Ryszard Kapuscinski
Shah-In-Shah

For those who are not familiar, Ryszard Kapuscinski was a famous reporter highly active in the third-world context and in non-aligned countries during the twentieth century, serving as a foreign correspondent for the Polish press agency PAP. His volumes-reports, including Shah-in-Shah, Ebony, and Imperium, were widely distributed and allowed readers to discover realities completely different from the usual clichés imposed grossly by media suffocated by interests, governments, companies, and various conveniences.

Shah-in-Shah is the perfect novelized account of Iran/Persia at the dawn of the national revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, which began with small but significant seeds in the early seventies and culminated in 1979 with the expulsion of the last Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his exile, Khomeini's political consecration, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose legislative, political, and judicial dictates merged into one with Shiite Quranic law, alignment with Sharia, and the absolute dominance of religion and its related morality over public legality. Kapuscinski, sent by the PAP to the East and confined in a hotel room in the capital Tehran, describes with clarity and commendable lexical and explanatory simplicity a series of "photographs" of Iran at the twilight of its monarchical experience, a country on the brink of economic collapse, marked by a political-institutional caste unworthy of representing it and suffocated by a sovereign-dictator who makes terror, repression, instruments of torture, and secret police his questionable methods of governance. Armed with SAVAK, a disgraceful emulation of the Nazi Gestapo and psychotically eager to transform his kneeling realm into the fifth military power in the world, Reza Pahlavi takes advantage of the only national resource capable of attracting foreign capital and delegations, oil, recklessly investing the ocean of money pouring into the royal coffers to purchase a rich war arsenal. Thus, planes, weapons, bombers, tanks, and more land in Iran, which the Shah, completely oblivious to the organizational-instrumental precariousness of his country (which lacks ports, roads, railways, engineers, and technicians), does not know where to place: this is how the cream of the crop of the war production bought from the powers to which he has sold barrels upon barrels of oil ends up abandoned in the desert, disassembled, inactive, and devoid of functionality.

Around him and his aspirations of ephemeral power, the people starve, warm themselves with burning manure, live in desolate and dilapidated huts, and are deprived of education and culture; the few and meager universities languish, the intelligentsia and wealthy progeny who can study migrate abroad, causing the nation to lose a terrifying amount of minds and ingenuity. This ghostly Middle Eastern tableau is completed with the bloody repression of dissidents, the intervention of the pseudo-Nazi SAVAK, torture and barbarities, as well as with the abandonment of the dictates of the Shiite faith, the true and authentic spiritual and cultural heritage of a people who consider their adherents the only heirs of Mohammedan Islam, successors of the ousted Ali (son-in-law of the prophet) and opponents of the millennial Sunni usurper.

Kapuscinski proves adept at expressing the fervor and moral ferment of the Shiites under dictatorship, illustrating in the manner of a deus ex machina simultaneously transcendental and immanent the Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled by Reza Pahlavi's regime in '63 yet active in anti-monarchy/dictatorship propaganda until the '79 revolution. After years of bloody reprisals against the rebels (reprisals including fiery grates, boiling oil, beatings...), the Shah and his collaborators can do nothing against a worn-out and starving populace, even annihilated by Shiite resilience, and are forced to yield to the "saintly" leader of the rebels, the thirteenth "hidden" Imam. Once the Shah's regime is abolished, Khomeini establishes the Islamic Republic of Iran, severely marked by Shiite fundamentalism.

An excellent volume of journalistic anthropology, written by an author never exhausted in his countless journeys around the "other" world, a lover of the real and the inscrutable, distant from the usual social conventions and the reductionism of bad information, unfortunately still predominant in mass media.