History Lessons

It is exactly 50 years since I went up to university to read history. Almost everything I was taught has turned out to be wrong.

A lecturer told us that an industrial revolution in India was out of the question in a country dominated by peasants. Experts on Russia assumed that Soviet communism was immortal. We were taught that religion was quaint or irrelevant.

I waded through Iran: Dictatorship and Development by a Middle East expert called Fred Halliday. The book, published by Penguin in 1978, was widely praised – the Daily Telegraph called it “prophetic” – and translated into many languages.

Its 300 pages contained, at best, incidental references to Islam with no substantive discussion – though lots about Tudeh, the Iranian communist party. When revolution broke out a year later, I complained to Penguin about the money and time I’d wasted reading a book reeking of Western arrogance by someone who didn’t understand the country he was writing about.