Customer Reviews

The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran

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I am no book critic. I have been reading and enjoying Dr. Katouzian's books for twenty years. This book brings together his vast and scholarly knowledge of 2500 years of Iranian history. No writer has achieved this. The narrative is very fluid and easy to read and understand, despite the sometimes complex subjects. I could not wait to finish it, so that I could start reading it again.

If you are an Iranian, then you owe it to yourself to read this book. If you have adult children, please encourage them to read it. If you have young children, save this book in a safe place, and let them read it when they grow up.

Finally, if you are interested in modern Iran, his two books about Musaddiq and the Emergence of the Pahlavis are unsurpassed for their quality of research and writing. You can find these and his other works on Amazon.

Prof. Katouzian shows how the Iranian "social DNA" developed over centuries in a way to desire emproers who had a divine favor, similar to China's mandate from heaven, but how that favor in Iran often was more fickle than the Chinese mandate. Problems of succession plagued many dynasties in the past, and can be seen in the post-Khomenei days of today.

So, there's nothing new under the sun today, but it's been a long time developing.

For the period of the last 125 years or so, most likely to interest Americans, this is a good overview. But, before that, the past gets skimmed at many times.

There's little on the glories of the Achaemenids. Nor is there anything beyond the superficial on the founding and development of Zoroastrianism. The one thing new I learned about Iran's religious is that apparently it was NOT Shi'a majority until forcible conversion in a dynasty of the 1600s.

There's some other things missing, speaking of that.
1. A good glossary of religious terms.
2. A two-paged, nicely sized map of the country, or more than one. A geological map would be nice as part of this. So would better mapping of ancient and modern political division.
3. More discussions of Iranians' relations with Turks, over nearly 1,000 years of Turkish slaves passing through on the way to forming various dynasties, plus the Turkic presence fronting different Iranian empires in Transoxania. It's clear that Iran has many Turkish, as well as Arabic, loan words.

Anyway, I don't have further comparison because this is the first in-depth history of Iran I've read.

Katouzian opens up a mysterious landscape that has been far too long on the periphery of my radar screen. It is a land which has been brutalized by Roman, Mongol, and Arab invaders and shahs who saw intrigue under every stone. Nevertheless it provided sufficiently fertile ground for a wealth of poets, mathematicians, and theologians who helped lay the groundwork for the modern world.

Not until the early twentieth century did liberal constitutional government begin to take root, albeit weakly in a factional tribal society where strong men for centuries ruthlessly seized power and ruled arbitrarily. In the the midst of this transformation, the West came to be emulated for its assumed cultural superiority: women achieved greater equality, ancient meandering thoroughfares were replaced by linear streets conforming to European standards, and as a result many majestic buildings and traditions embodying Persia's glorious past were plowed under.

In the hyperbole of current affairs much is lost by merely focusing on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's unqualified antagonisms toward the West without first looking to the causality that contributed to that invectiveness. Let us suppose, for example, 'the Brits' were behind a coup d'etat which overthrew President Obama and saw to it that a new leader, one who was more malleable to Anglo business concerns, was inserted in his place. With the most dedicated scholarship Katouzian lays bare the short-term opportunism of the CIA, which, in support of a British oil monopoly's ledger sheet, overthrew Iran's populist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and, in the process, revealed a certain emptiness and hypocrisy in America's call for democratic values; and in reaction the secular state and liberal values evaporated in favor of an ephemeral Islamic political panacea.

This is an excellent history of Persia / Iran ; author not only gives us an accurate chronological description of events but also and most importantly delivers an accurate , intelligent and hard hitting analyses of political and social culture of Iranian state and society from its inception to the present ; contrary to most historians author convincingly argues that Iran was never a feudal society ; Iran had either a strong arbitrary ruler who imposed order and territorial integrity with brute force or there existed chaos and disorder ; there never was a power sharing with an aristocratic or other ruling class ;

I was born and raised in Iran and I can tell you that reading this book will give you a glimpse of what I experienced in my life.

Readers familiar with the geography of Iran wil be disappointed that a full page map of Iran erroneously designates the Persian Gulf as simply "The Gulf". In this connection, one would expect the Arabian Sea next door would be called "The Sea", but it is not!
Introductory sections are over-simplified, i.e., "Farsi is the Persian word for Persian just as Deutsch is the 'German' word for "German" and Francais for 'French'." [sic]
The author then makes the assertion that "Unlike Persian, Farsi has no cultural or historical connotation, ...". Unfortunately the author fails to mention that Farsi is the Arabization of "Parsi" since Arabs substitute "F" for the letter "P".
Because of constant repetition of doubtful conclusionary remarks, reading this book is somewhat uninspiring.