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    "parsed_content": "Save this storySave this storyThere was rather a lot of oil, making the Shah one of the world\u2019s wealthiest men. For his forty-eighth birthday, in 1967, he staged a glitzy coronation for himself. Standing before a golden throne, he steadied onto his head a crown rimed with 3,380 diamonds. His third wife, Empress Farah, processed in a bejewelled, mink-edged Christian Dior cloak that took eight attendants to carry. After the ceremony, the royal couple waved stiffly to the crowds from a horse-drawn gilded carriage that had been crafted in Vienna by one of Europe\u2019s last remaining coach-makers. Planes dropped 17,532 roses, one for each glorious day of the Shah\u2019s glorious life.Iran\u2019s display of floral ballistics hinted at another beneficiary of its oil revenues: the military. In 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the Shah carte blanche to buy any arms he desired short of nuclear bombs. The Shah amassed the world\u2019s fifth-largest military, his toy chest brimming with supersonic jets, laser-guided bombs, and helicopter gunships. Reportedly, he relaxed by reading arms catalogues.A fair assessment would have conceded that not all Iranians shared the Shah\u2019s purring contentment. Liberals sought rights, Communists sought revolution, and clerics wanted a restoration of their power. One ayatollah in particular, Ruhollah Khomeini, needled the Shah incessantly. In 1967, he condemned the coronation. In 1971, when the Shah staged an even more expensive celebration to honor twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran, Khomeini declared that to attend the \u201cabominable festival\u201d would be \u201cto participate in the murder of the oppressed people of Iran.\u201dThis was more annoying than intimidating, though. Khomeini, by then an old man, inveighed against the Shah from Najaf, Iraq, because he hadn\u2019t been allowed in Iran since 1964. Iran\u2019s secret police force, SAVAK, known for its use of torture, had effectively cleared the country of the most vocal dissidents. By the seventies, opposition leaders were generally behind bars or in exile, with few replacements stepping forth.Cartoon by Brian Frazer and Sam FrazerCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopOpen cartoon galleryIf anything, the Shah\u2019s grip appeared to be strengthening. In 1975, he abolished Iran\u2019s two permitted political parties and established a single one in their place, which every adult was required to join. All public buildings and many homes displayed the Shah\u2019s portrait. You couldn\u2019t throw a stone without hitting one, the joke went\u2014though you\u2019d be arrested if you did.At a New Year\u2019s Eve celebration in Tehran in 1977, President Jimmy Carter made a toast. \u201cThere is no other head of state with whom I feel on friendlier terms,\u201d Carter said. In a troublesome region, Iran was an \u201cisland of stability.\u201dPredictably, Khomeini fulminated about Carter\u2019s visit. Iran\u2019s leading afternoon newspaper, Etalaat, struck back with an accusatory editorial, prepared by the government and likely at the Shah\u2019s behest. Khomeini was simultaneously the agent of Communists and of reactionaries, the editorial charged. He had ties to India, and possibly to British imperialists. Or perhaps, the paper insinuated, he was a sensitive soul who\u2019d written love poetry in his youth. (Perhaps he was. After Khomeini\u2019s death, his followers were dumbfounded by the publication of \u201cThe Wine of Love,\u201d a collection of his mystical poems. \u201cRelease me from these countless pains,\u201d one goes, \u201cfrom a heart cut in pieces and a breast pierced like a kebab.\u201d)The Shah had attacked from a position of apparent strength. \u201cMy power, both under law and due to the special spiritual link that I have with my people, is at its highest peak,\u201d he boasted in the month that the editorial was published. The peak, and also the precipice. After the editorial appeared, on January 7, 1978, seminarians incensed by the slander of Khomeini staged large demonstrations in Qom. The police opened fire, killing some. It didn\u2019t seem like a huge deal. Yet somehow the unrest continued, increased, and in thirteen months brought the Shah\u2019s regime crashing down. A Khomeini-led Islamic state rose in its stead.In a timely new book, \u201cKing of Kings\u201d (Doubleday), the reporter Scott Anderson discusses Etalaat\u2019s editorial in a chapter titled \u201cThe Butterfly Effect.