Full Reviews of Tales of Two Cities

Foreign Affairs (July/August 1996)

Memoirs of politicians are now commonplace in the Middle East, but it is rare to find a memoir by an independent thinker, which is candid and revealing. Perhaps it takes the wrenching experience of exile to open the way for such an intimate portrait as that sketched by Milani. With remarkable candor and sensitivity, he describes his life in Iran as a member of a well-to-do family and recounts how he turned to leftist politics, ended up in the shah's prison, and then tried to come to terms with the Islamic revolution. Finally, in 1986 he left his homeland, disillusioned by the Khomeini period, which had turned out to be at least as repressive as that of the shah. The reader will not find here deep insights into the high politics of Iran, but rather a wealth of insights into Iranian society and culture. Along the way Milani also makes acute observations about American society. Return to top of page
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (Spring 1998)

Abbas Milani grew up in Tehran in the 1950s, studied in the San Francisco Bay area, joined the radical student movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and returned to Iran in 1975 to teach and to fight against the shah. Within two years of his arrival, Milani was arrested and imprisoned. These facts constitute the material of a fascinating story. Fortunately, Milani, an accomplished writer, tells it well. His book is an engaging memoir of his boyhood, cultural challenges, political repression, and exile.

The book consists of several parts. The first deals with the author's birth in 1948 and continues with his years of childhood, including descriptions of customs and rituals then practiced. In discussing Norouz, the Persian New Year, the author describes shab-e chaharshanbeh suri (night before the last Wednesday of the year), spring cleaning, haft sin, wearing new clothing, receiving gifts, and visits to relatives and friends. Other traditions cited include rawzeh-khani, fasting, grieving, flagellation, and setting the effigy of 'Umar on fire. He also recounts his ordeal of circumcision at the age of twelve and the celebration of the event by the entire family. This section of the book is a lexicon of rituals not readily available in English.

The chapter entitled "Prometheus Bound" begins with his departure for America in 1964 when he was sixteen years old. In this chapter, he gives us a glimpse of his eleven-year stay in California and his introduction to the radical politics of the 1960s in Berkeley. "Bobby Seale and Huey Newton gave me my first taste of radicalism," he says. In 1968, when Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement were already history, he joined "a burgeoning movement of Iranian students fighting the Shah." His circles of friends, he tells us, were inspired by Mao's Cultural Revolution. The most important political activity that he divulges to us, however, is his participation in a two-year study of "how Mao's theories about what he had called 'semi-feudal, semi-colonial' societies applied to Iran."

The next part is an account of his return to Iran in 1975, his commencement of teaching at the National University, his contact with a young man named Hamid, and his entree into clandestine life. As an indication of his initial ambivalence, he failed to show up for his first two appointments with Hamid. He admits that he placed ~his life in the hands of a man he hardly knew, "save that he had entered Iran covertly, lived underground, and was fighting against the regime." As for his own political activities, he says, "We met regularly, never for longer than a couple of hours. We walked in crowded streets as we talked. We exchanged what news we had, exaggerating any indication of struggle against the regime and belittling all ominous portents." In the meantime, after receiving Hamid's approval, he infiltrates the inner circle of the monarchy as he participates in a "think tank," organized by the minister of education, and becomes a ghostwriter for the empress.

The next section, in which the author recounts his arrest by the secret police (Savak), detention in the komiteh headquarters, interrogation, public trial, plea-bargaining, imprisonment, pardon, and eventual release, is particularly captivating and informative. His account of prison life and culture, including the daily routine, organization of cells as communes, and colorful glimpses of the behavior of future political figures such as Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, provide much original data for scholars. While recounting his concession in the plea bargain (he agreed not to criticize the regime during the trial in return for the promise to be released in a year), Milani complains, "When the mass media reported my testimony in court, they turned what had been a plea for constitutional rights into an oration in praise of the king."

Tales of Two Cities, is original, informative, and entertaining. It was hard to put down the book once I began reading it. The work contains a number of wonderful insights about Iran and Iranians. The section dealing with Persian rituals provides those unable to read Persian with a unique source, full of interesting and graphic details. The section on Milani's arrest and imprisonment makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the darker side of contemporary political history. It is vivid, balanced, and illuminating as it complements the translation of the work of Bozorg Alavi by Donne Raffat, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1985), and Ihsan Naraqi, From Palace to Prison: Inside the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994). While Alavi recounts prison life during the rule of Reza Shah, and Naraqi describes prison life during the Islamic Republic, Milani discloses his experience during the rule of Muhammad Reza Shah. In addition to Iran specialists, thousands of Iranians who participated in the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s will find this section of interest. They will find many points with which to agree and disagree.

