I’m not going to give the traditional histories or text books here but with everything going on in Iran, it’s important to break out of the Washington or New York mindsets and to realize that the Iranians we are up against — not the students and ordinary people, but many of the clerics — fundamentally think differently.

The best book out there to get inside the mind of an ayatollah is Roy Mottahedeh’s Mantle of the Prophet, which (based on a true figure) follows the life of a young boy from his time entering a Quranic school through his religious education until he becomes an ayatollah. It’s not a political book, but almost 30 years after it was written, it is still the best read and most illuminating book out there.

Another great book is Iraj Pezeskhzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, a satire that pokes fun at the Iranian penchant for conspiracy theory. It’s told through the eyes of a young boy who lives in a family compound with an uncle who is obsessed with both Napoleon and the British. It’s been about a decade since I last read it but, from memory, the uncle, having gotten into a bar fight with a British soldier during the interwar period at one point theorizes that World War II in Europe was a British conspiracy, a diversion if you will, to give the British military an excuse to reoccupy Iran and so take revenge on the uncle for beating up the soldier decades before. Both books are the type that can be read in a plane or train in a couple of days. Before the Islamic Revolution, the story was made into a television series which, if I’m not mistaken, remains the top-rated Iranian television series of all time. An analogy would be to the way Americans remember Roots on television, although for very different reasons given the different subject matter.