“A well-orchestrated alliance emerged against Iran during last week’s Munich Security Conference. The stage was set by Mike Pence after he called Tehran “the leading state sponsor terrorism,” and accused the Islamic Republic of continuing to “destabilize the Middle East.” Further, to reiterate Trump administration’s dissatisfaction with Obama’s policy toward Iran, he speculated that with “the end of nuclear-related sanctions, Iran now has additional resources to devote to these efforts.”

One after another, representatives of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and, surprisingly, Turkey added their warnings about the rise of the Iranian menace and called for a united front to combat Iranian regional and global ambitions. The Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir told delegates at the conference “Iran remains the single main sponsor of terrorism in the world.” Iran is, he said, “determined to upend the order in the Middle East.” In an act more reminiscent of a scene from a theater of the absurd, the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, declared “Iran had an ultimate objective of undermining Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.” He called for a multilateral dialogue with Sunni Arab states to defeat Iran and its “radical” elements in the region. This was not the first time that the Saudi and Israeli positions on the Middle East security coincided, but the similarities in the way Lieberman and al-Jubeir articulated their grievances against Iran, using the exact same language in listing Iranian transgressions was unprecedented.”

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A major exporter of oil with a large and young population, Iran became the hotbed of revolutionary action in a sequence of dramatic events. The Shah’s regime, which had been installed by U.S. and British spy agencies at the expense of a democratically elected government, was equally replaced by a brutal theocracy whose political aspirations focused solely on its own survival, mostly with the help of imprisonment of all political opponents.In an interview with Readara, author and scholar Behrooz Ghamari, a former political prisoner between 1981 and 1985, recounts his experience of what it was like to be on a death row in a suffocatingly overcrowded prison. Packed with 25,000 other prisoners, Ghamari spent four years in a building with the capacity to contain only 1,200 people, knowing well that any day might prove to be the last. Yet, he never gave up hope. Very few people live to tell the tale under such circumstances, but Ghamari, in an emotional and well-balanced narrative, describes the daily struggles of a group of political prisoners in Tehran’s most infamous prison. Remembering Akbar tells the story of incredible strength, courage, unlikely humor, and, above all, optimism.

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“In August, newly released tapes of a mass execution shone a spotlight on the chaotic and violent years that followed Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, and on the schisms that reshaped the country’s politics during the 1980s. The tapes were released by the family of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who can be heard speaking before the execution. Montazeri, once the presumed successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, became a thorn in the side of the regime as he advocated for prisoner rights. He is also an unseen force in Behrooz Ghamari’s timely novel, Remembering Akbar, a fictionalized prison memoir that evokes the unsettled early 1980s from the perspective of a political prisoner.

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Laced through with dark humour and moments of humanity … Ghamari has crafted a compelling alternate view of history, imbuing a narrative often framed as inevitable with uncertainty and tension.”

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