Review by Choice Review
Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi was a controversial figure in 20th-century Iran, reigning from 1949 to 1979. Although Pahlavi is much reviled as a dictator, Cooper (adjunct professor, Columbia) argues that it is time to revisit the Shah's accomplishments. The author traces the events in Iran from January 1, 1978, to January 16, 1979, when the Shah left Iran for the last time. The author has interviewed many of the participants and witnesses of this time, including the former queen, members of the royal court, former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr, and former Carter advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Cooper argues that the Shah accomplished a great deal for his country, including women's rights, educational reform, and modernization. The author also points out that in the last days of the Shah's reign, he chose to leave the country rather than stay and fight, a strategy that would have led to much greater bloodshed. This book is well written and well researched, but not everyone will agree with the one-sided nature of its conclusions. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Grant Michael Farr, Portland State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE FORMER SHAH OF IRAN, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, staked his modernization project on the secularization of Iranian life, and the emancipation of traditionally religious women. He urged them to come out from under their veils, attend university and show up as citizens in the public sphere. He passed sweeping secular laws that gave women greater rights in the family, appointed women to high office and encouraged a Western liberality that involved Dior swimsuit shows and broadcasts of "The Mary TVler Moore Show." His efforts empowered a small elite of secular feminists, and led to women making up one-third of all university students by 1978. The 1979 Iranian revolution disrupted all this. It produced an Islamic Republic that imposed Shariah law and mandated veiling. But in the years that followed, female literacy spiked, women's university attendance expanded dramatically and women's participation in public life soared. By the 1990s, far more Iranian women were "emancipated" than had ever been under the shah. Despite this lived experience, the common opinion that Middle Eastern women are best served by secular dictators endures. It underpins Andrew Scott Cooper's "The Fall of Heaven," which sets out to correct the "one-dimensional" Western narrative around the shah, with an eye to what we should expect of the region's present dictators as they, like the shah, face off against "political extremists and religious fanatics." Cooper shows his hand with his title. He is determined to focus on what was heavenly in imperial Iran, while glossing over the grievances that led to the political revolt: the shah's aversion to even peaceful resistance to his regime, the enduring resentment at his restoration to power in 1953 by the United States and the lingering view of his rule as an enabler of American imperialism. The chief problem with Cooper's account is his reflexive hostility toward Islamism writ large, which ends up being analytically debilitating. Khomeini "understood that in Iran the path to power lay in the gutter," he writes with the snootiness of the same secular elite he faults for failing to appreciate Iranians' religiosity. He pays fleeting attention, or none at all, to the Islamically inflected writings of figures like Ali Shariati and Jalal Al-e-Ahmed, whose ideas shaped the politics of so many articulate young people. The dozens of mass protests and demonstrations leading up to the revolution are described simply as "mobs." Cooper tends to clump the broad array of revolutionary groups under the religious banner. "Khomeini had already won the hearts and minds of the children of the Pahlavi elite and many in the middle and upper classes." This is simply not true. The youth and technocratic elite described here certainly did want the regime gone, but they were drawn to a wide range of groups - democratic, constitutionalist, nationalist, Communist. That they coalesced behind Khomeini does not mean they were enraptured by "the forces of Islam." The ayatollah kept his political vision conveniently obscure, and his real designs became clear only months after his return, when it was too late. These pre-revolutionary currents matter because they reflect the sophisticated, complex history of Iranians' engagement with politics, and also the origins of the contestations we see in Iran today. The real question to pose about 1979 is why so many Iranians with everything at stake in the system saw no reason to defend it. Cooper's whisper-by-whisper retelling of the shah's final days is often rich in detail, but he resorts too often to Aladdin-lamp-lit analysis. Khomeini, he says, lied to the Americans not because he was a ruthless politician, but because of the Shia practice of taqiya, or dissimulation; assassination plots are intricate not because killing well-guarded senior officials is tricky, but because of "typically Persian" levels of intrigue; sycophancy to the king is not simply that, but "the Persian art of court flattery." The one intended showstopper in "The Fall of Heaven" is the account of the disappearance of Imam Musa Sadr, the charismatic and revered Iranian-Lebanese cleric. Sadr vanished during a visit to Libya in 1978, and rival theories have competed since to explain his death, most of them implicating Col. Muammar Qaddafi or various Palestinian factions. But Cooper points to Khomeini and his coterie. "The founders of the Islamic Republic were complicit in his murder," and were said to be intent on sabotaging a secret plan, hatched between the shah and Sadr, to bring the cleric back to Iran as an alternative to Khomeini. Cooper's recounting of this scheme is entertaining, but there is scant evidence that Sadr could have formed a serious counterpoint to Khomeini. Most far-fetched is the claim that Sadr was singularly poised to "reconcile faith with modernity." Sadr's legend is a beguiling one; ask many in the Middle East about him today, and they'll still get a faraway, wistful look in their eyes. It's fanciful, however, to imagine that he could have recast the course of Iranian and Shia history. But Cooper's main objective is to rehabilitate the shah, who in the late 1970s became associated with brutality on a scale all out of proportion to the truth. This was largely the work of President Jimmy Carter, who grew so obsessed with the shah's human rights record that his ambassador to the United Nations likened the shah to Adolf Eichmann. Compared with Iraq's Saddam Hussein or Syria's Hafez and Bashir al-Assad, who massacred in the tens of thousands, Cooper