Understanding why Iran is like nowhere on Earth

Death and transfiguration through the ages

The transformation of King Charles I

Say what you like about Roundheads and Cavaliers, if Charles I of Great Britain and Ireland had not been executed, the world would be a very different place today. Or it wouldn’t. “Missing the bus” is ripe territory for what if’s, because you know that you would have been where you were going on time. Never mind, we so often say, even when we do mind. But there are many what if’s where we cannot be so certain what the outcome would have been. In Islam, that is called zannah.

Charles I, the second son of James I of England and VI of Scotland, was born a Catholic in Dunfermline, died a Protestant in London, believed in the divine right of kings and resisted the idea of constitutional monarchy. He fought a Civil War, lost and was executed. And 12 years after the founding of the republic, it all seemed a waste of time. His son succeeded him in any case.

This period of history is well known. It’s not as oft recited as the World Wars, or Victorian Progress, or the rivalry between James I & VI’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, and her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, but it’s well known. Well-known enough to have engendered tropes and myths—potted schoolday truths that we carry with us through life in order to shout out the answers at TV quiz shows or impress friends with our historical knowledge at the moment juste: Walter Raleigh laying down his cape for the queen, Alfred burning the cakes, Harold with an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings.

So it is with Charles I. The king was played laconically by Alec Guinness in Ken Hughes’s 1970 film Cromwell, with a good, if not utterly convincing, Scottish accent. Guinness had had a shot at a somewhat rougher, Glasgow accent in Tunes of Glory in 1960 and dallied with the smooth Arabic accent of Prince Faisal in 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, but Guinness’s accents, while lacking in authenticity, were good enough to tell audiences that Faisal was from Mecca, Jock Sinclair had been locked up in Barlinnie Prison, and Charles I was from Dunfermline. Like all actors, Alec Guinness’s calling was to achieve transformation: from himself, Alec de Cuffe, to the actor Alec Guinness; and from the actor Alec Guinness to the characters that he played, including the king Charles I.

The irony of Charles I being executed for the sole purpose of denying the divine right of kings, only for him to be succeeded a dozen years later by his son, Charles II (who would, like his father before him, be hailed as defender of the faith and the rightful continuation of the Stuart dynasty) is mirrored by the fact that the Catholic-born Charles I would later convert to Protestantism for the sake of politics, only for his Protestant-born son Charles II to convert to Catholicism upon his deathbed for the sake of his soul. What’s interesting is that Charles II converted to Catholicism ostensibly because he’d promised his cousin Louis XIV of France that he would do so ‘at some future date’ in return for Louis’ assistance in England’s war against the Dutch Republic (1672-74).

There is a view that Charles’s deathbed conversion was cynical fulfilment of his promise, not backed by sincerity of soul. Or, by contrast, that he would in fact gladly have converted earlier, if the politics of England had allowed. He campaigned throughout his reign for religious tolerance, and knew only too well what problems religion had caused with the Kirk Party and the Covenanters in his other kingdom, of Scotland, which he had briefly reigned over from 1650 to 1652 before having to flee to France, and then the Netherlands. His 1672 Declaration of Indulgence for religious freedoms had to be recanted at the insistence of the English parliament, which had passed a series of laws between 1661 and 1665 that came to be known as the Clarendon Code, seeking to entrench the established Church of England and exclude all and any nonconformists, let alone Catholics, from public office and positions such as teachers. In 17th century Britain, transformation was anathema: service to the State, the sole prime consideration for any subject of the king, as for the king himself, was seen to derive best from being born into a religious tradition, living that religious tradition, applying the religious tradition within a political structure that formally honoured the religion, whilst giving it the status of a banner behind which the nation could rally, now and for evermore. It was that constancy that was sought in Restoration England.

Richard Strauss’s view of death

The fallacy that pervades supremely among western nations at the current time, a fallacy that has now given rise to the folly and disaster of the war against Iran and that will soon usher in a sea change in the global structures of economic, military and cultural positioning and polarities, reposes immovably in a fatally flawed understanding of what is meant for us as individuals, albeit less as nations, by that word: transformation.

