Blog: Bloodshed in Tehran but a seamless transition in Chelsea
Autumn 1978. I was at an ever so refined little prep school in London's Chelsea. I had an Iranian friend. We always got on very well until we started talking about the Arab-Israeli war and then suddenly I was Moshe Dayan and he was George Habash. He boycotted Marks and Spencer oranges and I berated him with the history of the Middle East wars. You have to laugh! He was not an Arab and I had never been to Israel. I suspect neither of us knew much about the history of the conflict. But - shall we say - we had both received healthy indoctrination from our fathers. Yet when our respective fathers met, they got on famously. Just don't mention the war!
My Iranian friend had a picture of the Shah on the inside of his desk lid. I sat behind him, so whenever he opened his desk the Shah would greet me - he looked sophisticated, introspective and Westernised. By all accounts his appearance reflected his nature.
January-February 1979. The Islamic Revolution. The Shah left Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran after years in exile. The changeover was swift, but not nearly so rapid as the new picture of the Ayatollah that found its way onto my friend's desk lid. In Chelsea at least it was an utterly seamless transition. From being a royalist devotee of the Shah, my friend became a stalwart supporter of the Islamic revolution virtually overnight. Suddenly the Ayatollah was there in his religious turban, his eyes burning with just a hint of the fanaticism and cruelty that characterised his regime over the next decade.
I've always been interested in Iran ever since, although I've never been near. A question burns inside me whenever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes his ludicrous threats. Iran is not an Arab country; it was not affected by the setting up of the so-called Zionist entity its leaders purport to abhor. Neither was it - like Lebanon or Jordan for example - affected by the dispersal of the Palestinians during Israel's creation. And yet its leaders have always been among the most vitriolic in their denunciation of Israel, even compared to Arab countries.
Ahmadinejad, in particular, is a ludicrous figure, his Holocaust-denial a symptom of a diseased mindset. But why the enmity? And what has it got to do with the Iranians? I'm not so naive as to pretend that replacing Ahmadinejad with Mir Hossein Mousavi will end the hostility. But it may just avert a war. And so if - 30 years down the line - the same school now has an Iranian boy with a photo of Ahmadinejad on his desk lid, I hope to see a changeover on that desk lid as smooth as the one that took place back in 1979. Only with a little less bloodshed in Iran.
My Iranian friend had a picture of the Shah on the inside of his desk lid. I sat behind him, so whenever he opened his desk the Shah would greet me - he looked sophisticated, introspective and Westernised. By all accounts his appearance reflected his nature.
January-February 1979. The Islamic Revolution. The Shah left Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran after years in exile. The changeover was swift, but not nearly so rapid as the new picture of the Ayatollah that found its way onto my friend's desk lid. In Chelsea at least it was an utterly seamless transition. From being a royalist devotee of the Shah, my friend became a stalwart supporter of the Islamic revolution virtually overnight. Suddenly the Ayatollah was there in his religious turban, his eyes burning with just a hint of the fanaticism and cruelty that characterised his regime over the next decade.
I've always been interested in Iran ever since, although I've never been near. A question burns inside me whenever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes his ludicrous threats. Iran is not an Arab country; it was not affected by the setting up of the so-called Zionist entity its leaders purport to abhor. Neither was it - like Lebanon or Jordan for example - affected by the dispersal of the Palestinians during Israel's creation. And yet its leaders have always been among the most vitriolic in their denunciation of Israel, even compared to Arab countries.
Ahmadinejad, in particular, is a ludicrous figure, his Holocaust-denial a symptom of a diseased mindset. But why the enmity? And what has it got to do with the Iranians? I'm not so naive as to pretend that replacing Ahmadinejad with Mir Hossein Mousavi will end the hostility. But it may just avert a war. And so if - 30 years down the line - the same school now has an Iranian boy with a photo of Ahmadinejad on his desk lid, I hope to see a changeover on that desk lid as smooth as the one that took place back in 1979. Only with a little less bloodshed in Iran.