The Books Khamenei Loved but Others Shouldn’t Read

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Reuters)
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Reuters)
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The Books Khamenei Loved but Others Shouldn’t Read

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Reuters)
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Reuters)

“Tell me which books you read, and I’ll tell you who you are!” That was how the late Iranian literary critic Mohit Tabatabai used to tease Tehran’s glitterati in the “good old days.” To be sure, the claim wasn’t based on any scientific study but empirical evidence showed that it wasn’t quite off the mark either. Books do offer an insight into the soul of a reader, provided he has a soul.

Thus, those interested in all things Iranian, especially in these exciting times, wouldn’t want to miss a new book on Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei if only because it devotes a chapter to books that he loved as a young man.

The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title “En Ma’a al-Sabr Fathan” (Patience Leads to Victory), but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title “The Drop of Blood That became a Ruby”. The “Supreme Guide” recalls his “passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels” and insists on “the deep impact” that reading novels had on him.

But what novels did the future “Supreme Guide” found especially captivating?

Top of Khamenei’s list are 10 of the cloak-and-dagger novels written by Michel Zevaco, the Corsican-French writer who helped popularize what the English call “penny-dreadful” romances in France.

Zevaco uses a simple formula: taking an historic character or event and fictionalizing it with a dose of page-turning pathos. Zevaco’s world is a universe of sex, violence, conspiracy and betrayal. In his best-selling novel “Borgia”, the head of the dreadful Borgia family that dominated Florentine politics in the medieval times, rapes his own sister Lucrece, a seductive blonde. The novel “Nostradamus” is a fictionalized biography of a roaming charlatan who claimed to read the future to gain money, power, sex and fame.

Zevaco’s most popular novels come in the series known as “Les Paradaillans” of which only two are translated into Persian.

Zevaco was an anarchist who edited the movement’s organ “Les Gueux” (The Beggars) and thus he aims at highlighting the corruption of European ruling classes. Ferocious anti-clerical, Zevaco regards organized religion as “the poison of the masses”. Some of his best writing is about the massacre of Huguenots (Protestant Christians) by the French King Charles IX under the influence of his shrewish mother Catherine of Medicis.

Khamenei’s next favorite novelist is Alexandre Dumas, another spinner of 19th century swashbuckling yarns, including the “Three Musketeers”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, “Twenty Years Later” and, the gripping “Cagliostro” relating the adventures of Joseph Balsamo, another charlatan in search of sex, money and power. Dumas’s work has less sex, revenge and violence than Zevaco, but the two French authors share many similarities, especially when it comes to fast-paced adventures and unexpected reversals of fortune.

Another 19th century French novelist is Maurice Leblanc, best known for his “Arsene Lupin” series about a gentleman thief who robs gentlemen, a classic of escapist literature.

Leblanc’s work shares two features with the works of Zevaco and Dumas. The first is the creation of an alternative world as a fictionalized double for the real one. The second is the central hero’s disdain for codes and norms of established bourgeois morality.

Khamenei says that he also read “almost all Iranian novels” of the period.

At the time of Khamenei’s youth, Persian novel seldom went beyond imitations of French novels of the late 19th century with JK Huysmans, Emile Zola, Hector Malot and Anatole France as favorites.

Because Iranian intellectuals disliked the British, none bothered to translate major English novels until the 1950s and, in the case of American literature, until a decade later. For the average Iranian reader, young men like Khamenei, France was the world’s “Literary Superpower.” Russian literature was also little known, again partly because of Iranian elite’s dislike of Russia as an enemy of Persia for two centuries.

Curiously, all the Iranian novelists of the time Khamenei talks about chose women as central characters at a time that Iranian women were still treated as second class citizens.

Ali Dashti’s novel offers a heroin named “Fitneh” (Sedition) who decides to use her charms to move up the ladder in a world dominated by men.

Muhammad Hejazi’s heroin “Ziba” is equally charming and ruthless in pursuit of a place in a world that tries to shut women out.

Then we have “Shahrashub”(literally: the disturber of peace in the city) the heroin of Hossein-Qoli Mosta’an whose appetite for sex is as keen as that of the main male character Aqa-Bala Khan. Mosta’an’s other popular novel “Rabi’a” also has a woman as central character, but is set in medieval times.