The book could have been significantly strengthened by the expansion of sections dealing with the political activities of the author. There is an imbalance between topics on which Milani is extremely forthcoming and those on which he is silent. For example, the book contains abundant intimate detail of the author's private life, as well as that of his family. However, the reader interested in this memoir precisely because of the author's background will be disappointed to find so little about his own political life. The author himself whets the appetite of the reader for details of his anti-government activities in the United States. In describing his arrival at Tehran airport after graduation, Milani states, "Frightened by the prospect that my name might be on the list, I had not told my family the time of my arrival. For the same precautionary reasons, Fereshteh, . . . the woman whom I was soon to marry, stood in a different line, a little further back."

Milani is even more reticent regarding his political activities after his return to Iran. The one subversive deed he reveals to the reader is his long walks with Hamid during which they exchanged political news. It is only after his arrest and during interrogation that we learn-- not from the author, but from the interrogator-- that he had taken a trip two weeks earlier to the city of Kermanshah, "then a hotbed of radical Kurdish activity." Moreover, it is after a suitcase full of documents is opened in front of him in the interrogation room that he admits to the reader, "I recognized the pamphlets and leaflets we had written against the shah and his regime." Nowhere in the book does he reveal the name of his political organization. Instead, he refers to it as our "circle" or the "opposition." The reader is, therefore, left with a series of obvious questions. Why was he arrested? What was the nature of his political activity? Was he punished for his beliefs or for his deeds? What was the cause for which he had risked his liberty, if not his life? It is the answers to these questions that enable the reader to better understand the political context of this era and to make a more informed evaluation of the conduct of the former regime and its agencies.

The book has a few factual errors. For example, Abbas Gholi Golshaiyan was not "one of the principal signatories to a controversial agreement of 1954." That agreement was negotiated and signed by Dr. Ali Amini, Golshaiyan's name is associated with the Golshaiyan-Gas agreement of 1949 that was never ratified by the Majlis. The book could have also been strengthened by an index, which would enable the general reader and researchers to access the wealth of information available in this work.

In spite of the shortcomings listed, I recommend this book highly to academics interested in social and political development, as well as to the general reader in the Iranian-American community. It fills a void in the English language dealing with the life and thoughts of Iranian intellectuals in pursuit of their political ideals. Return to top of page

Kirkus Reviews (December 15, 1995)

An exceptional, emotionally blooded memoir of a young man's life in modern Iran-viewed from the perspective of his self-chosen exile. Milani, born to a well-off family in Tehran in 1948, was sent to the US at age 15 to be educated. He returned to a teaching job in 1975 only to be imprisoned under the shah's regime two years later. Milani departed for good in 1986, having suffered a broken marriage and physical symptoms of stress and depression that had everything to do with the country's climate of political ugliness. Any book chronicling these experiences would be interesting; that this one turns out to be a breathtaking example of the quiet, selfless gorgeousness of the memoirist's art is the reader's good fortune. Milani offers classically ordered writing about character, place, and time. Contemporary Tehran is described as 'an overcrowded, densely polluted, dangerously stratified, economically hyped, architecturally schizoid, dust-ridden modern metropolis.' The author's youth was 'contaminated with religion.' Best are the descriptions of childhood-the psychologically complex parents behind the beards and veils; blackly comic musings about shortages of Ramadan pastries; circumcision at age 15 ('It's nothing,' his friends tell him. 'They just cut off half your dool'). But the entire memoir is infused with the perversity, nightmarishness, and occasional strange sweetness of growing up amid religious rule and ritual. The book has a few flaws. Long excurses on Iranian politics veer off into abstractness, and the author seems unable to outgrow a certain coyness when writing about women (for whom, it must be said, he has an admirable regard). But this is a tale on whose every word readers will hang. Is exile-with its nuances of time, space, grief, loss, and the human comedy-the most reliable progenitor of literary beauty? This book would support that theory." Return to top of page
Library Journal (February 1, 1996)

Milani, an expatriate Iranian professor, has written an intersting memoir. The son of a prosperous family, Milani was sent oversaes to be educated. He lived in Oakland, California in the 1960s where he listened to political sermons by Bobby Seale, participated in anti-Shah demonstrations, and studied Maosim. Returning to Iran in the 1970s, he taught at the National University until his anti-Shah activites led to his imprisonment. While in prison, he discovered that prisoners segregated themselves by ideology, the imprisoned religious opponents of the regime wanting no interaction with the imprisoned secular opponents--an ominous taste of what would come after the Islmaic revolution. Freed before the revolution, Milani returned to teaching until the pressures exerted on freedom of thougt by the Shi'ite clerics regime became intolerable, and Milani fled Iran. A great deal of information about Iran is contained in this volume, form the Shi'ite clerics' obsession with hierarchy to Iranians' favorite conspiracy theories explaining the foreces behind Iran's Islamic revolution. Return to top of page
Middle East Journal (Winter 1997)

