BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran’

THE FALL OF HEAVEN: THE PAHLAVIS AND THE FINAL DAYS OF IMPERIAL IRAN

By Andrew Scott Cooper

Henry Holt, $36, 587 pages

Agrand irony of the Islamic world is that most of the places pointed to as shining examples of high Muslim civilization were formed by centuries of pre-Islamic culture. Moorish Spain had been a center of ancient Roman civilization long before invading Arabs seized it at sword’s point. Tunisia was the site of Rome’s greatest rival, Carthage. Lebanon and its environs were once home to the ancient Phoenicians. Iraq’s pre-Islamic history goes back as far as ancient Babylon, Egypt’s to the age of Pharaohs.

Present-day Iran is successor state to the ancient Persian Empire, arguably the world’s first superpower and a center of high culture, political sophistication, advanced commerce and a remarkable system of underground irrigation. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late — and probably last — Shah of Iran, dreamed of restoring some of that ancient greatness to a country that had grown weak, backward and impoverished under centuries of decadent rulers who crushed their own subjects while being bullied and despoiled by stronger neighbors.

As its title suggests, Andrew Scott Cooper’s “Fall of Heaven” deals in greatest detail with the events leading up to the shah’s downfall and exile in 1979. But it is also the story of his reign and that of his father, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, woven into the greater fabric of modern Iranian history. Mr. Cooper’s work is thoroughly researched and documented; it is also highly readable and does justice to the tragic grandeur of his subject.