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.



Rising Seas and Shifting Sands Attack Ancient Alexandria from Below 

A view of buildings on the corniche in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt, April 20, 2025. (Reuters)
A view of buildings on the corniche in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt, April 20, 2025. (Reuters)
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Rising Seas and Shifting Sands Attack Ancient Alexandria from Below 

A view of buildings on the corniche in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt, April 20, 2025. (Reuters)
A view of buildings on the corniche in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt, April 20, 2025. (Reuters)

From her ninth-floor balcony over Alexandria's seafront, Eman Mabrouk looked down at the strip of sand that used to be the wide beach where she played as a child.

"The picture is completely different now," she said. The sea has crept closer, the concrete barriers have got longer and the buildings around her have cracked and shifted.

Every year 40 of them collapse across Egypt's second city, up from one on average a decade ago, a study shows.

The storied settlement that survived everything from bombardment by the British in the 1880s to attacks by crusaders in the 1160s is succumbing to a subtler foe infiltrating its foundations.

The warming waters of the Mediterranean are rising, part of a global phenomenon driven by climate change. In Alexandria, that is leading to coastal erosion and sending saltwater seeping through the sandy substrate, undermining buildings from below, researchers say.

"This is why we see the buildings in Alexandria being eroded from the bottom up," said Essam Heggy, a water scientist at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the study published in February describing a growing crisis in Alexandria and along the whole coast.

The combination of continuous seawater rises, ground subsidence and coastal erosion means Alexandria’s coastline has receded on average 3.5 meters a year over the last 20 years, he told Reuters.

"For many people who see that climatic change is something that will happen in the future and we don’t need to worry about it, it’s actually happening right now, right here," Heggy said.

The situation is alarming enough when set out in the report - "Soaring Building Collapses in Southern Mediterranean Coasts" in the journal "Earth's Future". For Mabrouk, 50, it has been part of day-to-day life for years.

She had to leave her last apartment when the building started moving.

"It eventually got slanted. I mean, after two years, we were all ... leaning," she told Reuters. "If you put something on the table, you would feel like it was rolling."

BARRIERS, BULLDOZERS, CRACKS

Egypt's government has acknowledged the problem and promised action. Submerged breakwaters reduce coastal wave action and truckloads of sand replenish stripped beaches.

Nine concrete sea barriers have been set up "to protect the delta and Alexandria from the impact of rising sea waves," Alexandria's governor, Ahmed Khaled Hassan, said.

The barriers stretch out to sea, piles of striking geometric shapes, their clear curves and lines standing out against the crumbling, flaking apartment blocks on the land.

Authorities are trying to get in ahead of the collapses by demolishing buildings at risk.

Around 7,500 were marked for destruction and 55,000 new housing units will be built, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a crowd as he stood on one of the concrete barriers on July 14.

"There isn't a day that passes without a partial or complete collapse of at least one building that already had a demolition order," Madbouly said.

Some are hopeful the measures can make a difference.

"There are no dangers now ... They have made their calculations," coffee shop owner Shady Mostafa said as he watched builders working on one of the barriers.

Others are less sure. Alexandria's 70-km (45-mile) long coastal zone was marked down as the most vulnerable in the whole Mediterranean basin in the February report.

Around 2% of the city's housing stock – or about 7,000 buildings – were probably unsafe, it added.

Every day, more people are pouring into the city - Alexandria's population has nearly doubled to about 5.8 million in the last 25 years, swollen by workers and tourists, according to Egypt's statistics agency CAPMAS. Property prices keep going up, despite all the risks, trackers show.

Sea levels are rising across the world, but they are rising faster in the Mediterranean than in many other bodies of water, partly because the relative shallowness of its sea basin means it is warming up faster.

The causes may be global, but the impacts are local, said 26-year-old Alexandria resident Ahmed al-Ashry.

"There's a change in the buildings, there's a change in the streets," he told Reuters.

"Every now and then we try to renovate the buildings, and in less than a month, the renovations start to fall apart. Our neighbors have started saying the same thing, that cracks have started to appear."