Jawad Fadil’s “Yeganeh” is in a different register, a romantic tear-jerker about star-crossed lovers. But even there, it is the heroin “Yeganeh” (The Unique One) who captains the wayward ship of a forlorn love. Fadil’s second novel, “Sho’eleh” (The Flame), also has a woman as its central character but is more ambitious in literary terms.

Taghi Modaressi’s heroin “Yakolia” in the novel of the same title is the most literary of the works of that period with the added distinction of being set in Biblical times.

The best-selling novel of the latter-end of that period was Muhammad-Ali Afghani’s “Ahu Khanum’s Husband” which launched a nationwide debate on the status of women and was used as material for a feature film and a television series.

Khamenei says he loved and cherished all those books. Ironically, however, all the novels he devoured with great appetite are on a blacklist of books that “corrupt public morality and violate religious values”, established under President Muhammad Khatami in 1999. Iranians who are today the same age as Khamenei was in his youth cannot read the books he loved.



Crops Wither in Sudan as Power Cuts Cripple Irrigation

FILED - 27 August 2024, Sudan, Omdurman: Young people walk along a street marked by destruction in Sudan. Photo: Mudathir Hameed/dpa
FILED - 27 August 2024, Sudan, Omdurman: Young people walk along a street marked by destruction in Sudan. Photo: Mudathir Hameed/dpa
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Crops Wither in Sudan as Power Cuts Cripple Irrigation

FILED - 27 August 2024, Sudan, Omdurman: Young people walk along a street marked by destruction in Sudan. Photo: Mudathir Hameed/dpa
FILED - 27 August 2024, Sudan, Omdurman: Young people walk along a street marked by destruction in Sudan. Photo: Mudathir Hameed/dpa

Hatem Abdelhamid stands amid his once-thriving date palms in northern Sudan, helpless as a prolonged war-driven power outage cripples irrigation, causing devastating crop losses and deepening the country's food crisis.

"I've lost 70 to 75 percent of my crops this year," he said, surveying the dying palms in Tanqasi, a village on the Nile in Sudan's Northern State.

"I'm trying really hard to keep the rest of the crops alive," he told AFP.

Sudan's agricultural sector -- already battered by a two-year conflict and economic crisis -- is now facing another crushing blow from the nationwide power outages.

Since the war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces began in April 2023, state-run power plants have been repeatedly targeted, suffering severe damage and ultimately leaving farms without water.

Like most Sudanese farms, Abdelhamid's depends on electric-powered irrigation -- but the system has been down "for over two months" due to the blackouts.

Sudan had barely recovered from the devastating 1985 drought and famine when war erupted again in 2023, delivering a fresh blow to the country's agriculture.

Agriculture remains the main source of food and income for 80 percent of the population, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Now in its third year, the conflict has plunged more than half the population into acute food insecurity, with famine already taking hold in at least five areas and millions more at risk across conflict-hit regions in the west, center and south.

The war has also devastated infrastructure, killed tens of thousands of people, and displaced 13 million.

A 2024 joint study by the United Nations Development Programme and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) found that nearly a third of rural households have lost irrigation and water access since the war began.

Without electricity to power his irrigation system, Abdelhamid -- like thousands of farmers across the country -- was forced to rely on diesel-powered pumps.

But with fuel scarce and prices now more than 20 times higher than before the war, even that option is out of reach for many.

"I used to spend 10,000 Sudanese pounds (about four euros according to the black market rate) for irrigation each time," said another farmer, Abdelhalim Ahmed.

"Now it costs me 150,000 pounds (around 60 euros) because there is no electricity," he told AFP.

Ahmed said he has lost three consecutive harvests -- including crops like oranges, onions, tomatoes and dates.

With seeds, fertilizers and fuel now barely available, many farmers say they won't be able to replant for the next cycle.

In April, the FAO warned that "below average rainfall" and ongoing instability were closing the window to prevent further deterioration.

A June study by IFPRI also projected Sudan's overall economic output could shrink by as much as 42 percent if the war continues, with the agricultural sector contracting by more than a third.

"Our analysis shows massive income losses across all households and a sharp rise in poverty, especially in rural areas and among women," said Khalid Siddig, a senior research fellow at IFPRI.