The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the dangers of foreign intervention.In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer gives the first full account of this fateful operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes with an assessment of the coup's "haunting and terrible legacy."Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection."It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts in this book, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."Drawing on research in the United States and Iran, and using material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car. Roosevelt,the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded three days later.The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of "Gang Busters," who flew to Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup's main sponsors.Brimming with insights into Middle Eastern history and American foreign policy, this book is an eye-opening look at an event whose unintended consequences - Islamic revolution and violent anti-Americanism--have shaped the modern world. As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the Middle East, it is essential reading.

    Avoiding land mines and bullets, he spent months travelling through Iraq and Iran negotiating a way into Afghanistan. Joining forces with the war-weary Mujahedeen, he found unexpected allies and unforgettable friends.

    He traveled to Baghdad, then part of Persian, and met Suhrawardi, a major Sufi figure. He had a passion for travel yet lived simply, and became known as a wandering dervish. His journeys took him to central Asia and India, then to Yemen and Ethiopia through Mecca. It is said that he was taken prisoner of the Crusaders during his visit to Syria and worked at hard labor until ransomed. He then proceeded to North Africa and Anatolia, returning at last to his native Shiraz in 1256, where he spent the remainder of his life writing poetry.His best-known work today is the Golestan [Land of Roses, or rose garden], written in rhyming prose. In addition to being a master of Sufi mystical poetry (Hafez is known to have been an ardent admirer of Sa'di's works), Sa'di was also a sharp wit, writing satires of the politicians of his time.Written with younger readers in mind, they feature imaginative illustrations which will entertain and inspire for years to come. The length of each story varies; the average is 12 pages.The four stories in this collection are: Kadra Afeeyat, Rosto Dorough, Pahlavan Nayeb and Du Baradar.

    He offers a wealth of new insights into the thousand-year-old conflict in Iran between the search for modernity and the forces of religious obscurantism. illuminating accounts of the work of Iranian intellectuals -- both men and women -- and their artistic movements as they struggle to find a new path toward a genuine modernity in Iran that is congruent with Iran's rich cultural heritage. This book challenges the hitherto accepted theory that modernity and its related concepts of democracy and freedom are Western in essence. It also demonstrates that Iran and the West have more that brings them together than separates them in their search for such modern ideals as rationalism, the rule of law, and democracy.

    It examines the expression of Iranian modernity in a variety of media including painting and sculpture, photography, posters, and graphic arts. It highlights new modes of artistic production and the expanding scene in Iran: developments in Iranian art criticism, exhibition apparatus, education, and patronage. The contributors also address changes in the iconography of Iranian art and in the increasingly social role of the artist. This groundbreaking work demonstrates that the visual arts serve as an important archival record of a critical period in Iranian history.

    The transition propelled political, religious and social change. While Shawkani espoused a socio-religious order which echoed aspects of Western thinking, the book demonstrates that it was indigenous to Islamic thought. Shawkani's ideas remain vital to the intellectual debates happening in Islam today.

    Ghulam-Reza Awani and Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen's English rendition of the Persian book "Badeh-e- Ishq" ( The Wine of Love), which is a collection of Imam Khomeini's mystical poetry with the appendage of the eight Ghazal poems in an earlier and smaller collection, Sabu-ye Ishq ( The Jug of Love) as well as Prof. Legenhausen's On the Symbolism of Religious poetry as appendix.

    The Third Round Table, the largest of the series to date, continued the emphasis of its predecessors on understanding and appreciating the legacy of the Safavid period by means of exchanges between both established and 'newer' scholars drawn from a variety of fields to facilitate an exchange of ideas, information, and methodologies across a broad range of academic disciplines between scholars from diverse disciplines and research backgrounds with a common interest in the history and culture of this period of Iran's history.