Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Or at least it jolted traditionalists, but who cared what they thought? They were no longer in power. In fact, Atatürk would turn out to be the prototypical Muslim leader of the half-century to come. Iran generated its own version of the prototype. After the war, the last Qajar king faced the “Jungle Revolution,” a guerilla insurgency launched by admirers of Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. The king’s forces consisted of two armies, one commanded by Swedish officers, one by Russian mercenaries.1 Little did the king realize that the real threat to his rule lay not in the jungle but among the foreigners propping him up. When Bolsheviks began joining the jungle revolutionaries, the British got nervous. Lenin had just seized power in Russia and they didn’t want this sort of thing to spread. The British decided the king wasn’t tough enough to squelch Bolsheviks, so they helped an Iranian colonel overthrow him. This colonel, Reza Pahlavi, was a secular modernist in the Atatürk mold, except that he had no use for democracy (few secular modernist leaders