\u201d Like the fabled butterfly wing flap that causes a hurricane, it split the heavens and loosed a revolutionary deluge that transformed the Middle East. If \u201cevents had played out just a little differently,\u201d Anderson asks, might the Iranian Revolution have never happened?What-if scenarios seize the imagination when immense power is held by a single person. In the early nineteenth century, no figure held so much as Napoleon Bonaparte. After his defeat, his adopted son Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy wrote a book imagining a world in which Napoleon\u2019s Russian invasion hadn\u2019t failed. Napoleon would have taken Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Geoffroy hypothesized, uniting the world under one ruler. Geoffroy\u2019s book was the \u201cfirst recognizable full-length, speculative, alternative history,\u201d the historian Richard\u00a0J. Evans observes. It started a long fascination with counterfactuals: what if Adolf Hitler hadn\u2019t been born, J.F.K. hadn\u2019t been killed, or, as \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d once asked, Napoleon had had a B-52?Such thought experiments delight in the notion that certain individuals can dramatically reroute history. The less fun notion is that they can\u2019t, and that major events have major causes. The modern discipline of history cut its teeth on the Napoleon question. On the one hand, he represented a modernization process that clearly transcended any single person. On the other, the fate of that process seemed to hang on Napoleon, a changeable man who was nearly assassinated several times.Hegel sought to square this circle. History progresses according to a grand logic, he proposed, but \u201cworld-historical individuals\u201d channel that logic as the agents of destiny. In 1806, when Hegel was living in Jena and putting the final touches on his masterwork, \u201cThe Phenomenology of Spirit,\u201d Napoleon arrived with his troops. \u201cI saw the Emperor\u2014this world-soul,\u201d Hegel breathlessly wrote. It was a \u201cwonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.\u201d The next day, Napoleon decimated the Prussian military, ending any hope of restoring the Holy Roman Empire. Although Napoleon\u2019s troops ransacked Hegel\u2019s home and burned his neighbors\u2019 houses, Hegel couldn\u2019t help but admire the spirit of history and his horse.In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, right, staged an expensive celebration to honor twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the \u201cabominable festival,\u201d saying that to attend would be \u201cto participate in the murder of the oppressed people of Iran.\u201dPhotograph by Jack Garofalo \/ GettyIn \u201cWar and Peace\u201d (1869), Leo Tolstoy dismissed the great-man theory of the Napoleonic Wars. He argued in an epilogue that to ascribe historical agency to figures like Napoleon was akin to seeing a herd of cattle and concluding that the cow in front must be in charge. Social forces, not men on horseback, decide the fate of nations, Tolstoy felt. The conservative writer Niall Ferguson credits his decision to become a historian to reading Tolstoy\u2019s epilogue. \u201cI remember thinking that can\u2019t be right,\u201d he has said. \u201cThere is and must be a role for individual agency, for Napoleon, for Hitler.\u201dFerguson, who has published a collection of counterfactual histories, is an outlier among academics. Perhaps their leftward leanings lead them, like Tolstoy, to downplay the ability of individuals to alter their own fates. (The Marxist historian E.\u00a0P. Thompson dismissed what-if speculations as \u201cGeschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.\u201d) Either way, the scholarly tendency has been to devalue choice and chance as historical factors. Wars and revolutions might feel chaotic, but they happen for reasons rooted in economics, ideology, geography, and climate. The doings of generals, in this view, are froth on the waves.Yet, even for those skilled at finding deeper causes behind events, Iran is a hard case. Any sense that history trends in a general direction\u2014toward freedom, perhaps, or toward rights, markets, secularism, or science\u2014is confounded by a large, prosperous country becoming a hard-line semi-theocracy. The philosopher Michel Foucault relished the Iranian Revolution\u2019s perversity: it was \u201cperhaps the greatest ever insurrection against global systems, the most insane and the most modern form of revolt.