Who REALLY Made the Modern Middle East - with Simon Sebag Montefiore

0:00There's never been more coverage of Israel and the Jewish world, and there's never been less of it worth trusting. That's why ARK Media exists, and our subscribers are what make this possible. Join us at arkmedia.org. And to our subscribers, thank you.

0:21You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. It used to be one of those kind of hot takes that, if you know the Middle East, you know that Sunnis and Shias can't work together. Well, that's nonsense. They really can. Ayatollah Khomeini was, among his many incredibly clever moves, was to use Israel and anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism to rally an Arab world that had become disaffected and disillusioned with the pan-Arabism of Nasser that had been defeated by Israel in 1967. And what Khomeini offered was a steroid-injected Islamism of Sunni Islamism. And it really looked to Islam rather than the Arab nation as the way that estates could be run, could be run like this.

1:08And so Yasser Arafat is one of the first to fly in to see Khomeini when he takes power. and all over the Middle East, Iranians, despite being Shiite, start to back these entities. Where it really takes off is long after the death of Khomeini, who dies in 89. In 89, he makes sure his successor is chosen and Khomeini is still in power 37 years later until this very year.

1:45It's 7.30 a.m. on Friday, August 27th in New York City. It is 2.30 p.m. on Friday, August 27th in Israel, as Israelis begin to wind down for Shabbat. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description.

2:25Now, on to today's episode.

2:36For more than a century, there has been a familiar way of telling the story of the modern Middle East. The Ottoman Empire collapses. Britain and France draw borders across the map. New countries are created. Israel is born. America and the Soviet Union move in. And ever since, the region has been living with the consequences of decisions largely made somewhere else. There's a lot of truth to that story. But Simon Sabag Montefiore argues that it is also radically incomplete. His new book, The Cauldron, tells the story of the entire Middle East, from Morocco to Iran, from 1900 to the wars of 2026.

3:17In between are the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the creation of modern Turkey and the Arab states, the birth of Israel, the Cold War, Nasser and Pan-Arabism, the Shah and the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Islamism, the American era in the region, the emergence of Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman, the long reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, October 7th, the Gaza War, and the wars with Iran. And one of its central ideas is that we give outsiders far too much credit for making the region and the people who actually live there far too little agency. The Middle East was not simply acted upon. It was shaped by Ottoman sultans and Saudi kings, Arab nationalists and Iranian revolutionaries, Zionists and Islamists, generals and monarchs, tribes and religious movements all competing for power, territory, survival, and legitimacy.

4:14And many of the forces we tend to think of as modern may actually be much older. Empires never really disappeared. Great powers often discovered that their supposed clients had agendas of their own, And the European-style nation-states may have been an awkward fit for a region whose societies were historically far more mixed, ethnically, religiously, and politically, than the borders suggested. Today, Simon argues, the story may be turning again. Iran, Turkey, and Israel have become the region's leading military powers. Saudi Arabia has replaced Egypt as the dominant Sunni Arab state. Similar, smaller Gulf monarchies project power thousands of miles beyond their borders, and conflicts once neatly separated into the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Europe are beginning to collide.

5:07So perhaps the question isn't simply who made the modern Middle East. Perhaps it is whether the Middle East we have known for the last hundred years is now coming to an end. I can think of few books more important to read since October 7, 2023 than Simon's new book, The Cauldron. He is a prolific writer. His biography of Joseph Stalin and his history of Jerusalem are among my favorite history books. And now, so is his latest book, The Cauldron. This conversation, no pun intended, covers a lot of ground. And we would not do it justice by compressing it into a single episode. So today, we're dropping part one.

5:46Part two will drop on Thursday, unless dramatic developments take priority. My conversation with Simon Sabag Montefiore right after this short message. This summer, more than 4 ,000 North American teens experienced Israel and deepened their Jewish identity through Route 1. Route 1 provides families with$3 ,000 vouchers toward the cost of an Israel trip and helps teens find the experience that's perfect for them. That matters because Route 1 alumni arrive on campus better prepared to lead, engage in Jewish life, and stand up to anti-Semitism. But don't take my word for it. Listen to what teenage participants have to say.

6:28This is Elijah from Michigan who said, Traveling to Israel with Route 1 gave me a shared experience with other Jewish students. I've seen firsthand how gaining this wider understanding of the world has allowed me to grow as an individual. And this is Chuck from Virginia, who said there's so much value in having had opportunities to engage with Israel's modern history. It would have been so much harder to maintain my connection and support for Israel if I hadn't experienced it for myself. Route One is helping the next generation build a strong foundation and a lasting connection to Israel, one they'll continue to carry with them.

