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Khomeini's Ghost: Iran since 1979 (Hardcover)

by Con Coughlin (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £25.00
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 424 pages
  • Publisher: Macmillan (20 Feb 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0230714544
  • ISBN-13: 978-0230714540
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 51,249 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #6 in  Books > History > Countries & Regions > Asia > Middle East > Iran
    #18 in  Books > Biography > Religious > Islam
    #25 in  Books > Biography > Historical > Countries & Regions > Middle East

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Product Description

Review

'A fluent, masterly narrative of the Iranian tragedy over the past thirty years ... Con Coughlin has rendered us a great service with his narrative.' --The Literary Review

Product Description

On 1 February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to a tumultuous welcome and the Iranian revolution that that he masterminded has become one of the defining moments of the modern age. Today the challenge of radical Islam represents the greatest threat to world peace seen since the darkest days of the Cold War, and the legacy of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution lies at the heart of many of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Khomeini’s Ghost is the definitive biographical account of how an impoverished young student from a remote area of southern Iran came to be the political and the spiritual leader of his country. Drawing on a wide variety of Iranian sources, including religious figures who knew and worked with Khomeini both in exile and in power, Con Coughlin examines in detail the principles of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and the impact of his legacy today, whether it is in Iran’s support for radical Islamic groups or Iran’s commitment to developing an atom bomb. Frighteningly topical, compellingly readable and written with authority and profound understanding of the subject, this is political biography at its best.

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars If only zero stars was available, 11 May 2009
By Kabeer "Kabeer" (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
A truly terrible work. Coughlin distorts basic facts, and writes in a highly incendiary way, as opposed to presenting basic facts and information in a calm, sober and scholarly fashion. As Azadeh Moaveni makes clear in her review for the New York Times: "Given the current attitudes in Washington about Iran, it seems Coughlin's book has arrived one administration too late." Coughlin is wildy out of step with the times and I hope book sales reflect people's weariness of fearmongering demagogues.

Coughlin repeats the Bush melodrama of Absolute Good vs. Absolute Evil, with little appreciation for the subtlety and nuance reality actually demands. I suggest you read Moaveni's review in the NYT entitled "Most Fundamentalist" for a more detailed picture and cataloguing of Coughlin's many rudimentary mistakes, omissions and outright lies.

I myself am writing a PhD on contemporary Iranian politics at one of the UK'S top universities so I do have an idea of what I'm talking about also. If you're interested in reading an insightful and illuminating primer on Iran read Ervand Abrahamian's A History of Modern Iran, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton Studies on the Near East) or Michael Axworthy's Iran: Empire of the Mind: A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day.

Couglin makes spurious and sensationalist claims on the most tendentious and thin of evidence. Please examine the footnotes. Not a single Persian language source and in a self-referential and somewhat Orwellian fashion he refers to his own newspaper articles in order to vindicate his flagrantly baseless assertions.

Couglin is an incredibly suspect figure. In a report published by the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran the sources of 44 articles written by Coughlin about Iran between 29/10/2005 and 10/10/2006 were examined and the following conclusions were made:

* Sources were unnamed or untraceable, often senior Western intelligence officials or senior Foreign Office officials.
* Articles were published at sensitive and delicate times where there had been relatively positive diplomatic moves towards Iran.
* Articles contained exclusive revelations about Iran combined with eye-catchingly controversial headlines.
* The story upon which the headline was based does not usually exceed one line or at the most one paragraph. The rest of the article focused on other, often unrelated, information.

It also should not be forgotten that Coughlin propagated the claim that the Iraqi army could access weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. This was the same claim, later discredited, used in the so-called "dodgy dossier" produced by the British intelligence services. Be wary of anything this man writes!
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Khomeini's Ghost: Iran since 1979, 20 Mar 2009
By Mr. J. F. Farrell "Joe Farrell" (Richmond, London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Khomeini's Ghost: Iran Since 1979

This is generally an easy-to-read account and brings to life the human side of someone who has seemed to be a very distant and austere figure of history. It is very valuable in setting the context of how Khomeini developed his religious and political ethos, including the contribution of external political, social and economic forces. But its broad sweep does leave the book lacking in sufficient detail with the inevitable feeling emerging that all is not quite as written. Editing is a bit sloppy with unnecessary repetitions in event sequencing and some bad grammar. Nevertheless a good account as an introduction.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A good, journalistic account of a highly controversial figure, 5 Sep 2009
By Philip Hurst (Seville, Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
First, I am giving this book 5 stars because in part I want to refute and counterbalance the highly disparaging and at times badly written review shown here on Amazon giving this book one star. That critic surely has an axe to grind, and has ground it very loudly indeed. Coughlin is a London-based journalist, and his book is consistent with his profession. It's not an academic treatise, but there's merit in that. Nor does he get bogged down in the minutiae of theological disputes, as many authors on Iran do. He takes a difficult and controversial subject, a man who was himself an extremely difficult personality, around whom all manner of myths and mystique have grown up or been created, and deals with him fairly dispassionately, or at least as dispassionately as it it reasonable to be when confronted by the single-minded zealotry and cruelty of the subject. As a concise review of Khomeini's life and his political activity and significance I found the book helpful. The real lesson of the book is contained in its title: how the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini continues to resonate through Iran and the Middle East today, 20 years after the old man's death. One only has to read of the many and varied appeals to the "Imam's" legacy on the part of the various factions contending the presidential elections earlier this summer to see how significant, how central, Khomeini (and his ghost) remain in Iranian political life.

I found, however, that it was sometimes difficult to work out what year Coughlin was talking about: he says that a certain event took place in "April" but I then had to search for some contextual reference to determine in April of what year it happened.
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