Shah of Shas

 

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski

This is a somewhat brief account of the infamous Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.  My guess is that most Americans never even heard of the man until the hostage crisis that occurred when he fled his country from the radical Islamic uprising in 1978.  The U.S. harbored the man, Iran wanted him back. A dark period of American history then commenced.

Why was Iran so infuriated?  Why was the Shah despised so much and by so many? This book does a good job explaining why.  This is not an extensive biography of the man, nor does the book go very deep in the weeds.  The author is a Polish journalist that spent considerable amount of time in Iran during the height of the crisis, and he does a wonderful job transcribing the feel of the country.  We get a strong sense of the mood, the atmosphere, the sights, and even the smells of this backward country, and it’s never pleasant.

We read how the Shah came into power, and how he essentially was oblivious to the dissatisfaction of the masses.  He had great ideas on how to Westernize his oil-rich country, but was clueless as to how to put these ideas into tangible plans in order to obtain any sort of success.  So when he arbitrarily throws money in every direction, what results is a cluttered, chaotic mess that does absolutely nothing to help the country, and it even manages to further inhibit the masses of residents.

In many ways, this book is more of a thesis on how revolutions occur in countries such as this.  Had this book been about any other country where such an incident occurred, you get the feeling that much of the descriptions would be exactly the same.  When countries such as Iran are run by cruel authoritarian dictators that tolerate no dissent, people are afraid to voice their opinion even at a quiet bus stop.  There are spies all over who would happily nab such individual and put them through immense torture.  So people stay quiet in public amongst the suffering.

So with all of the unrest, suddenly the pieces seem to almost accidentally fit together, and the masses unite almost overnight.  Of course, the Shah is so sheltered, he can’t believe what he sees.  Don’t his countrymen love him unconditionally?  We see the dangers of when a high profiled leader mistakes terror for devotion from his subjects.

There really isn’t much here about the actual hostage crisis.  It may have been mentioned in retrospect once or twice, but that’s about it as it’s never the intention of the author to discuss in detail.  So we don’t read about any of the particulars.

Again, this is a short book, but it’s very well written and very captivating.  This is the sort of book that makes the reader want to learn more, and read more about the man, the place, and the events.  It was a nice quick read, and it’s always an advantage when a book is written by an individual who writes current events for “a living” as they are practiced in keeping the reader’s attention.