Verklärung is how the German composer Richard Strauss describes one form of transformation, in his 1889 work Tod und Verklärung (in English: Death and Transfiguration). Strauss was 25 years of age when he completed the work, a musical expression of the process through which an artist goes when he dies. It garnered some disdain when it was published, one critic dismissing it as music to which one would not want to die or awaken, but, shortly before Strauss himself passed away, he declared to his daughter-in-law, “It’s a funny thing, Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

If you yourself would like to hear what dying is like, you can; here:

Much later in his life, during and after the Second World War, after a somewhat fallow creative period, Strauss found new inspiration, and, in his last seven years, launched himself into a new period of creativity, up to his death in 1949. His last but one work would be his Four Last Songs, his final contemplation of death before he would meet with it personally. The last of the Last Songs is At Sunset, the final words and motif of which quote his projection from 60 years previously as to what death sounds like: Ist dies etwa der Tod?—Might this perchance be death? The work would not be premiered until after the composer’s own passing (and, perhaps, his transfiguration).

Regardless of how one views the criticism of Ernest Newman, celebrated in his time for his intellectual objectivity (whilst, in the quotation above, to my mind, displaying a reckless trait of subjectivity), what transfiguration sounds like is less important than the transfiguration itself: the achievement of a change of form, from the physical to the spiritual. It is a process that is far from unknown to religion. It is a process that we mark with funerary rites, with baptism, with confirmation, with marriage even. Transformation, or transfiguration (the two terms are interchangeable, bar in the details), is not only a matter for contemplation on one’s deathbed. The formal change of religion that Charles II underwent on his deathbed was not some capricious whim, the fulfilment of a promise to his French cousin in exchange for military support in a war. It was a product of his deeply held conviction, the evidence of a transformation that had occurred within him, and which he felt a yearning to complete before he would meet with the deity that had made him the king of England.

Transformation in Shia Islam

Transformation lies at the very core of Shia Islam too. It is a prime element that differentiates it from Sunni Islam, besides the ancestry of the sects’ respective religious founding fathers. Shi’ites seek not just to know and understand the Koran, not just to live the traditions and the rites of Islam, but yearn already in this life to transform, to achieve what one might describe as unity with God. It is not far from the idea we know as mysticism, under which union with God becomes the follower’s sole goal in life, whether it be achieved in that life or in death.

The notion of transformation, as contemplated by Strauss at the tender age of 25, and still preoccupying him at the moment of his death at age 85, is not unique to the Bavarian composer: it is, truth be told, an aspect of our living that preoccupies all of us at some point or another, even if that point only be the cusp of death itself. For the Shi’ite Muslim, that results in a rejection of all the trappings of politics, of all the luxuries and monetary aspirations that seemingly preoccupy so much of the West.

Antecedents to the Iranian Revolution

The reason the 1979 Iranian revolution occurred stemmed from the joint British/American-led coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, prime minister of Iran, in 1953. Mossadegh wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later rebrand as BP—British Petroleum—and the Brits and the Yanks were having none of it. The coup arose out of the blatant manipulation of the Iranian people since the post-Ottoman carve-up of the Middle East after the First World War. What clearly emerged from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 was that, with France and Britain regarding the Western front as the decisive theatre for constructing the post-war world order, Britain, certainly, had no great ambitions for the Middle East as a colonial possession, but was nonetheless concerned to stymie Russian ambitions in the region. What drew Britain to Iran was, more than anything, its oil. In 1914, my great-uncle Harry rode with gleaming breastplate along with the rest of his comrades to the Western Front on horseback. He could swim the Thames astride his horse. In 1918, Britain drove home, in lorries, leaving great-uncle Harry in a field in France. It was the advent of the automobile and the new role of oil for energy production to which the First World War formed the bridge. And few countries at that time had quite so much of the black gold as Iran.