7:04Learn more at routeone.org.

7:11Simon, welcome to Call Me Back. Great to be with you. We have had many conversations over the last several years, but this is your maiden voyage on Call Me Back. I'm grateful for you being here, and I'm grateful for this book. There have been a lot of books written on the history of the Arab people, the history of the Jewish people, the history of Israel, the history of the Middle East. This book is different, and I hope this conversation captures that. I want to start our conversation with something that I was most struck by, which is that most of us learned that the modern Middle East was created, essentially created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and by European powers drawing new borders in the 20th century after the First World War.

7:53What does that story get wrong? Well, I mean, in this book, The Cauldron, I've really deliberately started it much earlier than 1900. And that's because most books traditionally start in 1917, 1918, with Britain and France and the end of World War I, fall of the Ottoman Empire. And I think you can't really understand anything in the Middle East today without understanding what the Ottoman Empire looked like. I mean, after all, just the sheer sort of span of it, both geographic and chronological, you know, it's 400 years. It extended from the borders of Morocco to the borders of Iran and had North Africa.

8:35It had, It had half of Europe, but also it was a particular way of ruling a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian empire. And you really can't understand the nations, the peoples, even the new states that come out of the Ottoman Empire without understanding what the Ottoman Empire was before. What we're seeing today is in part the ricochets from the end of the Ottoman Empire. Why do we cling then to this story about the end of World War I, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, you know, these British and French diplomats drawing up borders, creating nation states, creating the modern Middle East.

9:14That's the story we have. Who decided that was the story? Well, that became the conventional wisdom. It plays into all sorts of traditional stories about the Middle East. One is that the whole Middle East is the result of British and French and American outside interference, sort of neocolonialist, neo-imperial or imperialist interference, meddling and mishandling. And of course, that is part of the story. But it really ignores a lot of what is also important to understand, which is the agency of Middle Eastern players. As you said, there are lots of books on the Middle East, lots of books on the Arabs and the Jews and the Iranians and what have you, Israel, Palestine.

9:55But I begin this book really with Abdelaziz, the Saudi Emeon. Seizing and taking control of what today we think of Saudi Arabia. He was, what, 19, 20, 21 years old? Yeah, he was just a boy. He was very tall, very dashing, very determined, and very brave. And the founder of what we today refer to as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Where does that take place? When does that take place? That makes place in early 1902. It's in Riyadh, which is now the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we see today is, in fact, the third Saudi state. The first Saudi state started in the middle of the 18th century.

10:33The second was in the middle of the 19th century. Both collapsed. And so he was restoring it. And it's important to understand Saudi Arabia is now the center of the world in many ways. That's what Donald Trump said when he visited recently, a couple of years ago. This is how it started. It started with 30 men climbing over a wall in the middle of the night to this small town, Riyadh, climbing in with their swords and spears and a few kind of Lee-Enfield English rifles. And they hide in the harem of the governor. And then at dawn, when the governor walks out of the fortress of Riyadh, they attack him.

11:11There's a fight and they kill him and they seize Riyadh. And of course, it takes Abdelaziz about 25 years to conquer Saudi Arabia. It's not You don't often realise that Saudi Arabia is a huge country. It's really the biggest country in the Middle East. And in the 1920s, he finally took Mecca and Medina. And it's the guardianship of Mecca and Medina that gives the Saudi monarchy its prestige. So why did I start with this story? I started this story because Saudi Arabia is now the central power of the Middle East. This is where it started. It started in 1902 in a world that is completely different for anything that we could imagine now looking at the Middle East and wherever possible, not for reasons of ideological, political correctness.

12:01It just makes sense to recognize the agency of the players in this region. And I do that all the way through. You do do that all the way through. It is one of those striking themes of your book. And I guess, why have very few of these other histories taken this approach? Is this kind of Western, like we have to believe that we shaped, it's just another theater around the world that is a theater of great power conflict and great power interests and geopolitical strategies. we can't accept that this region has its own players, its own leaders, its own families, its own monarchies, its own dynasties that actually determine their own future and have real agency.

12:42We have to believe that these places are our theaters that are expressions and extensions of our own politics and geopolitics. Correct. And that's a narrative that has got stronger and stronger. It's also the narrative that suited Arab nationalists to tell. meaning that many Arab nationalists rose to power by saying they were resisting or rebelling or reacting to these outside forces. Yeah, and also the Arab historians, like George Antonius and others, used that as one of their main arguments in their new Arab histories. But that became a conventional wisdom, and historians are actually quite tend to retell the same story over and over again in a conventional wisdom.

