Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup

摘要

Christopher de Bellaigue's Patriot of Persia presents an intelligent, balanced portrait of Muhammad Mossadegh, whose tenure as prime minister of Iran and leader of the movement to nationalize Iran's British-controlled oil industry in the early 1950s made him one of the most important politicians in modern Iranian history and an influential world figure in this turbulent era. The book relies mainly on secondary sources and therefore contains little that will be new to close observers of Iran. Its strengths lie in bringing together disparate material - especially material from Persian-language sources - about the life of this enigmatic figure and portraying him in realistic rather than mythological terms, as is done in so many other accounts. Mossadegh was born in 1882 into a privileged family connected to Iran's ruling Qajar dynasty. This was a time when Iran - then known as Persia in the West - was coming increasingly into contact with Europe and its secular ways. Mossadegh was very much a product of this nascent cosmopolitanism, studying law in Paris and Switzerland, developing a modernist approach to his Islamic faith, and strongly embracing the nationalism and democratic ideals then sweeping the Western world. As a young man he had supported Iran's 1906 constitutional revolution and then become disillusioned when this movement was crushed under the weight of royalist forces backed by Britain and Russia. He left for Europe in 1909 and spent much of the next decade there, as Iran was engulfed in the turmoil of World War I. He even contemplated setting up a law practice and living permanently to Switzerland.