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Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. By Michael Axworthy. Allen Lane; 496 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

“SLEEP easily, Cyrus, for we are awake,” assured Iran’s last shah, Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, speaking at the tomb of his imperial ancestor in 1971. This staged event helped forge the myth that the Pahlavis were an adored monarchy stretching back millennia to the Achaemenid empire, a claim to which the shah clung dearly. Yet in less than a decade his embittered people had delivered his throne into the hands of an obscure Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. James Buchan’s elegant “Days of God”, which came out last November, focused on how all this came to pass. Now Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat and director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at Exeter University, goes over much of the same ground and explains how the Islamic republic has survived.

The shah’s gaudy fete at Persepolis, not far from Cyrus’s tomb, held to celebrate the monarchy’s 2,500th birthday, epitomised a half-century of montazh (from the French montage): a succession of flashy buildings and self-congratulatory statues which helped to conceal the dislocations of a society on fast-forward. Construction faltered for lack of cement; many of Iran’s ports became clogged with shiploads of imports. The minister of the shah’s court, driving through Tehran in his Chrysler Imperial in 1969, noticed dingy side streets with “not an ounce of asphalt”. Lashing out at the grandiose party at Persepolis, Ali Shariati, an Iranian leftist writer, denounced 5,000 years of deprivation and social injustice. Khomeini, then in exile in Iraq, thundered for the first time that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy.

A hodgepodge of Marxists and other leftists allied themselves at first to the religious fundamentalists in common cause against the shah, inspiring Iranian students, in particular, to rise up against his rule. Within a few years, though, the left had lost out to Shia Islamic political groups that were, Mr Axworthy writes, “more flexible, more charismatic, more in tune wit