A tour of unreality.(The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution)(Book review)

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The Persian Night: Iran under the KBomeinist Revolution, by Amir Taheri (Encounter, 300 pp., $25.95)

PRESENT-DAY Iran is a glaring example of the human propensity to do harm in the belief that one is doing good. The country has been hijacked and shaken out of its course by people with a claim to a vision of perfection. Self-righteous ideologues, they are like others of the kind in other countries at other times: Their true goal is absolute power. What sets the Iranians apart is that they are Shiites, a minority within Islam with a specific doctrine stating that an imam in the 10th century went into hiding and that mankind has to convert to Islam, whereupon the Hidden Imam will return and usher in the end of days.

Today's regime in Iran believes that this messianic vision is about to be fulfilled. Unbelievers--in other words, Christians and Jews--cannot be allowed to stand in the way. Even more problematically, within Islam itself Shiites are outnumbered about ten to one by Sunnis, and these too have to be brought into line. The pursuit of power in the name of Islam is driving the regime to develop and test weaponry, including long-range missiles and what is suspected from the available evidence to be a nuclear bomb. This threat to the world order is as sudden as it is unexpected, with a quality of hallucination about it, as if reality itself were going off the rails.

In the course of centuries, indeed millennia, Iran has experienced many ups and downs, but always managed to preserve its independence, and its identity and culture as well. Successive shahs were in the quandary of having to decide whether to modernize, and if so, how to carry it through--in other words, what accommodation to make to the ways of the West and unbelievers in general. At several levels of the society there was always a retrograde reaction to any change that seemed to be surrendering to outside influences, and an obscure and obscurantist cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, made himself the leader of a campaign against Westernization. Seizing power in 1979, he remodeled the state into a Shiite Islamic dictatorship. His hold on absolute power could only generate violence and a clash of civilizations. He did not object to being seen as another Prophet, perhaps even the Hidden Imam.

Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah's Iraqi and Sunni neighbor and rival, was quick to go to war against an Iran that had hit upon a new guise for ancient ethnic and doctrinal prejudices. The eventual American overthrow of Saddam Hussein dramatically changed the balance of forces throughout the Middle East. Occupying a position of military strength right next to Iran, the United States became the effective regional power, and the main obstacle to Shiite imperialism. Today's leaders of Iran bitterly resent what they see as an American check on their ambitions and nothing less than a repudiation of their whole vision of the future. In response, they regularly forecast the coming decline and fall of the United States, and for good measure the elimination of the state of Israel as well; they speechify and mount huge demonstrations to impress on everyone that for the sake of Islam they are about to deliver the promised apocalypse. The worst of it is that most of these ruling clerics are genuine ideologues and not cynics; they really mean what they say and do.

Written in sorrow rather than anger, The Persian Night clearly and calmly describes Iran's descent into unreality. It is a masterwork of information and argument. Formerly editor of Iran's most influential paper, Amir Taheri is now perforce an exile but he remains in touch with all sorts of insiders. In addition to his native Farsi he is fluent in Arabic and the main European languages. Frequent quotations from Persian poetry, old or contemporary, reveal his love of his native country and its culture, but he is equally likely to make good use of Plato and Cicero, Hobbes and Goethe, or even Frantz Fanon to illustrate a point. More than ironic, it seems outright improbable that one and the same Iran could be home to ignorant bigots like Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors--in particular the vicious and narrow-minded president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--and a sophisticated humanist like Taheri.