Autobiography is not a well-established genre in Iran. The value of privacy in Iranian life is strong ennugh to make the personal memoir a sensitive and embarassing phenomenon. Still the appeal of some of Iran's greatest writers (Sadeq Hedayat, Foruq Farrokhzad) has often derived from their emotional intimacy. In the period of introspection which followed the 1979 Islamic revolution, autobiographical experiments became popular, perhaps based on the belief that an understanding of individual lives would help explain the historical surprises that characterized Iran's recent past. The power of Abbas Milani's personal memoir comes from the fact that it is a dialogue between his personal experience and major historical events.

Milani was raised in Iran, educated in California, and imprisoned by the Pahlavi regime in 1977. Milani's earliest memories are personal and introspective. They are an account of his household in a then-quiet neighborhood of Tehran, a block away from the American Embassy. With his emphasis on the events that mould a child's values, his book seems at first of the genre of Sara Suleri's memories of a Lahore childhood in "Meatless Days," or, Edwar Kharrat's Alexandria novels, where style is an imporlant element of the memories, the transformation of the author's past into language. Perhaps because they are targeted at an American audience, Milani's memories of childhood, though often artful, are the least convincing part of the book. In the early episodes he does not quite find his voice, but remains suspended between an Olympian seholarly tone -- which handles the culture with sterilized tweezers ("Philosophers have said writing is a pharmakon, a cure and a curse....The same came be said of religion in Iran" [p. 59]; "shiism, in principle, denigrates joy" [p. 63]) -- and moments of personal rage aghainst the sometimes hypocritical restrictions, emotinal and physical, imposed in the name of religion on a child's daily life.

Milani's insightful observations become apparent in later chapters, after he has established a tension between two cultures (both in flux) which gives him a narrative edge. The scenes he describes of his experiences as a student, in Oakland and Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, discovering American culture and watching it go through profound changes, are powerful and captivating. There are not many convincing accounts of the various activist groups in those days, the influence of which nurtuted Milani's early political commitment. He describes his own anti-Shah Maoist cell with a skeptical sometimes bemused tone, clearly sympathetic to the clarity of goals and the energy of those idealistic social experiments. His book is a major contribution to the history of American radicalism -- and of the mosaic of political movcrnents which agitated against Shah Reza Pahlavi. Milani's return to Iran, in 1975, is occaison for an even more gripping sequenece, wherein his Western values face conflicting social and political pressures. He becomes a respected teacher at the National University and enough of an insider to join a royalist think-tank. At the same time, he joins an underground anti-Pahlavi cell. In 1977, apparently for that reason (although one gathers that the charges are never made either forthrightly or explicitly), he ends up in Evin Prison.

His observations of the details of prison life provide the most effective moments of the book. They are meausured, impersonal, free of self-pity, and precisely foscused. Milani was, if hardship can lend such privilege, a privileged observer of historic events. (His portraits of some notorious inquisitors are more observant and convincing that are those of Reza Baraheni, who sketches some of the same individuals in his 1976 prison peoms published in English as Shadow of God). Even more important, however, are Milani's sketches of fellow prisoners who later become major players in the Islamic government. Milani treats them with the respect of a secular observer, an indiginous anthropologist honestly puzzled by their power and respectful of ther enforced separation from their scular inmates in prison. The portraits of the ayatollahs Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, Husayn 'Ali Montazeri and Sayyid Kazam Shariatmadari are deeply etched and memorable. Milani's meditation on 'Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (which begins with the unanticipated but relevant detail that men whose beard is sparse, with the physiognomy of what is called a kuseh, are ordinarily treated with suspicion in Persian culture) juxtaposes personal observations with those of a political scientist. Milani's meditation catches the mysterious, mesmerizing and inexplicable quality of political charisma. His elaborate description of a public prayer in the courtyard of Evin prison, which he watches from the barred window of his cell, straining to pick out who assumes the ranking position, based on body language cues and positioning in the line, is one of those rare moments when ritual and the forces of history magically overlap.

