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Stendhal's The Red and the Black refers to the colours of the radicals and the clergy, as his protagonist attempts to pass as a conservative cleric while hiding his radical credentials. In that vein did Mohammad Reza Shah (deposed in 1979) once describe the ayatollahs who replaced him as “the coalition of the red and black reactionaries��. While the Ayatollah Khomeini preached his own new and extreme religious doctrine, the revolution absorbed the thought of cutting-edge leftist and postcolonial thinkers (among them Fanon, Sartre, and Massignon), primarily via the ideologue Ali Shariati. As Julian Sorel discovered, the combination was never really viable.



(Above: the Azadi Tower in Iran, one of the Shah's last great extravagances.)

This book, written by the director of Yale's program in Iranian Studies, covers the modern state of Iran from its founding with the Safavid Empire in 1501, through the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, and to the present day. However roughly the second half of the book is about 20th-century developments, and it goes deep on the current republic: the regime's crimes, economic and demographic changes, the Iran-Iraq war, and the cultural production both inside the country and in exile.

Iran's founding made it the first Shi'i state, in some ways mirroring the cleavage in Christendom (Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door in 1517). During that time and the subsequent Qajar reign, the country was fairly closed off and underdeveloped, with bloody succession battles following the death of each shah. During the 19th century, the rise of European empires to its south (Britain) and north (Russia) resulted in Iran being torn between the two powers and losing much of its territory. When oil was discovered in 1901, things again took a turn for the worse. Reza Khan, a military dictator, became shah after a brief and chaotic interregnum, something akin to Germany's pre-Weimar period, when liberal, socialist and atheist ideas were briefly in vogue.

Modern Iran has a tendency toward victimhood, and one upshot of this book is that is is fairly justified. From the , the extortionate shenanigans of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Western overthrow of Reza Khan in place of his son, the "temporary invasion" during World War II, and of course the CIA's 1953 coup against Mosadegh. Even without going into the root causes of each event, one can understand why the country has a sense of grievance, a national childhood trauma compelling distrust of outsiders.

The "Persiosphere" of time immemorial spans from India (via Babur and the Moguls) through the plains of central Asia (Tajik and the Afghan language Dari are Persian dialects) to Mesopotamia to the Caucasus. The modern state is far smaller, and its rogue government, which has tortured and executed without trial thousands of its citizens, has attempted to erase much of its past culture and beauty. Hopefully the next chapter of its history - whenever it comes - will be a more tolerant one which allows expression of this ancient people's vibrancy, creativity and romantic soul.