13:23It gives a much more naturalistic and realistic approach to understanding what's happened. And it also means that when you look back at these powers, the Saudis, the Iranians, the Turks, even Israel, Egypt, Moroccans, you can understand where all these people came from and how they came to be how they are today, particularly since today we're in a period when more than ever these powers are following their own interests, their own ambitions, their own aspirations, freer than ever before of foreign interference. That is why we're in a multiplayer game now in the Middle East, as well as in the world, but particularly in the Middle East.

14:01And that's what I'm trying to understand in the book. Now, how did the Middle East of the 1890s, 1900, become 2026? And how did we get here? Because, of course, you know, Dan, you know, there's a whole nother story, which is that everything in the Middle East is to do with Israel and Palestine, and that that should be completely central. Well, it's important, but is it central? there's a hell of a lot else going on here as well and what i try and do in this book is put everything in its correct place okay among the myths you puncture in this book is that the idea of empire is a uniquely western phenomenon you know we tend to think of the british empire or people talk about american empire or various european empires you say that's not the case in the middle east the middle east today there's plenty of neo-imperialistic powers now loose in the Middle East, trying to win prizes and trophies, but also to protect themselves from enemies and threats and so on.

14:58But yes, if you go back, I mean, one of the sort of narratives that's most preposterous, but which became very popular, particularly after 9-11, was that the Ottoman Empire was this kind of kumbaya, wonderful, peaceful, poetry-spouting, tolerant empire that was later destroyed by Western interference and nationalisms and American ambitions and Zionism and all of this. While in fact, the Ottoman Empire, like all long-standing empires, had many different versions and periods, all of them very different. But there was indeed a period of reform in the mid-19th century, the Tanzimat period. But by the time we reach 1900, the Ottoman Empire is going on a very, very different trajectory to that.

15:45It's pursuing under Abdul Hamid, the Sultan Caliph, a religious Islamist, Otamist, Caliphal approach in which he hoped to hold together this tottering empire by promoting Turkish and Islamic culture and power, and by playing off different ethnic groups and sects against each other in brutal repressions, which led to massive massacres across the empire. And by the time you get to the beginning of World War I in 1913, 1914, he's been overthrown. And the sultanate is then ruled not by its monarch, but by three really tough ideological dictators who are the three pashas, who really believe in what we'd now call almost a sort of proto-Nazi Turkish Ottoman nationalism, eugenicist, social Darwinism, and that war would kind of improve the Turkish Ottoman nation and save the empire.

16:47And of course, that approach led to a series of appalling disasters, the Armenian massacres in which 1.1 million people were killed in the Armenian genocide, And then a whole lot of other forgotten ones, where Christian Maronites in Lebanon, Assyrians on the borders of what are now Iraq, Pontic Greeks on the shores of the Black Sea, all of these peoples were massacred in huge numbers. And so that is part of the motive for the Western powers in 1918 when they defeated the Ottoman Empire finally. That is one reason why they did not envisage any role in the future for this genocidal power. And of course, today in our present period, that is why President Erdogan is so keen to constantly deny that the Turkish state has ever played in any role in any repressions at all.

17:42So that too ricochets forward to our period. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Daniel Hartman, president of the Sholem Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. And I'm Yossi Klein-Halevi, senior fellow at the Sholem Hartman Institute. What's more important, to be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself? Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations, or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart? What do Israelis and diaspora Jews owe each other? If you're Jewish. Or a friend, an ally. These questions have been gnawing at you these past few years. For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night.

18:23And for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers. What they do deserve are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossi and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things. We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply, a Jewish lens. So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune in to our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between ARC Media and the Sholem Hartman Institute. You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:01See you there. Simon, the beginning of the book, the region is extraordinarily diverse. We learn about Jews and Christians and Muslims and Armenians and Greeks and Kurds and Turkmen and Azidis and obviously Arabs, Persians. By the end, much of that mosaic has disappeared, or at least it's very, it's concentrated. You have these populations, but they're in very specific places. How did we get here? Yeah, I mean, nationalism has been a bit of a disaster for the Middle East. You could argue, and I suggest this, but that the nation state itself doesn't necessarily work for a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian region like the Middle East.

19:43But one thing's for certain, the combination of 50 years of nationalism and then 50 years of rising Islamism have had the effect of massive persecutions of minority peoples, and whether by Islamist terror organizations like the Islamic State, ISIS, or by local terrorists, Islamist terrorists, or by dictators and autocrats who wanted to convert multi-ethnic states into single nationalities like we had in Europe traditionally. And for all these reasons, these multi-ethnic societies have been whittled down and ground down. And there are two big examples. I mean, one is at the beginning of this period, Egypt is one of the most cosmopolitan countries on earth.