Throughout the memoir, Milani marks meticulously the dates of his personal history, so readers can see the historical record unfolding side by side with the individual one. ("The gate opened, and with a strange sense of hesitation and exhileration, I walked to freedom. The Islamic Revolution was a little more than a year away" [pp. 187-88]). It is that interplay between the personal and the political that makes this such a successful book. Milani has the authority of someone who has witnessed historical events and been chastened by the sight.

Tne opening chapter, particularly effictive in rereading, describes Milani at Mehrabad Airport in l986) ahout to leave Iran permanently. He mentions in passing that he carries with him paintings; by Parviz Kalantari, an Iranian artist, who drove him to the airport. Those who read library copies of Tales of Two Cities will miss one of Kalantari's paintings beautifully reprodued on the dust jacket. It shows the rickety skyscrapers of a Western city in the background, and a traditional mud-brick village in the foreground, inscribed mysteriously on the chador of a reclining woman. Overhead is a man in a Western suit, briefcase in hand, hanging from a rainbow-colored airplane -- a portrait of the exile. It is a miniature of the world that the book presents in narrative form.

There are memoirs of uneventful lives that are important for aesthetic reasons, and there are important memoirs for which the justification is primarily historical. Milani's memoirs is a combination of both. It establishes a compelling equilibrium of a privilaged witness to the mysterious, capricious and impersonal antics if history. Return to top of page

The Oregonian (May 19, 1996)

Portland writer Terence O'Donnell, who lived in Iran from 1957 to 1972, wrote "The Garden of the Brave in War" about his experiences there. Of that book, which was first published in 1980, The New York Times wrote, "Mr. O'Donnell explains more about the cultural context in which we must understand lran than any other modern writer about the Middle East." He met with Abbas Milani author of a newly published memoir about Iran, "Tales of Two Cities" (Mage, $24.95), when Milani was in Portland last week.

I expected my interview with Abbas Milani to be brief, for after reading his book, I did not expect to entirely like him. As it turned out, we talked for nearly five hours, and at the end I was sorry to see him leave.

Milani is a dark man in several senses of the word-his appearance, for one. He's darker complexioned than most Iranians- the color of wheat is their ideal. His eyes and hair are black as black can be, his attire muted, gray to black, his voice so low I sometimes failed to catch what he said.

The very way he sat in a chair, so often hunched forward, head down was as though he was bearing a burden, a burden of sadness, it seemed to me. Though this was a kind of credential, too-for, after all, the ruthless, the venal, the shallow are seldom, if ever, sad.

As we drank our tea in the Iranian way, from little glasses in silver holders, stirring in the sugar with tiny, silver spoons, Milani talked about his life and his book. Born in 1948 into an upper-class Tehran family, he, like the children of many such families, was sent abroad at an early age to study, in his case at 15 and to Berkeley, Calif. He remained for 10 years, acquiring along the way some Marxist notions as well as a Ph.D. at the university.

So equipped, Milani returned to Iran in 1975, determined to put his Marxist principles into practice by helping in the overthrow of the shah and his government. Instead Milani himself was overthrown, imprisoned by the government for the political beliefs he expressed as a professor at Tehran University.

After his release, and the revolution he so ardently desired, Milani returned to the university only to find that the rule of the mullahs was even more repressive than that of the shah's, repressive not only politically, as with the shah, but culturally.

Profoundly disillusioned, fired from his job, estranged from his wife, now in poor health, broken in both body and mind, Milani fled, returning to the United States in 1986. It has been a kind of refuge for him, for which he is grateful, but in some respects he finds this a cold place.
"Do you belong anywhere?" I asked. "No," he replied.

Now chair of a social science department in a small California college, Milani lives with his young son, Hamid, who, he writes, "has often been my only solace." The dark man's tale is a dark one, indeed. But that is not to dismiss him. After all, many of our greatest tales are dark.

Still, there are aspects of Milani's darkness that I question and that before I met him made me wonder if I would like him. In his account of his childhood, for example, he misrepresents Iranian life by generalizing about that life from the particulars of what he confessed to me had been a most unhappy childhood.

Are Iranian children generally considered "nuisances"? Really? Was he - and other Iranians, too, he implies - "contaminated" by Islam? Shia Islam admittedly is a rather somber faith and, like Christianity and Judaism, has its maniacal fundamentalists. But to call Islam a contaminant would, in the view of most, be a judgment overly harsh.

Also, Milani claims to have grown up in a viciously anti-Semitic environment, again, it seems to me, generalizing from a particular hardly typical. In my 15 years in Iran, I heard exactly one expression of anti-Semitism. I wish I could say the same for my past 15 years here in my own country. These, then, are a few examples, and there are others, in Milani's account of his childhood that, at least from my experience in Iran, do not ring true.

