Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
    Unavailable
    Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
    Unavailable
    Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
    Ebook454 pages6 hours

    Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup

    By Christopher de Bellaigue

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Christopher de Bellaigue, a former contributor to The Economist, brings to light the fascinating story of one of the great anti-colonial heroes of the twentieth century: Muhammad Mossadegh, the great Iranian leader whose untimely demise resulted in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and a man who has been demonized, ridiculed, and misunderstood in the West while remaining an icon and an inspiration across the Middle East. Patriot of Persia, a new biography exploring his life and impact, opens a crucial new window into Mossadegh—whose role in the evolution of Iran’s political climate cannot be overemphasized—providing a resource that will prove equally invaluable to academics, newshounds, and activists as they struggle to understand Mideast politics, Iran, Ahmadinejad, and the future of the region—and the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 15, 2012
    ISBN9780062196620
    Unavailable
    Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
    Author

    Christopher de Bellaigue

    Christopher de Bellaigue was born in 1971. He studied at Cambridge and writes for Granta and the New York Review of Books. He is married and lives in Iran.

    Read more from Christopher De Bellaigue

    Related to Patriot of Persia

    Related ebooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Israel Lost the Culture War

      Jul 20, 2021

      MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA After accepting an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, which took effect on May 21, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed an “achievement no military has ever achieved” in Israel’s 11-day bombing campaign in Gaza. A

      4 min read

    • Article

      On The Edge Of Afghanistan

      Sep 12, 2017

      On The Edge Of Afghanistan
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Tangled Roots Of The Third Reich

      Oct 26, 2023

      WITH THE CENTENARY OF THE Weimar Republic’s founding just gone, and that of Hitler’s rise to power fast approaching, interest in modern German history is as strong as ever. New books about Nazism and World War II still adorn the shelves of most books

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Iran Paradox

      Oct 15, 2016

      Roughly 2,500 years ago, the first great Persian Empire, led by Cyrus the Great, was founded. Over the next several centuries, it grew to dominate a significant portion of the world’s extant population and stretched from western India to the Mediterr

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Silencing Of A Princess

      Mar 12, 2021

      The Silencing Of A Princess
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Arab World’s Star Student

      Apr 9, 2018

      The Arab World’s Star Student
      6 min read

    • Article

      Back To Barbarity

      Aug 1, 2021

      In August 2010, Time magazine ran a cover photo of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan. Aisha was no longer pretty in the conventional sense because there was a hole where her nose had been. The Taliban hacked it off, along with her ears, as punishment for

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Excess

      Apr 25, 2017

      The Art of Excess
      8 min read

    • Article

      Princeton’s Friend Of The Iranian People

      Nov 24, 2022

      GIVEN THE FACT THAT IRAN has always occupied some measure of media attention in the Anglophone world even before the Islamic Republic made it into a pariah state, it is odd that most politically-minded members of the public or even of the academic cl

      4 min read

    • Article

      False Prophets by Nigel Ashton review – Britain and the Middle East

      Mar 5, 2022

      Every postwar British leader has seen the Middle East as a threatening place. They worried about the loss of empire and the risk of having oil supplies cut off; made bombastic claims about new Hitlers and transnational terrorism. But whatever the spe