So, if oil was so valuable, and Iran had so much, Mossadegh’s stance was that the west who wanted Iran’s oil would jolly well have to pay for it. He failed. After barely a year in office, he was deposed and the emperor reverted to autocratic rule until it was overthrown in the revolution. The emperor: the shah (cognates Caesar, Czar, Kaiser). There had been emperors in Persia in the past, but the Pahlavi dynasty has had only two ruling members, being Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled in 1979, and his father who’d preceded him, Reza Shah: a commoner soldier appointed Warwick-like¹ as emperor by the British in 1925, around the time that the British were appointing kings in Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and … no, not Palestine, they had other plans for it.

The human rights record of present-day Iran is not a glowing one, not by western standards. Westerners talk of human rights without contemplating the extent to which the rights of westerners themselves are compromised by unfortunate but necessary constraints. To understand human rights means to dissociate yourself from the society in which you regard the rights accorded to citizenry such as yourself as definitive. To understand those in Iran, you must disencumber yourself of your preconceptions of what life is and ought to be.

What drives Iran

Iran is not a country. First, it is the size of half a continent. But, more than that, it has a history that stretches back far beyond just the installation of a puppet ruler a hundred years ago. Iran is a civilisation, and it rests upon a firm bedrock of philosophy and thinking. It is not a nation carved out of some former empire, into which a king was parachuted to serve as a lapdog to the British, steeped in self-interest, in highfalutin, adopted slogans which seek to further the comfort of some at the expense of others. Yes, there has been corruption in Iran, as man gets tempted by lucre the world over. And, yes, men have succumbed to their innate weaknesses, imposing cruelty in order to establish and retain positions of power and influence—we know who Jeffrey Epstein is, and I will eat my hat if there is one Iranian name mentioned in his files. To say that Iran is founded in a tradition of philosophy that seeks the transformation of the individual though the grace of God is not to invite scepticism or criticism or fault-finding or mockery. It is to invite understanding.

Zannah is the Koranic concept of self-indulgent caprice about ineffable matters upon which no mortal can ascertain truth one way or the other. Instead, believers are exhorted to remind themselves of truths that are known by all and which have always been known. To that extent, Islam was never intended by the Prophet to be a religion, but rather to invoke the realities that each individual can find in their heart if they but look. The Koran is the text that aids that introspection, through reminders of truth that everyone knows. Not the truths that blow in the wind as the caprices of politicians, but the truths by which humanity, rather than the individual human, is served; by which they always have, and by which they always will.

That is the kind of constancy that the Clarendon Code sought to establish in 17th century England, but which it sought to impose by rules from the outside, rather than invoking the human spirit from the inside. The word Islam means surrender; submission of one’s entire being to God and to His exhortation that humans should behave to one another with justice, equity and compassion. The demands of the God of Islam are no different from those of the God of Christianity. They differ only when oil gets introduced.

Over the past decades we have witnessed many manifestations of western resort to power: culture, ethics and morality—all have been used as instruments of power, a means of domination by the West. We have to try to relinquish this attachment to power, and to revert to what is human. On the one hand, we need to reinvest culture with its rationality; and on the other hand, to humanise politics; to make politics humane. Only in this way can we limit abuse of power, and prevent the domination of man over man, and man over humanity.

An Iranian cleric quoted in Resistance—The Essence of the Islamist Revolution by Alastair Crooke, p. 6.

The U.S./Israeli-Iranian War

Iran is winning this war. It is not mining the Strait of Hormuz. What the U.S. say they are sinking (with pictures as purported evidence) are not ships or boats engaged in mining the strait. Iran has no interest in mining the Strait of Hormuz, because the strait is 21 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, and for that distance Iran can simply shoot vessels out of the water with cannon. Plus, there are ships—Chinese ships—that Iran will allow to pass through the strait, and that makes no sense if there are mines.

Iran is not firing many missiles at its enemies: it doesn’t need to. Its enemies have pretty much exhausted their intercepts, and Iran has missiles that each contain 80 sub-missiles with around 20 kilos of explosive each. That’s a barrage of 80 20-kilo bombs dropping for just one missile. Iran is causing a great deal of damage in Tel Aviv, with just one missile a day. It’s just that the Israelis have passed laws to stop the damage being seen. That means there is damage to see. The damage is there, I assure you.

