How to Understand the Ayatollahs

How to Understand the Ayatollahs

By Michael Rubin
September 7, 2015
Commentary Magazine


I frequently write here and elsewhere about modern Iran, but I have on occasion taught courses and more extended seminars on Iranian politics and history — at Yale, Hebrew University, Johns Hopkins and for U.S. military audiences. When lecturing to practitioners, be they military, law enforcement, or intelligence analysts, a recurring question is, “If I could read one book about Iran, what should it be?”

Books about Iran have long been imperfect. Many of the books about the Islamic Revolution, for example, were commissioned against the backdrop of the Islamic Revolution. Publishers reached out to Iranian history professors to explain why a revolution that caught most policymakers by surprise happened. The end results — in Nikki Keddie’s Roots of Revolution (updated as Modern Iran) or Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions — tended to depict the Islamic Revolution as the inevitable outcome of political, economic, social, and cultural forces that other less expert contemporaries had somehow failed to identify. The reality is that the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic that it inaugurated were an anomaly: Ayatollah Khomeini got lucky. Had Mohammad Reza Shah’s cancer manifested itself earlier — or later — the shah might have been more effective in his crackdown. Had some Western countries not facilitated Khomeini’s return or so naively accepted his statements professing a lack of interest in personal power at face value, then the nightmare scenario that developed need not have.

Other books about recent history — Ken Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle — provide excellent overviews of U.S.-Iran relations, but are light on incorporating Iranian culture, sources, philosophy, and to some extent religion. Back in 2007, the Washington Institute’s Patrick Clawson provided a fuller account of major English-language books about Iran in a special issue of the Middle East Quarterly dedicated to historiography; his overview and assessment of the different categories of Iran-related books are excellent and while many have been published since, they mainly augment the same patterns.

One book, however, has always stood out: Harvard University Professor Roy Mottahedeh’s Mantle of the Prophet. It might be 30 years old, but it is the only book that takes the reader inside the mind of an ayatollah. One of the worst things an analyst, academic, or diplomat can do is engage in projection: to base assessment of ‘the other’ on one’s own experience or moral context. This was on embarrassing display after the Iran deal was struck when President Obama spoke about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khanenei as just an ordinary politician.

Mottahedeh’s book largely resolves this. He weaves a tale around the life the pseudonymous Ali Hashemi, a young boy from a clerical family from his time entering a Koran school through various levels of education at different institutions until he became an ayatollah. While initially Mottahedeh claimed that Hashemi was a composite, fictional figure, he later acknowledged that the character was based on a real person.

The true strength of Mantle is how smoothly Mottahedeh transitions from the biographical sketch to sidebars about shopping in a Persian bazaar, Islamic philosophy, and Iranian history. It’s not a political book, and it’s not going to detail the contemporary Iranian leadership’s embrace of terrorism or the details of a covert nuclear program. Nevertheless, more than any other work out there, it goes deepest into the mindset of the ayatollahs and the factors and philosophy which has shaped their thinking. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Secretary of State John Kerry’s Iranian counterpart at the negotiations leading up to the JCPOA, went to high school and college in California. He understands Americans and American culture, and played Kerry and his team like fiddles. Too many journalists as well conflate English ability and turn-of-phrase with internalizing Western thought.

Senior Presidential Advisor Valerie Jarrett may have been born in Iran and spent her girlhood there, but she does not understand contemporary Iran. After all, the whole point of revolutions is that they turn society on its head. Russia pre- and post-Bolshevik revolution became two sharply different social orders. Ditto China, or for that matter pre- and post-1952 revolution Egypt. No U.S. negotiator had anything but the most superficial and shallow notion of Iran, Iranian history, culture, and philosophy.

Mantle of the Prophet may not be the same as being there, but even three decades after it was published, and nearly four decades after it was conceived, it remains the most illuminating book about Iran out there, and a good place for diplomats, businessmen, or analysts looking to gain insight to start.


Article Link:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/09/07/how-to-understand-the-ayatollahs/

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