The same cannot be said of Milani's account of his adult years in Iran, and it is here that the virtues of his book lie. His description of Tehran in the 1970s-the boom, the vulgarity, the collapsing infrastructure (moral as well as physical), the deluge of bewildered immigrants from the countryside - all this might well describe what has happened in many a Third World capital. Likewise, his reflections on revolution, in general and on the Iranian revolution in particular, are very impressive.

Then there is his account of prison life, the plain, almost stark prose setting off the horrific events and circumstances vividly. Finally, there is the extraordinary analysis of the Ayatollah Khomeini, stereotyped in the West as nothing but a fanatical ogre but in fact a figure of stature and complexity, as Milani so aptly shows.

Curiously-or perhaps diplomatically-Milani has little to say of American activity in Iran, our accomplishments, and there were some, or of our meddling, of which there was a great deal. For example, he chooses not to remind us that although the Iranians occupied our embassy for nearly two years, we in effect occupied their whole country for more than two decades, first by disposing of Dr. Mossadegh, one of the few political figures Iranians have ever admired, followed by our calling the tunes for the shah to pipe.

In general, it is probably a good idea for the reviewer of a book to talk to its author. But there can be a problem. If the reviewer finds that he likes the author, the reviewer may be reluctant to fault the book. And thus it is with reluctance that I must confess to finding "Tales of Two Cities" a book of virtues but also one of serious flaws.

Our nearly five hours came to an end, and we put aside the little tea glasses in their silver holders. In the Iranian way I walked Abbas Milani out to the street, where he caught a cab. We said good-bye, wishing each other well. Return to top of page
San Francisco Chronicle (April 21, 1996)

Like many exiles, Piedmont writer Abbas Milani has what he calls a "bifurcated mind." "Half of what I write is in Persian, half of what I think is in Persian," the author of Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir said recently at The Chronicle.

His 16-year-old son, Hamid, who has lived in the East Bay since he was 7, says that Milani doesn't understand what a teenager needs in order to cope in this country. "It's true," Milani, the product of a strict, oldworld Persian upbringing, says ruefully.

But because he attended high school in Oakland, Milani has an advantage over his friends. "Some of my son's interests I share. I like baseball; I followed it long before Hamid did. And I knew who Joe Montana was. Most of my generation of exiles know none of these things." Though he was jailed by the Shah of Iran and threatened by the mullahs, one of the most dramatic moments in his consistently dramatic and moving memoir comes when the 15yearold Milani is suddenly uprooted from his friends and family and sent to America.

"A Western education was a hope of every Iranian student and the fate of almost all children of the upper classes," he writes. "Yet I was hurled into my fate with little premonition and almost no preparation." The boy who "had never so much as walked without a chaperone to my school, only a few short blocks away from our house" suddenly found himself on his own in a strange country.

"It's true, I had a brother living here," Milani says, "but after two days I was on my own in an apartment in Oakland. Sometimes I think that's not a very kind way of treating a child, but I've never delved into it. Maybe it's too painful. People now tell me that under normal circumstances, this would be considered child abuse."

At the University of California at Berkeley, Milani fell under the spell of Marxism and actively worked against the shah both here and back in Iran, where he returned after receiving his Ph.D. in political science (he is now the chair of the Department of Social Sciences at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont). Looking back, Milani remembers himself and his friends in the student movement as "the worst conceivable kind of Marxists. We weren't progressive or openminded; we were prudish Maoists. That's as bad as you can get. I don't have the stomach for that kind of elite, hierarchical, cliquish politics anymore."

In fact, Milani lost his taste for that kind of activism after his stint in the shah's prison. And, he now believes, though he lived through some hairy moments under the Ayatollah Khomeini, he was ultimately saved because of his refusal to engage in any active opposition. "There was a time they were coming after all the old political prisoners. I was lucky," he says. "They could arrest you for having a drink, for talking to a woman who was not your wife who wasn't wearing a veil, and for having certain books in your home-all of which I did." He also spoke on subjects others wouldn't touch at the university where he taught.

Though Milani didn't realize it at the time, he now thinks that life under the mullahs is much worse than it was under the shah. "The most important difference -and I wasn't wise enough to know it at the time-is that though we didn't have political freedom under the shah, we had cultural freedom." Now people roam the streets of Iran whose sole purpose is to make sure that women are appropriately attired -and makeupfree-and that unmarried men and women are not seen together in public.