insists "the shah was a benevolent autocrat." (Carter's antagonism to the shah coincided roughly with Iran's inflexibility on oil prices, but Cooper, whose previous book concerned oil politics, oddly makes little of this.) The numbers of the shah's victims were far more modest than what Carter claimed - or Khomeini for that matter. The Islamic Republic set about memorializing those victims, and the lead researcher, the seminarian-turned-dissident Emad al-Din Baghi, discovered that instead of 100,000 alleged deaths at the hands of the shah, only a few hundred names could be found. Nonetheless, if Cooper is going to stake so much on accuracy with numbers, he might have been more scrupulous himself. He mentions no source for his own figure of 12,000 deaths in Khomeini's first decade and recycles widely rejected figures for deaths in the Iran-Iraq war. The best-drawn portrait that emerges in "The Fall of Heaven" is of Farah Diba, the shah's third wife and a figure desperately deserving of a proper biography. Trained as an architect, Farah was educated, cosmopolitan and ambitious, a first lady unlike any the Middle East had ever seen and, in Cooper's words, "the most accomplished female sovereign of the 20th century." She rescued lepers, bought Warhols, built museums and turned Tehran into a global hub of artistic and cultural activity. Down to earth, compassionate and clever, she could connect as easily to a cleaner as a courtier, and was the real star of the Pahlavi family. In passing, Cooper makes the important point that Westerners were rather too fascinated with Khomeini when he first came to power. He "appeared like a mirage out of the Arabian desert with his flowing beard and black eyes to regale them with tales of the bestial Pahlavis." The French philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Iran and was infatuated with the spiritual quality of Islamist politics. Journalists "hung on Khomeini's every word." In the light of what we now know, Cooper asks us to revisit our inherited memory of the shah, and consider returning with a different verdict. There seems to be lurking in these pages a wish that the shah had cracked down, and kept the forces that opposed him, "the floodgates to today's carnage," at bay. But this desire is fundamentally at odds with the personality of the shah, a proud man who rejected the scale of violence the moment seemingly demanded of him. In exile, shortly before his death, a friend asked him why he didn't crush Khomeini. "I wasn't this man," the shah replies. "If you wanted someone to kill people you had to find somebody else." AZADEH MOAVENI, who reported from Iran for a decade, is the author of "Lipstick Jihad," among other books. She is working on a book about women and the Islamic State.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Historians should resist the urge to read history backward and view events as inevitable, an error many have made regarding the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. According to this scenario, the Pahlavi dynasty was doomed by its brutality, corruption, and the arrogance of Mohammad Reza Shah. But Cooper (The Oil Kings, 2011) provides an expert and more nuanced view of the Shah, his regime, and its collapse. As he illustrates, the Shah was autocratic without apology, and could be indecisive and prone to wallowing in self-pity. Yet, he was devoted to modernizing his country and made genuine efforts to reach compromises with moderate opposition groups; he even tried to rein inhis dreaded secret police. His fall was the result of a confluence of external and internal factors, including, of course, the effectiveness and fanatic determination of Islamic extremists as well as the ambivalence of the U.S. government. This is a fine revisionist study of major world events that continue to influence the fate of the Middle East.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cooper (The Oil Kings), a scholar of oil markets and U.S.-Iran relations, recounts the rise and fall of Iran's glamorous Pahlavi dynasty, challenging common characterizations of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as a brutal dictator. Focusing on the last Shah's rule, Cooper explains the founding of the Pahlavi monarchy and details the various achievements of the White Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, "one of the 20th century's great experiments in liberal social and economic reform." These transformed Iran "from a semifeudal baron state into a modern industrial powerhouse" while also encompassing various social advances in women's rights, education, health care, and more. Such reforms, Cooper argues, qualify the Western-oriented Shah as more of a benevolent autocrat than a tyrant. The first part of the book is a sweeping survey of the Shah's time in power; the second is a riveting day-by-day account of the 1978-1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy. Based on various documentary sources as well as impressive access to royalists, revolutionaries, Queen Farah Pahlavi, and various U.S. officials, this thorough work is immensely detailed yet readable and continuously engaging. Cooper's attempts to downplay the regime's abuses are unconvincing, but he provides a fascinating, distinctive, and personal account of the Shah and his rule. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Reverberations from the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which led to the fall of the U.S.-supported Pahlavi dynasty, are still felt throughout the region. Cooper (political science, Columbia Univ.; The Oil Kings) chronicles Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's reign from 1941 to 1979; an autocratic rule balanced with progressive social and economic reforms. The author's substantial research uncovers a multilayered government, filled with religious and political intrigue. The Shah is revealed to be a sympathetic, flawed ruler who believed he had the mandate of heaven as the source of his power, only to see his drive to modernity set back by extremists. Ayatollah Khomeini, who heralded the revolution and became the first Supreme Leader of Iran, is portrayed as a ruthless tyrant who used the media to represent himself as a peace-loving cleric. The American diplomatic and intelligence communities displayed an astounding lack of understanding of Iran's religious and political landscape, with disastrous results. Extensive insights from Mohammed's wife, Farah Pahlavi, add dimension to this portrait of Iran under the Shah's rule. VERDICT A well-researched and fascinating book for readers interested in the history of Iran and the Middle East, current Iranian affairs, and the history of fundamentalist terrorism. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]-Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