20:30And it has been for 2000 years since the Ptolemaic dynasty of Cleopatra and started by Alexander the Great in effect. And there've been a huge Jewish population in Egypt, but also a huge Levantine population of Wabanal, of Lebanese, of Maronites, of Greeks, of Italians, of Armenians. So actually, it was this incredibly mixed society. And it really thrived in that kind of mercantile cosmopolitan mix. And you can have people like the ruler, King Farouk, who's one of the amazing characters in the book. His love life just illustrates this. You know, he's got, he's having love affairs with kind of Jewish showgirls, French countesses, Italians, Lebanese, all of these peoples, Americans, all of them are part of this fascinating interwoven society.

21:24But in 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, who overthrows King Farouk, when he's challenged by the British and the French and the Israelis in the Suez Crisis, he then throws out all these people to assert pan-Arab nationalism. And that really asserts the Arab nature of Egypt for the first time. And it's a disaster. The Egyptian economy has never recovered. And all those people were expelled and lost their properties and their estates and their businesses. In a wider sense, if you look at 1900, 25 % of the Middle East was Christian. 25 % of the population of the Middle East was Christian. One has to remember that in sort of 630 AD, just before the Arab conquest, the Arab world was, the Middle East was virtually 100 % Christian and had been for 300 years.

22:12And there were still pagan tribes, particularly in Arabia and the borderlands, but mostly it was overwhelmingly Christian. And amazingly, in over a thousand years of Islamic rule, many of those Christians kept their Christianity. Many must have converted to, of course, to Islam over the centuries. But in 1900, they were still 25%. And there were also, that was the Middle East, the sort of Middle least proper. But in Turkey, of course, you then had millions of other peoples, particularly Armenians and Greeks who lived in the Ottoman Empire. Jump ahead now. Iraq, for example. In 2000, there were a million Christians in Iraq.

22:53Now there are 115 ,000. Where have they all gone? Well, that is just the result of civil war, but particularly of his Islamist strife, Shia and Sunni, and the fact that all of these extremist ideologies preyed on and tried to drive out the Christians who have just left the Middle East. This is what I call the slow cleansing, the slow purge of the last century, but it really speeded up later in the century. And so you see this kind of bleak binary nationalism and Islamism really kind of diminishing the region. And while everywhere else in the world is getting more cosmopolitan, The Middle East is getting steadily less so.

23:35Okay, we talk about the limits of Western influence in the region, but these states, the West did create these nation states, right? So Libya, modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, what we think of these countries, these are nation states that were created by Western powers. They are very fragile today, these states. So in areas where the West did try to construct, you know, kind of piece together peoples and kind of create these nation states, integrating them to some degree into within borders that many cases made no sense. What should that tell us? It just tells us that the Western empires tried to do two things.

24:10The thing that they're notorious for doing is entirely justified. They wanted to create empires. They wanted power over the Middle East for different reasons. And for that reason, they created the mandates. but they also shaped these countries because they also embraced an idea of nationalism. And so at the end of World War I, these powers were really backing all sorts of nationalisms. And they saw that not as contradictory to their imperial interests, because they were planning to create states that would be client states, would be allied states, would be vassal states to them and be friendly to them.

24:45And to some extent, that worked in some of them. For example, in Jordan, still an example of that. The Kingdom of Iraq, that worked for a while too, and so on and so forth. But so they actually backed a lot of nationalism. They were backing Armenian nationalism. They were backing Greek nationalism. They were backing Jewish nationalism. And in Arab nationalism, they hoped to create these Arab states that would work, but would work as friendly in a way that was friendly to the allied imperial powers. And so they started to create these states in the Middle East proper. And so they divided it up, the British got what is now Israel plus Jordan plus Iraq, and the French got Lebanon and Syria.

25:26And in North Africa, they had Algeria and they had Tunisia. And they designed these states to endure after they left, when they were ready to hand over to rulers who they hoped would be friendly. But just to give you an idea of how these states developed, there were many challenges to the way they have developed now. One of the big myths that you see a lot on TikTok these days is that these are all ancient states in contradiction to Israel, which is a very new state. And in fact, all these states are new. None of them existed before. None of them had ever existed before in any shape or form. The only two that had were Iran, Persia, and Egypt.

26:07And those had been ancient units, ancient entities for a very long time with ancient histories. So all the others were kind of new states. And you've got to realise that all of these states in this region now are effectively new. So Iraq is an ancient name for parts of Mesopotamia, but it had never been a state. Syria is a Syrian province, but it had never been a state and so on. So it could have been very different. For example, the British took over Mesopotamia, which they called Iraq. And when they took over Iraq, the province of Mosul, which is where a lot of the oil is, it was questionable whether that should join Iraq or not, and whether large parts of it could be part of a Kurdish state, which they also hoped to create.