"The worst thing in regimes like the one in Iran is the random terror," Milani says. "You don't know whether you're outside the bounds of what is acceptable or not. But there are two saving graces for the Iranian people. The clerics are splintered into warring factions and have never been able to form a unified coalition. And they are very corrupt: If you have money you can buy medicine or even freedom. A good friend in Iran told me that for the first time in his life he saw the virtues of a corrupt regime- it gives you breathing room."

One of the most striking, and saddest, things about Milani's memoir is the number of people he knew who were executed by this regime. "From 1979-when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power-to 1990, about 30,000 people were killed for political crimes," he says. "And that's a conservative estimate. If you consider how small Iran is, and that most of these people were intellectuals or students, the chance of them being your relatives or friends or students is great. So many of my students were killed.

"In '86 when I came back here, I felt I had come close to understanding on an existential level what it meant to be a holocaust survivor. From a society where the terror was constant, I got on a plane, and five hours later, life went on normally. Sometimes I feel guilty for surviving. I think maybe I've done something wrong." Return to top of page

San Francisco Examiner (May 19, 1996)

The first envelope came anonymously, sent from Iran, fragments of a manuscript handwritten in Persian. Over the next few days, more fragments arrived in the mail addressed to Abbas Milani, an Iranian intellectual, writer, translator and former political activist who chairs the Department of History and Political Science at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont.

Eventually, says Milani, he realized it was a novella, and with the final pages there was an unsigned note from the author asking that he translate the manuscript into English and find it a publisher. It was unlikely, the anonymous author said, that it could ever be published in Iran.

And so Milani, who had translated many great books into Persian- Czeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind," the works of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita"- found a publisher for the work he called "King of the Benighted," a more evocative rendering of the author's original title, literally "King of Those Clad in Black." The reference is to a poem by the 12th century Persian poet Nizami of Ganja, the story of a king who visits the land of one of his seven brides to discover why her people always wear black, learns the secret of their grief and becomes king of the benighted.

Milani's found manuscript is the story of an artist who can no longer fill the empty pages that haunt his waking dreams of death and disappearance and the demands of a totalitarian society. And while it is contemporary in tone and technique-its protagonist's memories and experiences unfold like a dream-it is dense with allusions to Persian literary myth and history.

" 'King of the Benighted' is perhaps the tragedy of an artist's life in a society in which both the pillars of the status quo and the ideologues of the opposition wish to use art for their own purposes and deny it aesthetic autonomy," Milani writes. "In societies where oppression stifles free expression . . . a writer like the narrator of 'King of the Benighted,' who is committed to the aesthetic values of his work, can become tragically lonely."

It is a loneliness Milani is likely to have understood too well. Born in Iran in 1948, he grew up in a loving, protective Muslim household in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of pre-oil-boom Tehran and, like so many young Persians of his class, was sent away at 15 to study in the United States. Or, more specifically, in Oakland, where he went to Oakland Tech, then to Merritt College and finally, in 1968, to Berkeley, where-as he writes in a recently published memoir, "Tales of Two Cities" (Mage)-"Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement were already history and I was becoming involved in a burgeoning movement of Iranian students fighting the Shah."

Mao was their hero and Milani, who returned to Iran in 1975 to foment revolution, eventually spent time in prison under the shah, though the terrors of that ordeal were mitigated, he believes, by the fortuitous election of Jimmy Carter, with his human rights platform, as president of the United States.

By the time he was in his middle 30s, Milani had become disillusioned with politics and the Iranian revolution, which had turned against its secular supporters. He lost his teaching job, his marriage was foundering, the war with Iraq was destroying Tehran. "You look around and you see that everything you believed, everything you fought for, has turned out to be a frightening dictatorship," he says.

"I went to a city in the northern part of Iran, close to the Caspian Sea, and there was an enormous crowd of people in this big square and I asked my friend who was an inhabitant of that town what was happening. And he said, 'Oh, yesterday they hung three young men from the electrical poles and some 50,000 people came to watch.' And I thought, 'The heroes of the revolution have driven two or three hours to watch young kids hang?' "

Living with a tension that was destroying his health, worried about his son whose childish drawings were of blood and war, Milani left Iran permanently in 1986 with his wife and their child to return to his second home in the East Bay. "This is where I had roots, connections, memories," he says. He was hired almost immediately at the College of Notre Dame, where he says the Catholic nuns could not have been more supportive and where he is so popular a teacher he won the school's first annual award last year for teaching excellence.