\u201dBut why Iran? In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution had been preceded by two smaller revolutions. Mao Zedong, before his own revolution prevailed, described China as dry tinder awaiting a spark. Few observers saw Iran that way. The factors that in hindsight might explain the country\u2019s abrupt upheaval\u2014its swift economic growth followed by a downturn, its rapid urbanization, its authoritarianism, its corruption\u2014were fairly normal. Even as a large Muslim autocracy in the Middle East weathering the boom and bust of the oil market, Iran wasn\u2019t unique. Why did a revolution occur there but not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia?\u201cThe closer one examines it,\u201d Anderson writes, \u201cthe more mysterious and implausible it all seems.\u201d One of the best books on the topic, \u201cThe Unthinkable Revolution in Iran\u201d (2004), by the sociologist Charles Kurzman, considers various explanations but rejects them all in favor of an \u201canti-explanation,\u201d dwelling on the Revolution\u2019s anomalousness. Gary Sick, who oversaw Iranian affairs at the National Security Council under Carter, sees it similarly. \u201cI\u2019ve studied this thing for the past forty years,\u201d he told Anderson, \u201cand it still doesn\u2019t fully make sense to me.\u201d Could one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century have simply been an accident?Carter was the least informed. As is typical for U.S. Presidents, he faced a situation over which he held great power but to which he gave little attention. Carter took five months to select an Ambassador to Iran and another two to get him confirmed. For a surprisingly long time, Carter\u2019s Iran policy functioned on autopilot, which meant selling weapons and declining to ask questions. It wasn\u2019t until November, 1978, the eleventh month of the uprisings, that Carter began holding high-level meetings on Iran.Carter had campaigned on human rights, which he described as \u201cthe soul of our foreign policy.\u201d We now know that he didn\u2019t want to pressure Iran about rights, but the Shah, engaging in pre\u00ebmptive compliance, loosened political restrictions anyway. The Shah\u2019s opponents took Carter\u2019s speeches as reassurance that they\u2019d be protected. As a leading reformer, the engineering professor Mehdi Bazargan, explained, \u201cAll the built-up pressure exploded.\u201d For a pre-revolutionary season in 1977, liberals signed letters and staged poetry readings that criticized the government in increasingly frank terms.In late 1977, when it was clear that Carter wouldn\u2019t press the issue of human rights, the Shah reversed course and cracked down again. Still, there had been a noticeable wobble in his legitimacy. Without realizing, Carter might have kicked a rock that, months later, caused an avalanche.By the time Iran\u2019s revolution was over, it had drawn in two million people, a greater proportion of the population than any previous twentieth-century revolution saw.Photograph by Michel Setboun \/ GettyThe Shah could have shored things up. Anderson notes that his closest confidant, Asadollah Alam, had a firm grasp on popular grievances and the need to address them. But Alam was dying of cancer and resigned before the unrest began. That left the Shah to rely for advice on his wife, Farah, whose knowledge of the situation wasn\u2019t extensive. In May, 1978, long after the first unrest in Qom, Farah seemed not to have even heard of the ayatollah who was fomenting rebellion from Iraq. \u201cFor heaven\u2019s sake,\u201d she reportedly asked, \u201cwho is this Khomeini?\u201dGetting advice was one problem\u2014 taking it another. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, the Shah also had cancer. (He would die in 1980.) This could explain why he seemed chronically overwhelmed, unsure whether to suppress dissent or to allow it. His haphazard directives combined the worst of both options: soldiers often let demonstrators march but occasionally shot up crowds, supplying fresh outrages that fuelled more protest.Onlookers urged firmness. \u201cShoot the first man in front,\u201d the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, advised. \u201cThe rest will fall into line.\u201d In a wonderfully rich account of the Pahlavi regime\u2019s collapse, \u201cThe Fall of Heaven\u201d (2016), Andrew Scott Cooper describes a telephone call that Iraq\u2019s President, Saddam Hussein, placed to the Shah in August, 1978. \u201cThis mullah, Khomeini, is causing problems for you, and for me, and for all of us,\u201d Saddam reportedly said. Would it be O.K. to kill him? Saddam stayed on the line while the Shah consulted the Prime Minister and the SAVAK director, who lobbed the decision back to him. The Shah told Saddam to stand down.Anderson\u2019s third principal, Khomeini, was an unlikely leader. He was a scholar of Islamic law in his late seventies who hadn\u2019t set foot in Iran for nearly fifteen years. His relevance had been waning until October, 1977, when his son Mostafa suddenly died. The causes were likely natural, Anderson suggests, but Iranians blamed SAVAK. Mostafa\u2019s death returned the exiled ayatollah to the public eye; Khomeini called it \u201cGod\u2019s hidden providence.