Author: Maciej Czapiewski
Date: 1999

On 9 January 1978, in Qom, the holy city of the Shiites, the Islamic revolution in Iran began. After a year of bloody struggle the reigning ruler, Shah Reza Pahlavi, fled to the United States. Muslim fundamentalists seized power in Persia. There arose a unique state founded on Koranic law, defying both East and West — a state in which a woman could be sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. A witness to these dramatic events was Ryszard Kapuściński, the outstanding reporter gifted with the astonishing ability to be at the critical point of the globe at the right time. He recorded his observations and reflections in the book Shah of Shahs.

This is not a classic reportage. Only the first chapter and subsequent interjections have that character, giving the book its specific quality. Most of the book’s content consists of Kapuściński’s personal reflections. It is not so much a book about the revolution as about the causes of its outbreak; not about specific individuals, but about the mechanisms governing power and society.

Shah of Shahs opens like a good detective story. Kapuściński presents the situation in Iran just after the revolution’s victory. Together with the author we watch a television broadcast in a hotel abandoned by its Western guests. On the screen we see the speeches of revolutionary leaders, the faces of the disappeared — usually very young people — and the figures of the old regime’s prominent figures, today paying with their heads for past transgressions. The matter is clear: Iran is a great cauldron under which a bloody fire of revolution burns. But why? For what purpose? Who is to blame? That is precisely what the subsequent reading will reveal.

The author presents information in fragments, in shreds. Browsing through his photographs, notes, and books, he offers his own memories and associations connected with them. In this way, slowly, fitting the puzzle together into a whole, we come to know and begin to understand Iran.

Above all we become acquainted with the family and person of Iran’s absolute ruler, Shahanshah Reza Pahlavi — grandson of a common peasant, whose father had risen to power through a coup, a weak and contradictory man, in love with the army and irresponsible in matters of governance. To the Shah’s rule, his methods, and their consequences, Kapuściński devotes the most space in the book.

We are thus presented with an Iran rich in oil, delivering billions of dollars every year. Yet it turns out that an excess of money and a lack of sense can produce spectacular waste and a Byzantine lifestyle for the elites, in contrast to a poor and backward society. The Shah devoted half the oil revenues to the military, pursuing his misguided scheme of building the world’s third-largest army — yet Iran had no one capable of operating its supersonic aircraft or warships; Americans operated them, or the equipment rusted in the desert.

Ill-conceived, costly investments were implemented in an atmosphere of corruption and waste on a scale difficult to imagine. Meanwhile SAVAK monitored universal obedience. Trust was absent at every level.

In this situation the only asylum that allowed escape from the surrounding reality was Islam, with its mosques — which were places of meeting, discussion, and conversation for the Shiites as much as of prayer. Kapuściński draws attention to the historical and cultural specificity of Shia Islam: for the proud Iranians it was a mark of their own culture, which they set against the Western influence promoted by the unloved government.

When the cup finally ran over, society overthrew the regime at the cost of thousands of lives. Then Kapuściński’s scepticism becomes clear: he does not believe that the force that overthrew a dictatorship will transform into anything other than a new dictatorship. The temptation is too great, especially in a country with traditions of absolute rule as deep-rooted as Iran’s.

Shah of Shahs is a fascinating book because it presents an apparently exotic reality in an interesting way. The composition, the language, and the wealth of intriguing detail make it a book one cannot put down. It does, however, require of the reader some orientation in the nuances of recent history and at least a small interest in politics. Then one can manage without a dictionary and piece together the events presented.

A Polish reader will certainly be struck by the analogies between the Iran of Shah Reza Pahlavi and Poland in the 1970s — the ruling caste with its extraordinary privileges, the huge misguided investments made with Western loans, the growing social opposition, the enormous significance of the security services, and the role of religious institutions as a bastion of opposition to the undemocratic government. In Iran everything takes on a greater, almost caricatural scale. In both countries people finally want to feel free — which ignites a revolution or the Solidarity movement. Kapuściński’s pessimism finds its justification: in Iran the revolution ignites an Islamic totalitarian state; in Poland the hard-liners take power.

It seems the author consciously built Shah of Shahs in such a way that the reader could read it as an allegory of the situation in Poland. However that may be, Shah of Shahs can be read in different ways: as reportage from a revolutionary Iran; as the author’s reflections on power and society; or as an allusion to the reality of Poland at that time. It depends on the reader’s attitude and perceptiveness.

I read Shah of Shahs in a single evening and recommend it without hesitation to anyone interested in history, politics, or sociology. The book will certainly prompt reflection on the problems it presents — and its many interesting details, engaging composition, and absorbing language will make the reading compelling and not tedious. And when the last page is closed, the reader will doubtless not be able to resist reaching for other books by Kapuściński, such as The Emperor or The Soccer War.

Author: Maciej Czapiewski

source: kapuscinski.info