From palace to prison

de Iḥsān Narāqī

"On September 28, 1978, I was summoned to the Saadabad Palace for the first of eight audiences with the Shah spread over the last hundred days of his reign. During these meetings the monarch, anxious to understand the growing revolutionary crisis in Iran and if possible to find a way out, questioned me closely about my views of the situation....". So begins Ehsan Naraghi's unusual and illuminating account of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Far more than an insider's memoir of the Shah's downfall and the rise of the Islamic Republic, it is also a unique behind-the-scenes view of Iran's tempestuous politics and society. In the first half of the book, Naraghi, a prominent Iranian sociologist, engagingly recounts his long conversations with the Shah in the weeks before the revolution. Here is the Shah at bay, a man overtaken by events and unbelievably ignorant of the causes of the popular agitation against him. Naraghi provides an unparalleled picture of the revolutionary events as seen through the eyes of those at the very center of power. In the second half of the book the author recalls his thirty-three-month experience in prison - the first testimony to come from a survivor of the Islamic Republic's jails. In a rich, intensely human portrait of his fellow prisoners and his jailors, Naraghi powerfully reconstructs his prison world as a microcosm of the political earthquake that engulfed Iran.