\u201dOne might see Khomeini as a Hegelian agent of destiny through whom historical forces acted. If so, though, he wasn\u2019t a witting one. Khomeini had sharp instincts, but his comprehension of politics was warped by paranoid fantasies about Jews, Baha\u2019is, Freemasons, and the \u201csatanic superpowers.\u201d His fellow opposition leader, the liberal Mehdi Bazargan, expressed astonishment at Khomeini\u2019s \u201cheedlessness of the obvious problems of politics and administration.\u201d Khomeini had launched his anti-Shah campaign \u201cwithout any plan,\u201d Bazargan observed. \u201cI even wonder if he had any inkling that he was starting a revolution.\u201dRebellion crescendoed throughout 1978, prompting the Shah to institute martial law in twelve cities on September 8th. That day, now known as Black Friday, soldiers fired on a large demonstration, killing two or three hundred people. Perhaps, had things gone differently, this could have been avoided\u2014if Carter\u2019s Iran policy had been more considered, if the Shah and his most perceptive adviser hadn\u2019t both been dying of cancer, if a son\u2019s death hadn\u2019t made Khomeini a resistance icon, if Saddam had killed Khomeini in August. But by autumn Iran was slipping from the Shah\u2019s grasp. \u201cFor fifteen years everything I picked up turned to gold,\u201d he reflected. \u201cNow every time I pick up gold it turns to shit.\u201dThe Shah, looking exhausted, gave a perplexing speech on television on November 6th. \u201cI cannot but approve of your revolution,\u201d he said. \u201cIn these moments of rising against foreign domination, tyranny, and corruption, I stand by your side.\u201d It was an awkward attempt to co-opt the uprising, and it failed pitifully. Afterward, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran finally broached the topic of the Shah\u2019s potential downfall in a long telegram titled \u201cThinking the Unthinkable.\u201dIt was a shock to see so many Iranians who had previously minded their own business\u2014merchants, professionals, clerics, students, housewives\u2014clash violently with police. The economist Timur Kuran explains this change as the consequence of \u201cpreference falsification.\u201d Years of SAVAK surveillance had taught Iranians to conceal their grievances. Yet when a minor provocation\u2014the publication of an editorial\u2014shook things up, the discontent poured out. The more that people were exposed to their compatriots\u2019 views, the more they shared their own, touching off a chain reaction of disclosure. Khomeini can be seen here as a catalyst. His exile, rather than marginalizing him, gave him the rare platform from which to speak forthrightly.At a New Year\u2019s Eve celebration in Tehran in 1977, President Jimmy Carter, pictured here with the Shah, made a toast. \u201cThere is no other head of state with whom I feel on friendlier terms,\u201d Carter said.Photograph from HUM Images \/ GettyPreference falsification explains how a revolution could be both inevitable and unforeseeable. Subterranean pressures mount, unnoticed, until they erupt. If it hadn\u2019t been Etalaat\u2019s editorial, some other jostle would have released that stored political energy. The fact that the Revolution was unexpected\u2014even by the revolutionaries themselves\u2014doesn\u2019t mean it was contingent.Yet Kuran\u2019s model of revolution as revelation presumes that people have stable preferences to reveal. Do they? Revolutions are unsettling affairs, Kurzman, the sociologist, notes. People don\u2019t know how to act, so they take cues from their neighbors or react to their opponents. With everyone predicating their behavior on everyone else\u2019s, norms shift rapidly, and complicated feedback effects ensue. Rebels aren\u2019t surprised only by one another\u2019s revealed desires, Kurzman maintains; they\u2019re surprised by their own.In \u201cThe Loneliest Revolution\u201d (2023), the Iranian sociologist Ali Mirsepassi recounts, during his student days, standing nervously with his friend Hamid as a chanting crowd approached. Even being near a protest could mean prison. \u201cI looked to Hamid and the rest of our group, our eyes scanning the others\u2019 for an answer to what to do: run or join ranks,\u201d he writes. Hamid suddenly shouted, \u201cFree all political prisoners!,\u201d and everyone followed. That was Mirsepassi\u2019s first protest. By late 1978, he recalled, \u201cthe revolutionary crowd had attained a single will or soul.