Three months after Israel’s attack on Iran—which killed some 1,060 people and badly damaged the country’s nuclear facilities and air defenses—a “human tragedy,” writes Christopher de Bellaigue in the Review’s October 9 issue, “is playing out on the Persian plateau”:

The government that possesses the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and vast oil wealth cannot keep the lights on or the stoves running. Electricity and gas outages have shuttered industrial sites and blighted the lives of ordinary people….

Iran is also running out of water. Five years of drought have reduced some of the country’s biggest reservoirs to shallow ponds, while beneath fields and orchards the water table has dropped because of the excessive use of wells.

And with the eighty-six-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—“the regime’s most important unifying force”—in frail health, many people, “seizing on a pervasive sense of crisis both at home and abroad,…have proposed alternative visions” for the future of Iran.

Below, alongside Bellaigue’s essay, are five articles from our archive about recent history in Iran.

Christopher de Bellaigue
The Ayatollah’s Kingly Woe

The Supreme Leader’s frail health and Israel’s recent attacks have left the Islamic Republic on the brink of paralysis.

Roya Hakakian
Unveiling Iran

From the start, the Islamic Revolution used the compulsory hijab to cement its rule by subordinating women. A wave of civil disobedience is challenging all that.

—March 8, 2021

Eric Randolph
The Bleak Humor of Tehran’s One and Only Standup Comic

“In front of the sizable and unsuspecting crowd that had gathered in the hostel’s café, Ali immediately launched into an explanation of his unremittingly bleak view of life—starting with his certainty that life was pointless and we were all going to hell, forever. ‘There won’t be any revolution or protests in hell,’ he said. ‘No people holding up placards saying, Stop torturing people and Say no to fire.’”

—February 10, 2020

V. S. Naipaul
Tehran Winter

“The city was free, but it remained the Shah’s creation. In the winter of 1980, a year after the revolution, it was still awaiting purpose. To many—like the hotel people gathering to chat in unoccupied, half-serviced rooms, like the man in the ITT-built telephone room sleeping on the floor, as on the desert sand, covered from head to toe by a blanket—to many people the city was still like a camping site.”

—October 8, 1981

People of Iran
An Appeal in Iran

(The following document, which has recently been circulated in Iran, was sent to the editors by an Iranian writer with a request that it be published.)

On the occasion of the commencement of the third year of the revolution, we the undersigned writers and intellectuals of the country feel that it is our duty to go over the record of the past two years under the present leaders of our society and to explore what has happened.

Not only was full use of all the capacities and capabilities of our people not made in the past two years in the direction of social renovation for the benefit of the downtrodden layers of the society, not only was a consistent struggle against imperialism not waged through the extension of democratic rights and liberties; on the contrary, the rights of our people, the new fabric of democratic institutions, and, in practice, all things achieved through the devotion of thousands of martyrs, victims, and invalids have come under numerous attacks.

—June 11, 1981

Reza Baraheni
Terror in Iran

“No historian of the Middle East and Iran will deny that the CIA overthrew the legally elected government of Dr. Mossadeq in August 1953, brought back to the country the Shah, his wife, his brothers and sisters who had run away earlier, and reinstalled the present monarch on the throne. Imagine a more tyrannical and primitive George III being crowned 6,000 miles away by the very descendants of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin with money raised by the American taxpayer. The CIA re-created the monarchy, built up the SAVAK and trained all its prominent members, and stood by the Shah and his secret police as their powerful ally. Iran became the police state it is now.”

—October 28, 1976

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