Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences

by James Buchan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416597827
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

James Buchan holds a degree in Persian studies from Oxford University. He worked for twelve years as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. He has written three works of nonfiction and six novels, including Heart’s Journey in Winter, which won the Guardian Fiction Award, and A Good Place to Die, which was a New York Times Notable Book. He lives on a farm in eastern England.

Read an Excerpt

Days of God
I first came to Iran in 1974, the year the price of crude oil rose fourfold and Europe switched off its power stations. After the darkness of the autobahns, I found the city of Tabriz illuminated as if for a perpetual wedding. On my first day in Tehran, the capital, I was taken on by a school teaching the English language to cadets of the Imperial Iranian Air Force. The rows of desks receded out of sight. It was Ramazan, when Muslims fast the daylight hours, and the pupils dozed on their pen-cases or glared at the wrapped sandwiches they had brought in to eat at sundown. Among those Turkoman boys, there must have been the makings of at least one military aviator, and it was I who was going to make the start on him. I was the smallest component in one of the greatest military expansions ever undertaken. The owner of the school was a brigadier general and I used to see him, in uniform in the afternoons, striking the male secretaries. At payday, the cashier, an old man with stubble on his chin, who was the general’s father, took half an hour to sign my check. An Indian colleague whispered that a tip was expected. I quit.

I moved to Isfahan, the famous old city in the heart of the country. I found a job in a morning, teaching schoolgirls. I was a bad teacher, but I was an Oxford sophomore and nineteen years old. The class doubled in size and halved in fluency. My pupils cultivated feeling to a pitch, and sighed over adjectives. They made fun of me, as if I had been a bashful seminary student.

Bred up in the medieval Persian of Oxford University, I was baffled by Iranian modernity. In this famous town, with its palaces so flimsy you could blow them over with a sigh, there were military instructors from Grumman Corp. and Bell Helicopter International, with their Asian women and a screw loose from Vietnam, sobbing in hotel lobbies. 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.

I did not know, as I know now, that nations salvage what they can from the wreck of history, and the warriors of the national poet Ferdowsi were the tough guys or lutis (“buggers”) of the bazaar, and the lyrics of Hafez were the songs on the car radio: Black-eyed, tall and slender, Oh to win Leila! The Isfahan women rose early, buying their food from the grocery fresh each day, a clay bowl of yoghurt which they smashed after use, or those bundles of green herbs that Khomeini liked to eat, all to cook the daily lunch. For an Englishman, standing in line to buy cigarettes, it was tempting enough to stay and settle down with one of these angels, and pass his life in inconsequential fantasies. The grocer wore a double-breasted suit of wide 1930s cut, a tribal cap, and the rag-soled cotton slippers known as giveh. It was as if he had thrown off a tyrannical dress code, but only at its up and down extremities. It seemed to me that the Shah had run a blunt saw across the very grain of Iranianness.

In the cool vaults of the Isfahan bazaar, where I supplemented my wages by dealing in bad antiques, a lane would end in a chaos of smashed brick and a blinding highway, as if Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was trying to abolish something other than medieval masonry: an entire and traditional way of life, with its procession from shop to mosque to bath to shop to mosque and its interminable religious ceremonies.

Somebody, presumably the Russians, had given the Iranians a taste for assassination and vodka. Somebody else, no doubt the Americans, had given them Pepsi and ice cream. A third, perhaps the British, had taught them to love opium. Laid across that beautiful town was some personality that expressed itself in straight roads crossing at right angles, mosques turned into mere works of art, and all the frowstiness of an overtaken modernity. It was uneducated or even illiterate, violent, avaricious, in a hurry to get somewhere it never arrived. I know now that that personality was the Shah’s father, Reza. Over that was another impression, not at all forceful, but cynical, melancholy, pleasure-loving, distrustful, also in a hurry. I supposed that was Mohammed Reza. I did not understand why those kings were in such a hurry but I knew that haste, as the Iranians say, is the devil’s work. I could see that Iran was going to hell but could not for the life of me descry what kind of hell.

James Buchan

England, 2013

Table of Contents

Introduction xv

1 The Origins of the Pahlavi State 1

2 Cossack Government 27

3 The Boy 53

4 Ruhollah 79

5 Ruritania 99

6 The Storm Gathers 115

7 The Indian 147

8 The Burnt Cinema 159

9 The Junction 177

10 A Box of Earth 195

11 God Is Great 215

12 Dog Wedding 243

13 The Scent of Watermelon 281

14 Convoys of Light 307

Epilogue 329

Appendix: Khomeini's Letter of July 16, 1988 335

Notes 339

Acknowledgments 387

Index 389

Editorial Reviews

Buchan, who was studying in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution, draws on Iranian records, memoirs, and newspaper reports to explain the revolution's causes and consequences. Expect vivid characterization from Buchan, an award-winning novelist as well as a journalist. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

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)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Financial Times - Tony Barber

A superb and original history of the Iranian Revolution. It’s essential reading.

Mail on Sunday Books of the Year - Simon Sebag Montefiore

"A well-informed account of revolutionary Iran."

National Review - David Pryce-Jones

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.

The Wall Street Journal - Roya Hakakian

"[Buchan] mines the literature in Persian and English to better effect than any historian so far....[a] fine, elegantly written book."

The Economist

An outstanding analysis of the legacy of Iran’s revolution.

Sunday Times

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.

Foreign Affairs - Laura Secor

A wonderfully detailed and authoritative account of the Shah’s final days and the murder and mayhem that followed.

The Spectator - Jonathan Rugman

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

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.

The Christian Science Monitor - Graeme Wood

2013-10-01
British novelist and journalist Buchan (The Authentic Adam Smith, 2006, etc.) revisits the Iranian revolution for a clarification of the historical record. A plethora of recent works on Iraq and Afghanistan have given way to a deluge of interest in Iran and what makes this enigmatic empire tick. Buchan, a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, provides a helpful primer about the rise and fall of the Pahlavi state, fleshing out in particular the personalities of the autocratic father, Reza, a "former stable lad" who "crowned himself King of Kings" in 1926, and coddled son, Mohammed Reza, who rose to power in 1941 and was hounded into exile by the revolution in 1979. A country deeply embedded in ancient customs and privileges, Iran had known long-running dynasties of Safavids and Qajars, while the Pahlavis, in comparison, would be a flash in the pan, though they galvanized the country to hasty European-inspired modernity. A political lightweight on the world stage, Mohammed Reza was nonetheless tolerated by the British and Americans after World War II as offering "stability" to their oil interests in the region and left in power after the CIA-engineered coup of 1953. Meanwhile, the brilliant seminary student Ruhollah Khomeini swung into political action, challenging the shah's reforms and ending up in exile in 1963. The shah grew increasingly isolated from real events, spending lavishly on the buildup of his armed forces, and he was emboldened by the death of his chief rival, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eventually, the revolutionary and religious elements could not be contained by the shah's forces, and Khomeini became the movement's spiritual leader. In sprightly prose, Buchan delineates the events that took on a mind of their own and left Iran doomed by its very "intransigence." A solid, accessible look at the making of modern Iran.

Kirkus Reviews