Buy pre-owned: $15.96

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Mon, Oct 3 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon. Order within 19 hrs 48 mins

Select delivery location

Pre-owned: Good | Details

Sold by sylvz sells

Fulfilled by Amazon

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Christopher De Bellaigue

In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran Hardcover – Deckle Edge, January 4, 2005

by Christopher de Bellaigue (Author)

48 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$2.49

—

Hardcover, Deckle Edge

"Please retry"

$15.96

$6.47

$1.89

Paperback

"Please retry"

$5.02

$1.00

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

Beside the highway that leads south from Tehran, the necropolis of Ayatollah Rudollah Khomeini rises from the sweating tarmac like a miraculous filling station supplying fuel for the soul. However, the paint is peeling even before the complex has been completed, and the prayer halls are all but deserted.

Iran's Islamic Revolution is out of gas, but what has happened to the hostage takers, suicidal holy warriors, and ideologues who brought it about? These men and women kicked out the Shah, spent eight years fighting Saddam's Iraq, and terrified the West with its militancy and courage. Now they are a worn-out generation.

In this superbly crafted and thoughtful book, Christopher de Bellaigue gives us the voices and memories of these wistful revolutionaries. Mullahs and academics, artists, traders, and mystics: the author knows them as an insider -- a journalist who speaks fluent Persian and is married to an Iranian -- and also as an outsider -- a Westerner isolated in one of the world's most enigmatic and impenetrable societies.

The result is a subtly intense revelation of the hearts and minds of the Iranian people -- and what it is to live among them.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper
Publication date

January 4, 2005
Dimensions

6.13 x 1.01 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0066209803
ISBN-13

978-0066209807
See all details

Christopher de Bellaigue
108
Hardcover
1 offer from $28.00

Christopher de Bellaigue
25
Paperback
26 offers from $1.90
Christopher de Bellaigue
154
Paperback
30 offers from $2.55

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This portrait of the Islamist revolution's heartland is far from the "axis of evil" caricature so often associated with the regime that held Americans hostage in 1979–1980 and is actively pursuing nuclear arms today. Rather, Ballaigue, who covers Iran for the Economist, presents a textured view of a complex society, struggling with an ancient culture, a radical ideology and a Westernized elite. Drawing inspiration from George Orwell, who chronicled the Catalonian revolution of the 1930s and its betrayal by Stalinists, Ballaiguecharts the Islamist revolution from its origins in the repressive regime of the Shah and the fiery sermons of the Ayatollah Khomeini, through its triumph and the taking of the hostages of the "Great Satan," the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal and the waning of the Islamist revolutionary fervor as educated Iranians became disillusioned with the mullahs and thirsted for greater cultural and intellectual freedom. The book is peppered with interviews with and vignettes of the many Iranians the author has met during his years in Iran; the title refers to a cemetery in Tehran where the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war are interred—"rose garden" being an ironic rendition of rows of headstones. (On sale Jan. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If Pollack's Persian Puzzle [BKL D 1 04] is the policy wonk's view of today's Iran, British journalist de Bellaigue's memoir is closer to the ground. Outsiders might see Iran as an emerging nuclear threat, but de Bellaigue also sees a country terribly spent from decades of autocratic rule, revolution, ultrafundamentalism, a ruinous war with Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal, and ongoing hostilities with America. The author, who lives in Iran and writes for the New York Review of Books and the economist, discusses these issues at length, but he also guides us through city streets and into the lives of Iranian citizens. There is Mr. Zarif, who agitated for the Ayatollah's return to Iran and now wonders why his Iranian-manufactured Paykan car is so poorly built. And the war veteran Amini, whose forehead carries 60 pieces of shrapnel and who has resigned himself to letting Esfahan teens dance in public. Readers will find here a detailed picture of Iranian life that has too long been out of reach. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First U.S. Edition (January 4, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0066209803
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0066209807
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.01 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,908,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,502 in Historical Middle East Biographies
- #13,435 in Political Leader Biographies
- #84,609 in Memoirs (Books)

Customer Reviews:
48 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Christopher De Bellaigue

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Born in London in 1971, Christopher de Bellaigue has worked as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His first book, IN THE ROSE GARDEN OF THE MARTYRS: A MEMOIR OF IRAN, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. His second book, THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAN, was a collection of 14 essays on Iranian culture and politics, all of which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, REBEL LAND: UNRAVELING THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY IN A TURKISH TOWN, was shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell Book Prize for political writing. Christopher de Bellaigue is the Tehran correspondent for The Economist and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

Customer reviews

5 star		37%
4 star		35%
3 star		10%
2 star		5%
1 star		12%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Thomas Ricks

and war reporters will most enjoy the gruesome realities suffered by the Iranians at home ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

