Word: shah
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...tumult in Tehran's streets suggests that the country's youth will not be quieted for long. More than 60% of Iran's 70 million people are under the age of 30. The oldest were just starting school when the Shah was toppled by Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. Their fathers and uncles were sacrificed to Iraqi missiles and mines in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which claimed more than 300,000 Iranian lives. They have inherited bitter memories and unrelenting strictures, and now the boys want girlfriends with whom they can hold hands and socialize freely...
...State Cinema Institute in 1981 (Afghanistan was then under Soviet control), and a decade later he landed the directorship of the government-run Afghan Film Studio in Kabul. When the Taliban took the city, Barmak fled to the north, where he made documentaries for the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was later assassinated by al-Qaeda. Next he escaped to Pakistan, where he starred in a radio soap opera for Afghan refugees. His moviemaker friends from the studio weren't so lucky. Barmak returned to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, to find his former partners broken...
...Persepolis is told through the eyes of a child. And that is the ideal way for the uninitiated reader to absorb the whiplash of Iran's history. Wide-eyed, Satrapi as a young girl demands an explanation for the crimes of the Shah, and then for the violence of the revolution, and finally for the bombing of her neighborhood during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. The country - and Satrapi and her family - career from one ideology to the next. She is taught from first grade on that God chose the Shah; every time his name is mentioned...
...communists were coming, even though Mossadegh was as anti-Soviet as he was anti-British. On Aug. 19, 1953, after the deaths of about 300 people in street riots, the 71-year-old Premier was overthrown. He was replaced by a retired army general, Fazollah Zahedi. The American-friendly Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had earlier fled the country, returned triumphantly, resumed the throne and reasserted his control...
...Persepolis," she recalls her early obsession with becoming God's new Prophet. Practically personifying her country's sacred-secular struggle, she would decree that their maid could eat at the table with them and that her father's Cadillac would be banned. While her parents demonstrated against the Shah, Satrapi would march around the backyard with her friends, pretending to be Che Guevara. Like Satrapi, I was nine when the Shah fell in 1979. That the so-called "Islamic Revolution" began as a populist revolt that included secular, left-wing socialists is just one of this book's many surprises...