Customer Reviews

In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade

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This book does an excellent job in explaining the causes and ramifications of the 1979 Revolution. It doesn't delve too deeply into personal lives or experiences of big or little players, which I've found is pretty common in a lot of books about Iran. Instead, the author presents the information solidly, showing the stages of the revolution in a panorama. This is a good book if you're just starting to learn about modern Iran.

I as well didn't feel author Robin Wright was presenting a "rosy picture" of Islamist terrorists or Ayatollah Khomeini et. al. .
This was my first book on Khomeini and his revolution. I enjoyed it. Recommend it. If anyone can recommend a post-Khomeini and Ahmadinejad book let me know.

I was reading this concurrently with 'Daughter of Persia: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem Through the Islamic Revolution' by Sattareh Farman Farmaian, another great book on the country and people of Iran.
Sattareh (a princess of the Qajar dynasty) writes of life in Iran between 1921 to 1992. and her personal experience with being arrested by Khomeini fanatics, taken to this dang compound I can't remember the name were Khomeini was executing all the Shahs men on the roof and she saw Arafat there. After almost 24hrs she was released but told to leave the country asap or else. She narrowly escaped and now lives in the U.S. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Daughter of Persia: .

Back to In the Name of God

On page 136 R. Wright says that then Vice President George HW Bush's Special Task Force on Combating Terrorism - Final Report - "pledged "total war" on terrorism, whatever its origins." I've just read that report and he never says that. He says ;
"Our conclusion: the U.S. policy and program to combat terrorism is tough and resolute. We firmly oppose terrorism in all forms and wherever it takes place. We are prepared to act in concert with other nations or alone to prevent or respond to terrorist acts. We will make no concessions to terrorists. At the same time, we will use every available resource to gain the safe return of American citizens who are held hostage."

That last sentence negates the previous one, doesn't it? How can you " make no concessions to terrorists " but then "use every available resource to gain the safe return" of American hostages.

In light of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, this book provides a context in which to understand the current state of affiars. It chronicles the Kohmeini decade in Iran, 1979-1989 and describes how complex the politics of the region can be. The quagmire sometimes causes the U.S. and other nations to allign with questionable parties simply because options are limited. This book describes how some of those linkages come about.

In this book, author Robin Wright covers the history of Iran from the 1979 Revolution, to Ayatollah Khomeini's death in 1989. Covering in-depth the happenings inside Iran, she covers many of the different factions within in Iran, as they jostled for power and frequently clashed. She breaks this decade down into four phases: 1979-82, the period of survival; 1983-late 1986, the period of expansion; late 1986-mid 1988, the period of retreat; and mid-1988 on, when Iran came to terms with its rivals.

This book was written in 1989, which means that the author did not have too much time in which to put the Iranian Revolution into its proper historical setting. However, that said, the author does give a wonderful understanding, at times showing the similarities between the terrors of Iran's Revolution and those of the French and Russian Revolutions.

It did not appear to me that the author was trying to present the revolution in an overtly positive light, though the terrors were not covered in any great depth. Instead, this book read like any good history of the French or Russian Revolutions, and is an excellent chronicle. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what happened in Iran during this fascinating decade.

I have to disagree with the reader from London. While this book does not go into nearly enough depth about the darker side of the Iranian revolution, it's hardly an apologia. I read it more as a primer, the first draft on a remarkably important event that is still being understood 20 years later. Consult Ms. Wright's other book, "The Last Great Revolution" as a followup.

Robin Wright is worthy of her reputation. This is a very readable book on the first decade of the Islamic Republic. Wright is objective and revealing. Anyone wanting to understand what she calls the "Khomeini decade" must read this book.

I decided to have a fresh look at this book which I had read years ago.
The reason was 11 September 2001, the day Islamist terrorism pulled off its biggest coup against the United States.
The book is an example of efforts by some American media people to present a rosy picture of the Islamist terrorist movements to the American people.
Ms Wright, a long-time admirer of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, describes the whole of the 1980s, and a bit of the 1990s, too, as "the Khomeini decade", ignoring such historic events as the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Communist empire. She invites the reader not only to swallow Khomeini's mad ideology of " Holy War" but to admire and love it in the name of revolution.
She repeats the Islamists' line that the terror and oppression that they have unleashed against their people and , as we saw on 11 September, against other peoples too, is divinely inspired.
Ms. Wright, in effect, tells the Americans that Khomeini, acting in the name of God,was right in executing 100,000 Iranians , provoking a war with Iraq that claimed one million lives, seizing over 40 Americans hostage in Lebanon, killing hundreds of American soldiers and civilians in a string of terrorist operations throughout the 1980s, and holding Iran's religious minorities, especially Jews, Bahais and Sunni Muslims captive as second-class citizens.
I have never lived in America and thus cannot answer some simple questions: Why is it that so many American media people become fascinated with vicious foreign despots and terrorists?
How can anyone write about Khomeini without showing the readers that he was a monster?
How could an Americanm, born and raised in a democratic society, believe that fanatical mullahs who claim to own the only truth possible can ever understand human rights and develop a civilised society?
The ayatollah asked children to spy on their own parents.
He sent at least 30,000 Iranian children and teenagers on minfields on the border with Iraq to die to open a path for his Revolutionary Guard. He coined the phrase " America is the Great Satan" and called on Muslims to wage " Jihad" ( Holy War) against the United States.His dictum : " American Cannot Do A Damned Thing!" is isncribed on the walls of the terrorist camps in the Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On 11 September 2001 Khomeinism came to New York and Washington, albeit in its Arab " Afghan" version.
People like Ms. Wright should know that what goes round comes round. If you justify the massacre of Iranians by Islamist terror gangs do nto be surprised when the tragedy comes to your home- one day.
Ms Wright does not tell her readers that the same Islamist ideology that produced the 11 September 2001 tragedy had already been rehearsed in Iran when the Khomeinists burned 600 people alive in the Rex Cinema in Abadan in 1978, simply to punish them " in the name of God". Nor does she speak of the hundreds of Iranian woemen who have had their faces disfigured by Khomeinist Hezballah gangs throwing acid at any woman not observing the strict " hijab" ( Islamic headgear) rules. That
Ms Wright should don the Khomeinist "hijab" whe she travels to the Islamic Republic may be understandable because she needs to get visas and interviews with the mullahs. What is dangerous is that the " hijab" seems to have gone inside her head as well, preventing her from seeing, and reporting, the abomination of Islamist terrorism. Nor does she tell her readers that the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject Islamism as a fraudulent ideology develpoped by power hungry men like Khomeini, Mullah Muhammad Omar and Osama Bin Laden.
I don't know if Ms. Wright has lost any closde relatives and friends in the 11 September terror operations. But I have lost many relatives and friends, enough to fill a whole graveyard. Some were as young as 11 years of age, others as old as 96. They were teachers, writers, researchers, shopkeepers,musicians, poets, civil servants, housewives- people from all walks of life. Khomeini killed them all because they opposed his Islamist tyranny, the same ideology that Osama Bin Laden is propagating from his Al Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan today. He killed them all in the name of God, to be applauded by Ms. Robin Wright and her brood in the American media.
Today, there are at least 25,000 political prisoners in the Khomeinist prisons ( according to Amnesty International), all in the name of God.
Please accept this as a cry from the heart: I feel the pain of the American people in their terrible bereavement because as an Iranian I have seen my homeland shattered and my people martyrised , in the name of the same brand of Islamist terrorism that struck New York and Washington, for the past 22 years.
Ms Wright should have subtitled her apologia of Khomeinism differently, perhaps as: In the Name of Satan.
An Iranian In Britain