azar Nafisi is an autobiographical account of a woman who finds herself suffocated by the arbitrary restrictions and punishments of her country. After resigning her university job, she creates, clandestinely, a classroom with more freedoms than exist outside.

For two years, every Thursday, seven students gather in her home, taking off their veils, to peruse the relationship between fiction and reality. They read A Thousand and One Nights and the forbidden, ‘non-revolutionary’ canon, Nabokov to Austen.


Lolita captures, for them, the texture of living in a totalitarian society. As movie houses were set on fire, Ayatollah Khomeini had declared, “We are not against cinema…we are against prostitution.” Humbert rapes Lolita, robs her of childhood, and exonerates himself by implicating her, as vulgar vixen, vile slut, seducer. An illusory world makes saviour and executioner indistinguishable.

Republics of Myth : National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (2022) by Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne, John Tirman explores how two nations in a cold war for 40 years managed to deal on a complex issue – Iran’s nuclear programme – and then let it unravel. Crediting or criticising individuals – Obama-Rouhani or Trump – is incomplete reading. It’s the two nations’ centuries old narratives that constantly clash, and determine the relationship. Iran’s narrative is of suspicion of foreign involvement, US’s is of self-glorifying idealism.

These narratives, sustained by history, culture, ideology, overpower ‘strategic logic’. It took 18 years to reach an n-deal, driven by powerful state interests – existential for Iran’s regime survival, for US, a need to contain Iran. Yet, it was the stories nations tell themselves weaving history with myth that reinforced the US-Iran conflict – a fraught relationship itself became the key narrative.

Iran’s Rise and Rivalry with the US in the Middle East (2025) by Mohsen M Milani : In 1971, Iran was America’s top arms buyer, and ‘policeman of the Persian Gulf’ – a peg above Saudi – in Nixon’s eyes. Oil revenues were strong, yet the revolution that deposed the Shah and ushered in a theocracy was just eight years away. How did US, seen as a friend under Truman in the 1940s, become a foe so soon? One that Khomeini described as “the great Satan, the wounded snake”.

In Milani’s assessment, this rupture occurred because Iranians resent attacks on their sovereignty, which they have lost to Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks and Britons over millennia. The 1953 coup, Eisenhower ganged up with Churchill to oust Mohammad Mosaddegh, a patriotic Iranian PM who nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and continued interference since, were the deal-breakers.