      4 min read

    • Article

      Imperial Measures

      Mar 11, 2022

      Imperial Measures
      3 min read

    Reviews for Patriot of Persia

    4/5

    12 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Patriot of Persia: Muhammed Mossadegh and a very British coup by Christopher de BellaigueI was going to start this review by commenting that there were two misleading things about the title: the first is that this is in fact a biography of Mossadegh's life rather than an account of the coup, the second that the description of the coup itself focuses on the CIA role without any mention of UK involvement (although there is coverage of the British persuading the US that a coup was necessary). But as I looked for the touchstone I discovered that the US subtitle of the book is "MM and a tragic Anglo-American coup", different in both tone and content from the UK one. Anyway, to the review. In some ways this has quite an old-fashioned approach to biography writing, literally starting with Mossadegh's birth and ending with his death, and packing the author's analysis quite closely around the facts of Mossadegh's life. This is exacerbated by de Bellaigue's style of writing, which is fabulously elliptical and impressionistic - especially in the early chapters I felt that other biographers would squeeze a paragraph out of the information he was putting into a sentence. Six-foot-three of glowering, muscle-bound ambition, Reza Khan crushed the shell of Qajar power. He wrote no foreign language, and barely his own; his culture was cards and wenching, though later he acquired the genteel vices of opium and extortion. ... Iran seethed as he started his ascent. Banditry and insurgency threatened the whole flimsy structure. It was one of those times when the Persian longing for a strongman capable of dragging the country back from the precipice seems like the summit of logic and good sense.de Bellaigue loves a good anecdote, quote or nickname (Brainless Shaban, Icy Ramazan, Sugar-lip Zeynab) - anything that creates an image in the reader's mind. All this makes the book an enjoyable read, although there are a couple of downsides - because it's so elliptical there were times when I would have liked a statement to be more backed up with argument (eg, in above, 'the Persian longing for a strongman'?), and I occasionally worried that I was coming away with an impression of what had happened rather than detailed knowledge.But in any case, the story is interesting and important. Overall it's a portrayal of Mossadegh himself, with plenty of complexity and contradictions. de Bellaigue shows us his strong adherence to his values and integrity, his love for political theatre, his vision but also his fussiness over details, and demonstrates how these made Mossadegh so popular among the Iranian people but also so frustrating to his political colleagues and opponents, and how it led him to miss opportunities to make compromises. de Bellaigue thinks, for example, that it would have been possible to reach an acceptable compromise with the British over Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP) which would have met Iranian requirements and averted the coup. That doesn't mean that the book is not critical of the UK and US approaches, far from it. But reaching a compromise would actually have achieved Mossadegh's ends better than nobly standing above the fray. Certainly, without the coup, the modern Middle East could look very different.Wealth distribution; a military under civilian control; modestly enhanced rights for women in the face of clerical unease; these were the most visible parts of a modernisation programme which would have brought Iran substantially closer to a secular, constitutional regime. The final year of Mossadegh's premiership is a salutary episode in modern Middle Eastern history - an opportunity spurned because of the British obsession with lost prestige and the American obsession with Communism.
    • 4/5
      A very good, highly readable account, told almost completely from the Mossadegh point of view. Although it's title alludes to the coup of 1953, this is a very good account of Iranian politics in the first half of the twentieth century. The subject could have been very difficult to follow with the contrary nature of Iranian politics & the fluidity of events, but this account took it all in its stride. A good book on a very important figure in 20th century middle eastern politics.
    • 4/5
      A highly readable biography about Iran's gray eminence Muhammad Mossadegh. Contrary to his noble family tradition and his relatives, Muhammad Mossadegh, trained as a lawyer in Switzerland, tried to install good government in corrupt and backward Persia. In a volatile environment, he tried to modernize his country, as minister in multiple government or in private opposition. Similar to another rich old boy in Britain, he was in the privileged position to decide whether he wanted to participate in politics. In contrast to Churchill, his chief weapon was inaction, of dramatically falling ill or going on hunger strike. His Schmerzensmann showmanship carried the public with him, forcing his political opponents to adopt some of his policies.Unfortunately, the British corporate interests were not willing to play this game. Muhammad Mossadegh's altogether quite sensible demands were deemed unsuitable. In their short-term greed, the British corporations together with the American CIA undermined the secular movement in Iran because those secularists weren't as pliable as the puppet dictators. In the end, the undermining of the secular institutions and the support for the dictators meant that only the religious fanatics remained popular. The supreme irony is that the very conservative nature of Muhammad Mossadegh led him not to go effectively resist the CIA triggered putsch as fighting back would have handed control to the rabble. In all their difference, Mossadegh remained an aristocrat not a true man of the people.Unfortunately, as recent events in Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and Syria confirm, Great Britain and the United States still prefer to work with dictators or the military instead of with the quarrelsome secular forces which in the long run tends to benefit religious extremists.