The Mantle of the Prophet

"Yes, although this is not a book about Iraq it is still deeply relevant to later Iraqi history of the 1980s and 90s. It tells the story of the Iranian revolution which changed the whole path of the modern Middle East, not least of all Iraq. The very important event which follows the revolution is the eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq that began in 1980. That war is one of the single largest unappreciated great events of modern Middle Eastern history. Iraq was transformed beyond recognition socially and in lots of other ways. It was certainly the bloodiest war in the Middle East’s recent history. You could take all the Arab-Israeli wars and roll them up into one and all the various civil wars and intifadas and acts of genocide or mass murder committed in the modern Middle East and still you wouldn’t even come close to the number of Iraqis and Iranians who were killed during that time. The escalation of cruelty and violence in Iraqi society during the 1980s is something which we still live with. So this is something people need to know about if they are to understand the violence which followed the fall of the Saddam regime in 2003. There was the genocide against the Kurds and the use of weapons of mass destruction against them and so on. There were levels of brutalisation against ordinary people which are part of the terrible legacy that remains to haunt us in Iraq today. The lid of repression was lifted on a whole society that had been abused, and abuse of this kind does not just melt away after the removal of the regime causing it; it persists in people’s minds and sense of who they are."

"The Mantle of the Prophet is an accessible, captivating and thought-provoking book. It reads like a novel . It’s not a thick, historical narrative. The storyline focuses on one cleric called Ali Hashemi, the son of a leading cleric in Iran. The author tells the story of Iran through the lens of Ali Hashemi. He follows Ali Hashemi’s journey as a young man and the transformations and changes that he witnesses and undergoes. The book tells the story of Iran from 1940s up to the present. Ali himself suffers from internal contradictions and had reservations about his father, a senior cleric, and the Shia tradition in general. Like Ali Hashemi, the author, Roy Mottahedeh, comes from a prominent Iranian family, even though he has lived most of his life in America as an academic at Harvard. He says that he writes about Iran lovingly and, indeed, his book sounds like a love story. While writing the book, Mottahedeh had access to many clerics, so again, this is a book from the inside-out, as opposed to the outside-in. He tells the story of the Iranian Revolution through the lens of the clerics, their views, their ideas, the intellectual and emotional tensions that they experience. And his ability to zero in on the human experiences of the clerics provides the reader with considerable food for thought, about why the Shia clerics were able to lead the revolution and topple one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, in 1979. In a way, The Mantle of the Prophet is a story of the Iranian Revolution, told through the lens of the clerical class because, in the end, the 1979 revolution was a clerical revolution. Having said that, the 1979 Revolution was not an Islamic Revolution at the outset. The Shia clerics in Iran were able to coalesce with and co-opt a rainbow coalition that included liberals, secularists, nationalists, Marxists, bazarris, and the middle class. But once they captured power, the clerics devoured the rest and took ownership of the Revolution. This book should be read together with Abrahamian’s Iran Between the Two Revolutions , because Abrahamian gives us the historical and sociological narrative of why Iran fell like a ripened fruit into the hands of the clerical class. He pays a lot of attention to the period between 1941 and 1953. This particular period was very important in Iran, because it witnessed the emergence of many political parties. Iranian society was, relatively speaking, an open society at the time, and great social struggles were unleashed in Iran between 1941 and 1953. The Tudeh Party or the Marxist party became the dominant force in Iran and there were struggles among the various parties for the control of the state. The CIA-led coup against the legitimately elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953 was a pivotal moment in allowing the clerical class to surge and ultimately dominate the country. The two books complement each other. Roy Mottahedeh focuses mainly on the clerical establishment and how the clerical establishment radically changed and decided to interfere in the political process and get rid of the Shah; while Ervand Abrahamian tells the story of the intellectual and social vacuums created by toppling Mohammad Mossadegh because the elimination of the nationalist and the Marxist resistance, created a vacuum that was filled by the clerics. I’m simplifying a great deal, but Roy Mottahedeh’s book is fascinating because he gives us a glance of the pre-1979 clerical community that appreciated restraint, moderation and reflection. After 1979, the tradition of toleration and restraint was replaced with radicalism, bitterness and revenge. Ali Hashemi’s journey in the book reflects the journey of the clerical establishment as a whole and of Iran itself from 1953 up to 1979. The reason why we need both books together is because Mottahedeh tells us a story about the radicalisation of the clerics and Abrahamian informs us about the socio-economic aspects of this radicalisation. But the clerical establishment now is a new ruling class. It’s vengeful and bitter and it does not share power with other groups. Mottahedeh bemoans the passing of the old regime because the social space has been Islamicised from the top-down and bottom-up. There’s no space for young Iranians to express their dissenting views. But Iranians have learned through the ages how to cope with different kinds of repressive regimes, whether internal or external. And Mottahedeh finds hope in the ability of Iranians to manipulate religious theocracy, through language, through ambiguity, through art, films and music and what have you. He puts his hopes in the efforts of young Iranians to survive and outlast the current theocracy."