\u201dThe crowd\u2019s will mattered because the Revolution had no overarching organization. Rebellion spread more through graffiti, chants, and songs than through top-down orders. Wild rumors swirled about Baha\u2019is poisoning the water, Israeli troops entering the country in disguise, and the Shah personally gunning down protesters from his helicopter. Khomeini tried to shape these unpredictable fluid dynamics, but his directives were often ignored. He was less a commander than an icon, an Islamic Che Guevara.Khomeini sought to replace the monarchy with a religious state ruled by an Islamic jurist. He knew to soft-pedal that aim in interviews, though, since relatively few rebels initially shared it. (Even his fellow-ayatollahs didn\u2019t all want a theocracy.) The streets belonged as much to students, feminists, merchants, liberals, and industrial workers as to clerics. One could find, among the opposition, hippies and Jews.Khomeini\u2019s vagueness was central to his leadership. Many who would have found his spelled-out vision repellent nevertheless accepted him as a figurehead. Probably they didn\u2019t imagine an elderly theologian actually seizing the state. Either way, the Revolution found Communists and liberals following fundamentalists. \u201cIt seemed in no way a contradiction for me\u2014an educated, professional woman\u2014to back an opposition that cloaked its fight against real-life grievances under the mantle of religion,\u201d the judge (and later the Nobel-winning democracy advocate) Shirin Ebadi recalled. \u201cWho did I have more in common with, in the end: an opposition led by mullahs who spoke in the tones familiar to ordinary Iranians or the gilded court of the shah, whose officials cavorted with American starlets at parties soaked in expensive French champagne?\u201dCould those discordant elements cohere? In late 1978, Ali Mirsepassi spoke in favor of prolonging a university strike. Khomeini opposed this, Mirsepassi acknowledged, but who put Khomeini in charge? Mirsepassi won over his cheering audience, though he worried that he\u2019d got \u201ccarried away\u201d and been \u201cexcessively harsh\u201d regarding the ayatollah. While leaving the event, he was stabbed twenty-one times. If there was contingency here, it was less the caprice of leaders than the volatility of crowds.By 1979, as those crowds clamored for his death, the Shah prepared to flee. \u201cDon\u2019t pack too much,\u201d he advised his valet. \u201cIt is just for a short period of time.\u201d He appointed a new Prime Minister, placed him in charge, and took off for Egypt on January 16, 1979.Khomeini returned from exile and announced a provisional government \u201cbased on the Sharia,\u201d though with the liberal Mehdi Bazargan as Prime Minister. \u201cThrough the guardianship that I have from the holy lawgiver I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler,\u201d Khomeini explained. \u201cSince I have appointed him, he must be obeyed.\u201dAyatollah Khomeini, appearing here on an image held aloft by protesters, was a scholar of Islamic law in his late seventies who hadn\u2019t set foot in Iran for nearly fifteen years. Somehow, he became the symbol of an unlikely revolution.Photograph from Bettmann \/ GettyIf Khomeini\u2019s announced government had the support of God, Iran\u2019s still intact government had the world\u2019s fifth-largest military. But the contagion of rebellion was spreading there, too. Desertions became so rampant that officers hesitated to have soldiers police crowds for fear that the soldiers would join the protesters. The Army fought for a few days, then abruptly gave up. Millions of Iranians, to their own shock, had caused the region\u2019s most powerful regime to simply melt away. \u201cDo you think we actually planned to have a revolution?\u201d one of Khomeini\u2019s confidants asked. \u201cWe were just as surprised as anyone.