He has not been back to Iran and, though his now ex-wife and many of his friends and siblings are near him in California, his mother died while he was in exile and he has not seen his father in a decade. "It is very difficult to live in exile," he says, though he is quick to add how lucky he feels to live in the Bay Area. "In tolerance and openness I don't think there is anyplace like this in the United States."

One of the most painful things for Iranians living abroad, he says, "is that we have had to pay twice for this Islamic regime. First, we are in exile and second, we are treated as if we are the regime, which we are not."

The essence of exile, he says, is that "you are stripped of your cultural capital. Everything you have learned and accomplished becomes irrelevant." Milani spent so much of his youth in the United States that he has managed to transcend that loss.

But he talks about a group of old Iranians he knows in Los Angeles, "escapees from the revolution who were very important people in Iran, and now they have some money and live in a fancy house, but nobody cares about them. So they have these parties where they call one another by their old titles: General, Doctor, Mr. Engineer. It's so sad, like a scene from Chekhov. Most people do not live in exile because it is something they would have chosen. They live in exile because there is no other choice." Return to top of page

Seattle Times (January 26, 1997)

This Iranian exile's briskly written look at his turbulent native country and his own unsettled life is a genuine eye-opener. Born in 1948, Milani grew up in a prosperous Tehran family and, like many well-to-do Iranians, was sent abroad for his education, ending up at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. There he succumbed to an "intractable utopianism" of the Marxist variety, which he tried to put into action upon his return to Iran in 1975. It landed him in prison, where he was kept company not just by fellow Marxists but by Islamic clerics who in a few years would be leaders of the country.

Milani's shock at Islam rather than Marxism prevailing after the 1979 revolution was profound (he had thought of religion as being, at most, an "insignificant nuisance" in the Iranian political scene). But his shock doesn't stop his portraits of Iran's future leaders born being both informative and fascinating.

As for the repressive Pahlavi regime, with which his family had close connections, Milani reveals that it may well have engineered its own downfall by sending its students abroad for training, creating an unbridgeable four-way gap between corrupt rulers, conservative clergy, a liberal educated elites and a huge, religion-frenzied underclass. The Shah's "ineptitude" at speaking Persian ("He was more articulate . . . in French and English") was typical of the ruling aristocracy's disdain for its own language and culture, Milani observes.

The book contains sharp observations on the volatile dynamics of revolution "a coagulation of private agendas with public grievances" - and is eloquent too on the author's own plight: "Exile is when you live in one land and dream in another." Milani's prose is marred by occasional grammatical errors--where was the copy editor? -- but that doesn't stop this from being a riveting read.
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Small Press Magazine (July 1996)

A fascinating autobiography interwoven with the cultures, religions, philosophies and politics of Iran. In a gripping manner, Milani describes his boyhood in traditional Iran, what it was like to be uprooted from his family and sent to the avant-garde 1960's San Francisco.

In the US, Milani became politically active, and received a Ph.D. in political science. Upon his return to Tehran, he taught at the National University but was soon imprisoned by the Pahlavi regime. After the revolution, he became a professor at Tehran University, but by 1986 his illusions were shattered and he emigrated to the United States. He is now the Chair of the Department of Social Sciences at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California and a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle.

What makes this story intriguing is the author's own insight into his youthful naiveté and painful awakening to what was going on in his beloved Iran. As his story unfolds, the reader is given a unique view of a traditional Persian family and the multi-faceted culture of the country. He shares a personal look at the eruption of a revolution, a painful account of time spent in the Shah's prison, and ties together how all these experiences affected his intimate relationships.

Milani has a comfortable writing style, as though he is communicating with a personal friend. More can be learned about the recent history and politics of Iran and its Islamic Revolution from this personal memoir than from any history book or news report. It will also help the reader uniquely understand why so many have fled Iran and settled in America. Return to top of page
Vancouver Sun (March 30, 1996)

Like many young men of his generation from Iran's educated classes, Abbas Milani, now a professor at a liberal arts college in California, was sent abroad for his studies. In Tales of Two Cities he tells how he arrived in early '60s Berkeley as a thoroughly Iranian teenager, speaking a few words of English. He soon lost his virginity to a pretty blond tennis player and generally became caught up in the spirit of the times.

But increasingly, he writes, "inspiration came not from Woodstock but from the dour example of Mao's Cultural Revolution. While the flower children made their pilgrimages to HaightAshbury and Telegraph Avenue in search of higher and higher levels of psychedelic consciousness, my comrades and I congregated every Wednesday in a little bookstore called Yenan, where pictures of Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Marx adorned the walls." Many of these radical "comrades" were the adult children of wealthy Iranians. Despite their privileged backgrounds, their dogmatism was unwavering.

