• Home
  • Books
  • Writing
  • Blog
  • Who?
  I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car

BLOG

On Shapour Bakhtiar

15/11/2015

0 Comments

 
I'm unexpectedly reminded, in the wake of the recent attacks in Paris, of Shapour Bakhtiar. 

Bakhtiar was an Iranian who moved to Paris shortly before the Second World War and became involved in the resistance. After the war he returned to Iran and worked with the Shah's regime whilst simultaneously covertly working against it in the hopes of installing a more liberal, progressive rule. He was found out and thereafter imprisoned repeatedly. When the Shah's grip eventually crumbled, however, Bakhtiar unexpectedly found he was made the head of state. He immediately released all political prisoners, removed restrictions on the press and disbanded the Iranian secret police. But his reign had come at the wrong time and was short-lived, lasting a little over a month. Overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini and his new order of revolutionary Islamism which immediately undid all his social changes, Bakhtiar once again left for Paris. A decade later, still in exile in the suburbs in Suresnes and once again involved in a resistance movement, Bakhtiar was killed, stabbed to death in his kitchen by assassins from the Islamic Republic. And that was the end of Shapour Bakhtiar: another small tributary in the steady tide of history dammed-up and moved on from.

I suppose Bakhtiar comes to mind, not just because his brief life, traversing as it does between Europe and the Middle East, contains something of an echo of our more modern anxieties, but also because it's a life which quietly embodies the national credo of the French - liberté, égalité, fraternité - in a way which seems indivisible from the fact that he was also a migrant and a Muslim.
Picture
0 Comments

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    July 2022
    December 2021
    July 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    September 2020
    June 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    March 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    July 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Categories

    All
    Books
    Fiction
    Film
    Music

    RSS Feed


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Books
  • Writing
  • Blog
  • Who?