Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam »

Con Coughlin, one of Britain's leading journalists, is the executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph and a world-renowned expert on the Middle East. He is the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Saddam: His Rise and Fall. He appears regularly on television and radio in the United States, and has been a frequent political commentator on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic Monthly. He lives in London, England.

In February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran after nearly fifteen years in exile and received a hero's welcome. Just as the new world order sought to purge the communist ideologies of the Cold War, the religious doctrine of Islamic fundamentalism emerged to pose an even greater threat to post-Iron Curtain stability-and Khomeini would mastermind it into a revolution.

Khomeini's Ghost is the account of how an impoverished young student from a remote, area of southern Iran became the leader of one of the most dramatic upheavals of the modern age, and how his radical Islamic philosophy now lies at the heart of the modern-day conflict between Iran and the West. Con Coughlin draws on a wide variety of Iranian sources, including religious figures who knew and worked with Khomeini both in exile and in power.

Both compelling and timely, Khomeini's Ghost is essential reading for a anyone wishing to understand what lies at the center of many of the world's most intractable conflicts.

Publishers Weekly

Coughlin (Saddam) offers a serviceable biography of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989), a brief history of his reign and an even briefer history of Iran in an account that is regrettably taciturn on his continuing influence. The author provides ample evidence that the ayatollah's agenda was always radical, though Khomeini chose to downplay it before the revolution; Coughlin says that, in fact, Khomeini "[stole] the revolution from beneath the nose of the very people who had brought him to power," in great part through the creation of the Revolutionary Guards. Coughlin details the bloody chaos that followed the revolution, and the ensuing decades of bloodshed, but what goes unremarked might be the most astonishing detail of all: in spite of chaos, war and a dictatorship to rival that which they had overthrown, the Iranian people clearly loved, and continue to love, the imam. Coughlin places great emphasis on the Iranian commitment to exporting the revolution and achieving nuclear capabilities, and American and Israeli concerns about both, but doesn't always give all the necessary information about the give and take between the countries, the political forces within Iran or why Khomeini's ideology struck a chord for so many. (Mar.)

Map x

Introduction xii

Part 1 Origins

1 Stealing the Revolution 3

2 Child of the Revolution 32

3 To Be a Mullah 58

4 Living in Exile 88

5 The Ayatollah Returns 115

Part 2 Legacy

6 The Revolution Unveiled 149

7 Taking on the World 181

8 The Legacy Defined 209

9 The Global Brand 239

10 Rogue Regime 278

11 In Search of the Apocalypse 307

12 The Clenched Fist 341

Notes 371

Select Bibliography 385

Index 390