\u201dKhomeini exploited this uncertainty. He moved like \u201ca bulldozer crushing rocks, roots, and stones in his path,\u201d Bazargan felt. A military organization created by Khomeini, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and cleric-controlled \u201ccommittees\u201d patrolled the streets, making arrests, confiscating property, and executing suspected enemies of the Revolution. In this feverish climate, Khomeini acquired a momentum that his non-clerical comrades hadn\u2019t foreseen and couldn\u2019t match.In October, 1979, Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the ailing Shah to enter the United States for medical care. A week later, Bazargan was photographed shaking hands with Carter\u2019s national-security adviser at an event they were both attending in Algeria. These events suggested to some a Shah-Carter-Bazargan axis of imperialism. Militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took hostages. Khomeini initially disapproved and directed Iran\u2019s foreign minister, Ebrahim Yazdi, to \u201cgo and kick them out.\u201d But\u2014in another of Anderson\u2019s consequential contingencies\u2014Yazdi, rather than communicating that command to Tehran, travelled there himself. By the time he arrived, Khomeini had changed his mind and publicly embraced the hostage-takers. Unable to control the situation, Bazargan resigned. Crowds took up a new chant: \u201cDeath to Bazargan.\u201dAnd death to liberal Iran. A new constitution placed the country under the supreme leadership of an Islamic legal scholar, and Article 107 stipulated that this be Khomeini. Women were purged from positions of power and forced to wear hijabs. Universities were closed, for years. Khomeini, meeting with state-radio employees, insisted that there was \u201cno difference between music and opium\u201d and demanded that they \u201celiminate music completely\u201d\u2014his opposition drove most music underground.Firmly in control, Khomeini turned on his former allies, particularly those on the left. They weren\u2019t a \u201creal left,\u201d he maintained, but an \u201cartificial\u201d one created by Washington \u201cto sabotage and destroy us.\u201d In one execution spree, in 1988, Khomeini\u2019s government put to death thousands of political prisoners\u2014Human Rights Watch reports \u201cbetween 2,800 and 5,000,\u201d which appears to far exceed the number of political prisoners that were killed in the nearly forty years that the Shah was on the throne. The prisons and torture chambers filled with Communists, liberals, feminists, gays, Baha\u2019is, and monarchists.One might imagine such cruelties destabilizing the Islamic Republic. They have not done so. Since 1979, Iran has been ruled continuously by just two men: Ruhollah Khomeini and, after his death, in 1989, his former disciple Ali Khamenei. Today, Khamenei ranks among the world\u2019s oldest and longest-serving heads of state. He\u2019s been Supreme Leader for every one of Taylor Swift\u2019s eras, indeed for her entire life.There was talk that the recent attacks by Israel and the United States might end Khamenei\u2019s thirty-six-year reign. \u201cAll it takes now is a nationwide uprising to put an end to this nightmare,\u201d the Shah\u2019s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, thirstily suggested. He should know. But Tehran has faced war before without toppling. An eight-year conflict with Iraq in the eighties killed hundreds of thousands yet only strengthened Khomeini\u2019s position. As Israel has seen in Gaza, it\u2019s hard to persuade people to change their government by bombing them.The larger instability today seems to be in the United States, not Iran. Norms here are shifting wildly, with the chaos centering on a single figure, our Napoleon on a golf cart. The usual questions arise: Is Donald Trump an accident or an inevitability? An erratic blunderer or the spray-tanned spirit of history? It may not ultimately matter. As Anderson\u2019s book suggests, an event that is improbable can still be irreversible. A switch is thrown, the train hurtles down an alternate track, and it goes that way for a very long time.\u00a0\u2666",
    "ai_headline": "King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution",
    "ai_simplified_title": "New Yorker Reviews Iranian Revolution Book",
    "ai_excerpt": "A New Yorker article reviews Scott Anderson's book, \"King of Kings,\" examining the Iranian Revolution. The review explores the role of key figures like the Shah and Khomeini, and considers counterfactuals about the revolution's causes.",
    "ai_subject_tags": [
        "Iran",
        "Iranian Revolution",
        "Shah of Iran",
        "Ruhollah Khomeini",
        "Book Review",
        "History",
        "Politics"
    ],
    "ai_context_type": "Review",
    "ai_context_details": {
        "tone": "analytical",
        "perspective": "academic",
        "audience": "general",
        "credibility_indicators": [
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