The U.S. has moved some of its mobile missile-launching capabilities from South Korea to the Iran theatre because it’s so desperate. The South Koreans are not happy, but they might be even unhappier if these mobile missile-launchers were ever to be fired at North Korea. It’s strange how Iran is being attacked because it might become a nuclear power, and North Korea is not attacked because it is a nuclear power: what better incentive could there be for Iran to become a nuclear power? Yet the Americans killed the Supreme Leader who has advocated for years that Iran should not build a nuclear bomb. Well, let’s be clear: the Iranian war has nothing to do with nukes. Netanyahu said as much to President Trump in Florida at the end of last year. What he said there is that Iran is building up hypersonic missile defences (not nuclear, but very fast conventional), and that America had to help him deplete these capabilities before they became invincible. Israel can shoot down missiles travelling at 4 Mach. Iran’s missiles travel at 14 Mach.

Back before Christmas, Trump and Netanyahu even fixed a date for the war to start, but that got shifted slightly, inter alia, because Israel had intelligence that the Ayatollah was at home. Later, this would be sold to the public as having the attack date coincide with Purim, a holiday celebrating how Esther saved the Jews from Persia. It’s all poppycock: Khamenei was at home because it’s his home. He would be home lots of times. He was 86 and knew he was a target and had nothing to fear from death. He and Richard Strauss had a lot in common.

Iran doesn’t have a lot of mobile missile launchers. Those they do have can be fired and concealed again within 90 seconds, before the missile itself even strikes. They have decoys everywhere (which the Americans are very good at getting fooled by) and decentralised missile systems spread across 57 separate command areas, which can work independently if one of them gets destroyed (that much they learned from the 2003 Iraq invasion, when Saddam Hussein lost his entire command structure because it was all concentrated in Baghdad). Their missiles lie, or stand, 90 metres underground, in silos. They’re virtually untouchable by the supposed superior air power of the Americans, who seemingly can’t tell between an aircraft on the ground and an outline painted in black. The Iranians haven’t even started to fire off their most recent technology; they’re using up stuff that’s been hanging around for 13 or 14 years before they get going with the very latest toys.

Despite what Mr Trump says (assuming he can even remember what he says from one day to the next), the war will end when Iran says it ends, and it will not end in a situation in which, like from June 2025, it can easily be started again once Israel and America catch their breaths. It will end when Iran has neutralised the threat from Israel such that it becomes a non-threat (let’s just leave it that cryptic). And it will end when Iran will have wrenched oil hegemony from the hands of the U.S., and we shall see how Mr Trump likes that, because no amount of mid-terms or presidential elections, let alone tariffs, will be able to reverse the changes that Iran is currently making in the world economic order. Do not forget, it is Chinese ships that are immune in the Strait of Hormuz. And BRICS is a union that Russia is now starting to enforce as a real federation, and not just a talking shop. Much to the shock and chagrin of Mr Modi in New Delhi, who is now paying through the nose for his discounted crude.

There is much we do not know for certain about the Iran war. The U.S. government lies when it opens its mouth; the Israeli government is shelling the Kingdom with its tired and worn false-flag operations in order to egg the Saudis into joining the war more actively; Europe doesn’t know what it wants or what to do to get it; the Israelis and Americans are losing their eyes, because Iran is knocking out their billions of dollars-worth of radar; and meanwhile Iranians are flocking behind their regime, which is what happens when you bomb people: they don’t rise up in revolution, they back the people who they know can stop the bombing.

I don’t know if the Americans fail to understand the Israelis, but Iran has long since understood Israel, which is why they have always got others to be Israel’s bugbears. Iran is deeply committed to the cause of the Palestinians, however, so it does not pain them to be pummelling their distant neighbour. Ultimately, the final question has to be in how far the Israelis understand anything.

There is just a small suggestion that, perhaps, maybe, Iran will end up being Palestine’s last hope.

1. The Earl of Warwick was the king-maker who supported the Duke of York’s claim to the English throne in opposition to King Henry VI, only later to turn coat and support Henry against the Yorkist claim.