Milani notes wryly how in an ironic twist of political fate, the Shah of Iran sent thousands of students abroad-almost exclusively to the West-hoping that they would return as modernizing technocrats and unaware that "while the Marxist Soviet Union smothered under totalitarianism, it was the West that caught the contagious fever of revolution and Marxist theory." A few years later many of these same students became the revolutionaries who helped overthrow the monarchy.

In 1975 Milani returned to Iran and became involved in underground opposition activities. Simultaneously he was recruited to become part of an "intellectual thinktank" connected to the queen. "I know of no other contemporary regime that was as awed and enamored of intellectuals as the Pahlavi regime," he writes. "The government wooed them desperately, yearned for their political approval, and paid handsomely for their allegiance."

He was eventually arrested, and his stories of torture, imprisonment and revolutionary turmoil say much about the human foibles and complexities that transcend ideology. He shows his middleaged SAVAK interrogator in an almost sympathetic light, at first as a pawn of the regime, abandoned by superiors who fled the country at the dawn of the revolution, and eventually as the scapegoat for a murderous act of arson-allegedly committed by mullahs-for which the revolutionary government has him executed.

Imprisoned in the infamous Evin jail, Milani observes the petty hierarchies inherent even in prison life-mullahs jostle for frontline positions during public prayer, while leftist revolutionaries (kept separate from the clergy who considered them "unclean") bicker over the Marxist implications of comrades who take bigger bites of tightly rationed sandwiches. He writes compellingly of a "comrade" as pure in intention as a 19th century revolutionary hero from a Russian novel who is later betrayed and killed, as well as fellow prisoner who attempts to sexually assault another and after the Revolution becomes the Republic's Minister of Islamic Guidance.

Writing of the dark days of the Iran/Iraq war, when he experienced a midlife crisis, a marriage breakdown and complete disillusionment with his revolutionary idealism, Milani paints powerful portraits of life under siege. He meets a window washer who remains fiercely loyal to "Imam Khomeni" despite the fact that his sons are dying on the frontlines and no medicine is available for his sick children in warrationed Tehran. He encounters a brilliant student, dedicated to the idea of Islamic revolution, who returns from the war with a limb missing and his "innocence abused," and an opportunistic bully who uses the revolutionary ideal for personal gain and is later indicted for graft and corruption.

And he offers deep insight into the mentality of Khomeni, a man Milani claims was so thoroughly absorbed by the mysticism of the "other world" that the fact that thousands of his "opponents" (let alone the youth of his nation) died was of little importance to him. During the initial postrevolutionary "purges," recounts Milani, Khomeni assured the public that those "few" innocents who were unjustly executed should be grateful, as they would go to heaven as "martyrs" of the revolution:

Although Milani addressees the many conspiracy theories concerning Khomeni's rise to power (CIA plot, etc.), he concludes that Khomeni was actually a "mirror" for certain aspects of Iranian society: the Sh'ia tradition of messianic martyrdom, and the taboo against "selfassertion" and the "expected quiet submissiveness" inherent in Iranian culture. (Khomeni was, says Milani, the Messiah, albeit a false one, that many despairing yet fervently believing Iranians waited for.)

Ultimately, Milani recognizes some of these qualities in himself. In a relationship with an American woman in California, he squirms prudishly at her directness and sexual frankness- indeed at her very assertiveness. When the relationship ends, Milani lays part of the blame on cultural differences.

An effective and powerful blend of the personal and political, Milani's memoirs try to create cohesion and meaning from his own fragmented past and Iran's recent tragic history. Return to top of page
World Affairs Council Newsletter

Tales of Two Cities is a cathartic diary of a large, wounded segment of Iranian culture. It is the true story, told in the first person, of an Iranian teenage boy who like thousands of others, was sent to be educated in America. He returns home to his traditional family, a political dictatorship, and eventual political imprisonment where he shares a cell block with the future Iranian President Rafsanjani.

The book grants its reader an understanding of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran that is beyond the realm of traditional Middle Eastern affairs discourse. He reveals the inseparability of his emotions from the political realities in Iran and America, his re-assimilation into Iranian culture upon return, the simultaneous confluence and conflict of Islamic fundamentalism and secularism, both within Milani's own family and within Tehran, and his eventual exile which he describes as, "when you live in one land and dream in another." When wrestling with the complexity of romantic relationships in exile he writes, "In English, we 'fall' in love, whereas in Persian we 'become' in love. One is dangerous and accidental, even serendipitous; the other is transformational and purposeful." Return to top of page