Shah of Shahs is a book that came about somewhat by chance. Returning from one of my trips, I was walking down a corridor at PAP headquarters when I ran into a very worried colleague. He said he’d been ordered to go to Tehran to cover the Khomeini revolution. I was surprised: “Why does that worry you?” He replied: “It does. I don’t want to go, I don’t like it, it doesn’t interest me, I’m frightened of all that.” “Then I’ll go in your place,” I said. He was delighted. We went straight to the editor and explained the situation. The editor agreed without any problem. Everything was arranged immediately. That same week I flew to Tehran, where the Iranian revolution had already begun — the first demonstrations, the first shots, the first victims, the first great upheaval the world had seen in a long time.

The revolution was a huge story for the media, a huge story for the whole world. Nobody knew what it all meant or how it would end. The American position — it must be remembered — was very strong in Iran at the time. And the entire revolution had an anti-American edge: the American Embassy was seized and American hostages were taken. This provoked an American military operation that ended in disaster for the Americans. The American press was full of unbelievable claims. The moment I landed in Iran it was clear to me that the revolution would succeed, because it was led by the Shia clergy — the most organised, most powerful, most efficient force in the whole of Islam. The entire opposition movement against the Shah took place in mosques, and mosques are sacred ground, untouchable by authority and regime. All of this formed a straightforward Polish analogy — the power of the Church, the power of our clergy and its untouchability were also the strength of our opposition, which gathered around it. For me, a Pole with Polish experience, what was happening there was obvious.

Besides covering current events, I was studying books about Islam. I wanted to describe people, their mentality, their way of feeling the world. Experience had taught me that from every point on our planet the world looks different — a person who lives in Europe sees the world differently from a person who lives in Africa. Without trying to enter into those other ways of seeing and feeling and describing, we will understand nothing of that world. The Iranian revolution was the last great revolution of the 20th century. After Iran there was no large-scale revolutionary movement. Parallel to it was our Solidarity movement. I wrote the last three chapters of Shah of Shahs already in Warsaw, feeling how Solidarity was beginning to experience difficulties and to crack. That is why the last three short chapters of Shah of Shahs are about how emotion becomes exhausted, how hope becomes exhausted, how human expectations break in the face of the reality they encounter. They are chapters about the sadness that remains in a person and in a society after a great experience. And that is essentially the story of Shah of Shahs.

Ryszard Kapuściński

source: kapuscinski.info