Scott Anderson - King of Kings
APA: Anderson, S. (2025). King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation. Vintage Books.
page 257:
Like economics, revolution is often a matter of faith, a test of the human capacity to believe.
... ... not only in faith, but in faith's many ancillary properties: superstition and myth, revelation and fantasy.
... in the end Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had the misfortune of ruling over a place where faith regularly trumped fact, where delusion and reality fused.
page 416:
In sum, the shahanshah was so profoundly important to the United States that it couldn't conceive of life without him -- and so it did not. Instead, successive American governments happily bought into his fictions, both of himself and of his nation. ... by ... refusing to look for problems ... when the fictions fell away, the superpowers stood just as naked, just as flummoxed, as its imperial hirling.
pages 418 - 419:
On a broader level, and in looking to what has transpired in the decade since that revolution, another question presents itself. To what degree did that upheaval spawn the rise of militant religious fundamentalism that, in varying form and virulence, is now evident in every major faith and in almost every corner of the globe?
... On the one hand, the Iranian rebellion represented one of history's greatest counterrevolutions: There is simply no event in the contemporary era with which to compare it. On the other, the rumblings of a religious revivalism were evident long before and across every faith, often in response to the same inequities -- and iniquities -- that modernity had visited upon Iran: the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization; the growing chasm between rich and poor, and urban and rural; the tearing apart of the traditional social structure in the name of progress.
... Whatever its positive elements, the Iranian Revolution helped legitimize a current of religious zealotry and violence that is likely to bubble up from the earth almost anywhere and at any time.