LEBANON-IRAN-IRAQ-FRANCE 1977–79
Peace died in the homeland of peace
Justice succumbed
When the City of Jerusalem fell
Love retreated and in the hearts of the world, war settled
The child in the grotto and his mother Mary are crying, and I am praying.
—Fairuz, lyrics from “Jerusalem Flower of all the Cities” (1971)
There is an irony lodged deep in the heart of the revolution that turned Iran from a Persian kingdom into an Islamic theocracy, a revolution cheered and organized by secular leftists and Islamist modernists. The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq.
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