Tag: Shi’a Islam

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Scott Anderson
King of Kings—The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
New York: Doubleday, 2025

The Iran Hostage Crisis in which Iranian students imprisoned the Americans on the staff of the US Embassy for 444 days after its start date of November 4, 1979 was part of the Iranian Revolution—a political convulsion which overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s leader within the Iranian monarchical political order. Pahlavi was the king of Iran and in Iran’s vernacular Persian language “king” is rendered as “shah,” therefore Pahlavi was referred to as “the Shah.” His other titles were King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The Rise of Saddam Hussein

In 1968, the Ba’athists returned to power in Iraq after a relatively bloodless coup. President Arif was deposed and exiled along with his family to London. The fact that the coup was bloodless shows that Ba’athism had won Iraqi hearts and minds and was widely seen as legitimate. Saddam Hussein was still in the background at this time, and like Stalin, he focused on creating a security and intelligence service that was loyal to him. (more…)

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Kim Ghattas
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East
New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2020

Kim Ghattas is a Lebanese senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a journalist with a stellar reputation and once accompanied Crooked H on one of her junkets to the Middle East and Pakistan when Hillary was US Secretary of State. (more…)