Christoper de Bellaigue [pronounced "deh bellog"] has written a wrenching account of contemporary Iran (2000 to 2002) in considerable detail. As a British journalist, he had visited Tehran several times prior and after the period he focuses on with the aim of understanding the Iranian political culture and its leaders' fascination with martyrdom particularly during the post-Khomeini 1998 era and the disastrous Iraq and Iran - more than 2 million Iranian casualties. What follows is a much detailed account from one Iranian veteran or family after another carefully interviewed and documentated by de Bellaigue who is fluent in modern Persian and at home in Iran with his Iranian wife and in-laws in Tehran. De Bellaigue follows up lead after lead of Iran's veterans in the capitol and provinces including the province of Khuzistan where much of the early war was fought by the Iran against the invading forces of Saddam Hussein from lower Iraq amidst Iran-Iraqi oil fields. De Bellaique even visits some of the bloodiest battlefields, villages and towns, such as Khorramshahr (Date-Town) whose name was changed to "Khooneenshahr (Bloody Town) due to the vast devastation of people and buildings. The narrative is unrelenting in dissecting the eight-year war including the 1983 peace offering from Saddam Hussein which Ayatollah Khomeini turned down thus extending the massive blood-letting of Iran's eligible male population including 10-14 year old youth called the "basij" force.De Bellaique also interviewed the fallen veterans' families in villages and towns giving the heaviest detail to the agonies and rationales for such bloody history so very new to Iranians whose last comparable conflict in longevity and fatalities can only be found in the twelve-year Ottoman-Iranian war along the Turkish/Iraqi borders with Iran in the last parts of the 16th century (AD 1578-1590), a cluster of wars by Iran's mid-16th-17th cc. Safavid shahs in the Caucasus, and in the dynasty-killing Afghani Occupation of Iran in the early 18th c. (1722-25) - In other words, most horror display of misguided nationalist outburst for 20th century Iran. The thousands of black wreaths that decorated the doors of fallen veterans' homes remain a rivetting and most unpopular collective memory of the present Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian academic specialists, graduate students in international relations or conflict resolution, Iranians themselves, and war reporters will most enjoy the gruesome realities suffered by the Iranians at home and in diaspora. I don't believe that too many others will. The overall picture of Iran, wittingly or not, portrayed by de Bellaigue is vastly unfavorable to the Iran the wine drinking, poetry reading, picnicking, and sufi mystical Iran/ancient Persia many of us know.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Caraculiambro

condemnation of the mullahs never materializes

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 25, 2007

Verified Purchase

Thumbing through Christopher de Bellaigue's "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs," I smelled a rat.

Riddle me this: How is it that an Englishman who wrote what is being billed as a "searingly honest portrait" of life in modern-day Iran is not in, uh, jail?

How is it that he is permitted, to this day, to reside in unmolested luxury and comfort in a tony suburb north of Tehran? Wouldn't anybody "honest" be either imprisoned or shoved on a plane?

Answer: because his memoir is not "searingly honest." Or any kind of honest, for that matter.

That's right. de Bellaigue, who (forgetting to mention this in the book) about a decade ago converted to Shi'a Islam and married an Iranian, has managed to write a book about Iran that, while lovingly describing colorful characters, quaint locales, and heart-wrenching situations, never actually takes the trouble to specify where all the grief in this society is coming from! While he is competent at turning a phrase, his book ends up just flitting from anecdote to anecdote; he never manages (or bothers) to stitch his material into a more coherent (and therefore more condemnatory) narrative.

What's worse, de Bellaigue is, without hitting you on the head about it, apologizing for the mullahs, for the oppression, for the blood. Not that he does this directly, no. But every description, every episode in the book, each island of woe that drifts into view is allowed to drift right back out of view without our cicerone's ever clarifying the serpent in the basement. Well, no, sorry: not in the basement anymore.

If I were Iranian, I'd be fuming.

I'm not even sure why de Bellaigue wrote this thing. I charitably stuck through the whole tour, waiting for it to take off, but it never did. In fact, I only realized what de Bellaigue really was when I was about halfway into it: an upper-class British whitewasher of atrocities.

Chris, if you're reading this: Shame. Although, for you, judgment is "as slippery as soap" (p. 276), I have no such impairment.

Here's a few samples of what you're in store for:

"In around 1970, while he was in Najaf, Khomeini delivered a series of lectures, subsequently collected and published, that put flesh on the bones of Nouri's longing. It was illogical, Khomeini argued, to suppose that God desired Islamic government only so long as there was an infallible guide -- the Prophet or the Imams -- to oversee it. Even now, during the occultation, the government of God should be implemented. Who was better qualified, he asked, to oversee Islamic rule, than the doctors of Islamic law -- the senior jurists, or 'mojtaheds'"? (p. 100)

"Mullahs study so that they can use their knowledge of God's will, and their God-given rationalism, to extract he law. They have tools: their knowledge of Arabic, grammar, rhetoric and logic. these help them when it comes to learning a set of principles for deriving the law from its sources." (p. 104)

"Having been perfectly dynamic during the 1980s, the Islamic Republic is now inert. No, things are worse than that; Iran is being disabled from within, by liberals intent on corrupting and Westernizing; they use phrases like human rights and representative democracy." (p. 235)

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Peter

Modern history of Iran through vignettes

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

De Bellaigue gives us insight into the ancient and modern history of Iran through interviews with survivors of the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War and glimpses of the culture and places of Iran. The book contains an overwhelming amount of names, making it hard to follow at times, but it gives a good sense of the people, religion, joys and sorrows, and rich history of Iran. Through it all, the author imparts his love for the people of Iran, as he tries to make sense of the psyche and recent history of the people.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Manto

Get upto speed with modern Iran

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 10, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is a great book on Iran if you have been keeping pace with what has been happening there, politically since the Islamic revolution, otherwise certain sections might became a bit of a drag. The author has the singular advantage of being a British man married to an Iranian lady and living in Tehran, giving him pretty unprecedented coverage of the insides of a very proud but wounded country. Proud because of their culture and wounded because despite their tall claims they were routinely overlooked when the new world powers were busy collecting prize lands for themselves, places like India, Sri Lanka, Africa etc.

I was a bit disappointed in that the author chose to present an Iran by interviewing people of substance and not choosing to present the life's and impacts of the ordinary people. Because of this route, every time he presented a new character, a quick historical context had to be established which proved pretty tedious to me as I had little background of the ground politics of Iran.