A century of mistrust

Iran At the end of his comprehensive book Iran Today, Dilip Hiro comes to the obvious conclusion that a major crisis over Iran's nuclear programme is inevitable.

The book was completed before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's shock announcement in April that his country had begun enriching uranium. But Hiro's analysis that the US and Europe can do little to prevent Tehran from building a bomb remains valid.

An oil embargo would hurt the West more than Iran. Military intervention by the US or Israel would, in the words of the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, quoted by Hiro, "engulf the entire region in fire".

An attack on Iran would increase hatred of the US and Israel throughout the Muslim world - though one wonders whether a maximum level of animosity was not reached long ago. Tehran could make Iraq even more of a hell for US occupation forces. And military action could at best delay - but not destroy - Iran's nuclear programme.

Why should we care what happens in Iran? Because Muslim countries possess 75 per cent of oil and 45 per cent of the world's natural gas reserves, replies Hiro. His book is a detailed chronicle of the past century of mistrust and misdeeds between Britain and the US on the one hand, and Iran on the other.

Jason Elliot takes an entirely different approach - he never mentions the nuclear issue - and addresses politics only peripherally, adopting the poet's dictum that "the world's affairs do not amount to much". With the deft strokes of a Persian miniaturist, and a great sense of humour, Elliot brings to life the timeless Persia of Parthians, Mongols and Safavids. The characters he meets on his travels are touching, often surprising.

Elliot asks at the beginning of his book: what has Persia given to the West? His three-page answer should be mandatory reading for every US official now contemplating the bombing of Iran.

In the Middle Ages, the Persian scholar Ibn Sina or Avicenna's Canon laid the foundations of modern medicine. Persia also gave the world the first postal service, the banker's cheque, the first calculating machine, algebra and trigonometry, electric batteries, the carrot, tulip and domesticated rose, stained glass, the Virgin birth, Christmas lights and Christmas trees, the sacramental use of wine . . .

In Elliot's Iran, the brilliance of this heritage shines through the daily grind of cheating cab drivers, cockroach-infested hotels and glowering mullahs. A post office clerk in Kermanshah rails against anti-Persian bias in ancient Greek history books and recites the 14th-century poet Sa'adi.

In a Tehran park, an old man sitting on a crate uses a budgerigar to pick out a paper slip telling Elliot's fortune. The prediction is a couplet from the great poet Hafez. "My fortune was being told by a 10th century poet in a 21st century city," Elliot writes. "I was struck by the facility with which, among its people, the intervening millennium could be compressed into irrelevance."

These are two of the finest books I've read about Iran. Hiro's is a precious compendium of dates and facts, a compact reference work that will be invaluable on future reporting trips to Iran. Elliot's is a writer's book - the sort of leisurely exploration that every journalist dreams of indulging in, if only we had the time.

Hiro's prose is workmanly; the gems in his book carefully gleaned bits of knowledge. He recalls the ties between Reza Shah, the late Shah's father, and Nazi Germany, which forced him to abdicate in favour of his son in 1941. The founder of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty, Hiro reminds us, changed his country's name from Persia to Iran in the 1930s at the behest of his ambassador to Berlin, "Iran" being a variation on the word "Aryan".

Hiro provides a wealth of detail on family relationships within the ruling clergy. It is more than idle gossip: Iranians often cite this complex web to explain political events, but connections are devilishly difficult to confirm.

Hiro's cast of Western characters is equally fascinating. Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA's regional director who engineered the 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohamed Mossadeq, was the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Gen H Norman Schwarzkopf snr, who carried suitcases full of cash to finance the coup, was the father of the commander of the 1991 Gulf War. And Col William Boykin, the architect of the failed attempt to rescue the US Embassy hostages in April, 1980, has since September 11th, 2001 resurfaced as a rabid Evangelical Christian preaching Holy War against Muslims.

The recurring American names add to the sense of déjà vu. Hiro tells how, in the 1950s, CIA scribes in Washington wrote propaganda articles which were published the next day in the Iranian press. Last year, a Pentagon sub-contractor was caught planting articles with "positive spin" about the US military in Baghdad newspapers. Do we never learn?

Hiro and Elliot both write about the defining moments of Iran's 20th century: the coup against Mossadeq; the Shah's outrageous celebration at Persepolis of his 50th birthday with a bogus claim of 2,500 years of uninterrupted Persian monarchy; the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Elliot calls the Persepolis bash in 1975 "the most ill-conceived party of modern times". While Hiro mentions the catering by Maxim's of Paris, Elliot supplies the telling detail: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia attending with a black chihuahua wearing a diamond collar; a menu of caviar-filled quails' eggs, lobster mousse, champagne sorbet, peacocks stuffed with foie gras, flaming roast lambs and 25,000 bottles of wine flown from Paris. All this while people went hungry in nearby Shiraz. In his own version of "Let them eat cake!" the Shah countered critics with the words: "What do they think I should feed fifty heads of state? Bread and radishes?"

Westernised, upper-middle-class Tehranis - "ghosts in their own society" - pop up in Elliot's book like relics from the Shah's time. At the desperately festive parties he attends, the food, wine, music and conversation are exquisite, the women ravishing.

The best thing about Mirrors of the Unseen is its insights into Islamic art and architecture. At moments, one teeters on the brink of "mosque fatigue", but Elliot is so skilled a writer that even his enthusiasm at the use of the geometric "Golden Mean" in the design of the city of Isfahan is contagious.

Westerners traditionally dismiss Islamic art as the result of a ban on representing the human figure. "Can the high level of its art really be explained by a prohibition, a sort of artistic road-block, around which its most talented artists were forced to divert their creative efforts?" Elliot asks.

He explains the primacy of the garden in Persian culture, "a thing of sanctity . . . steeped from antiquity with connotations of the otherworldly". Our perception of Islamic art as merely decorative is a sign of the loss of spirituality in the West. The masterpieces which Elliot studies, particularly the intricate motifs of faience domes, are as much about the unseen as the visible world.

Persian artists saw themselves as intermediaries between earth and heaven, not as individuals bent on self-expression. Their quest, Elliot writes, "is no more, and no less, than to create visible reminders of the Divine Presence."

Lara Marlowe is the France and Maghreb correspondent for The Irish Times. She has made many reporting trips to Iran since 1988

Iran Today By Dilip Hiro Politico's Publishing, 447pp. £ 9.99 Mirrors of The Unseen: Journeys in Iran By Jason Elliot Picador, 415pp. £16.99