26:50At the same time, the new Turkish Republic, which had been created after 1922, and also had never existed before as such, it hoped to get Mosul. In the end, the Iraqis got it. Another example, when the French took over greater Syria, which includes Lebanon, they didn't want to create two states, Syria and Lebanon. They wanted to create five or six states. And those five or six states, they were going to create two Sunni states, one in Aleppo, one in Damascus, a Druze state, an Alawite state in Latakia on the Mediterranean coast. And you know, the Alawites were the sect from which came the Assads.

27:30And then they wanted to create another state that would be controlled by the Maranite Christians, who were their chief allies, their Christian allies in the region. But after the 1925 Great Syrian Revolt against the French, the French decided this was too expensive, too complicated, create bigger states. And so they created Syria, which was a multi-ethnic state that contained all of these different peoples, and still does, Kurds, Druze, Alawites. And we see today in 2026 how the new rulers of Syria are trying to work out how to run this state with all these minorities within it. And they also created Lebanon, which they specially designed in a very weird way so that they hoped that the Christians would remain kind of in charge, but it would also reflect the Sunnis who were there, the Druze who were much smaller, and then the Shia who were rising fast in population and in the end became larger than everybody else.

28:28And Lebanon, therefore, is what you might call a one-state solution. And as you can see, a one-state solution doesn't really work that well. There have been brutal civil wars, a small one in 1958, a huge one in 1976 for almost 10 years. And then we've seen how Hezbollah, a paramilitary organisation, has seized control of the state, and the state is now trying to get its power back. So these are all experiments. But the point of the story is that these states didn't have to have the borders or names that they had to date. The powers played with different ideas. And in the end, these were the states that emerged.

29:05And they could have been very different. Another example, the British had created a new entity in 1980, and they called it Palestine. Again, an old name, a Roman name for a province. And almost immediately, Prince Abdullah, son of Hussein of Mecca, who had led the pro-British anti-Ottoman Arab revolt in 1916, his son galloped up, seized what is now Amman, the capital of the Kingdom of Jordan today, and said, I'm going to create my own little kingdom here. Can I have it? And Winston Churchill, who happened to be in Egypt at the time, creating the new Middle East, said, okay, he wrote a letter. He said, like, today in Jerusalem, I created a new country, Transjordan.

29:50And so they gave that to Abdullah. So you can see that this is a very fluid situation in which many, many different entities could have emerged. But the ones that did emerge were the ones they decided upon. And they are very fragile because they were created by outsiders, by imperial statesmen. And they often didn't develop or developed very slowly a national consciousness because they were superficial and created by foreign statesmen. And at the same time, the one institution that endured from the colonial power to the new state was the army, because the French and British were very keen at creating paramilitary or auxiliary forces, often using minorities to create the armies.

30:35And so that's why the Assad's were able to take power, because much of the military were members of a minority, the Alawites. So overall, all these states were formed, put together out of Ottoman provinces in a makeshift way, combining different provinces together. And some of them never really developed the civil institutions that Such societies need to work. And before they left, the Western powers in the 40s, when they left, they tried to leave democracies that were a bit like French or British democracy. And those didn't last long. And they were rapidly taken over by military officers and radical dictators like Saddam Hussein.

31:17And those states are still struggling to exist. And what we really need is a rethinking of how these states work and how they look. And it may be that federal states actually work better for this environment. And you see in Iraq today, I'm not looking at Iraq, and you know Iraq, Dan. I know. Trust me, this question could be its own episode. I lived and breathed some of these decisions in terms of the political organization of Iraq today, but I think you're right. I want to talk about, I spent a little bit of time here on Iran. Where do you put the revolution in Iran, the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979?

31:53Where does that fit in terms of significance of this period, the entirety of the period you're covering? It matters hugely. It really, you know, 1979 needs to rank right up there with the way that 1789 or 1776 or 1917, those sort of dates, it's right up there with the American revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution. it changes everything. Why? Why does it change everything? Is that that subforce? And maybe, Simon, tell us just briefly what was there before 1979, what existed, and then how did it change everything? The 20th century begins with Iran as a shambolic empire under the Qajar dynasty, barely holding together its multi-ethnic peoples.

32:38And about 50 % of its people then and now are not ethnically Persian or Iranian, but they speak Persian. And there are Arab peoples, there are Kurdish peoples, there are Azerbaijani peoples, Aziri peoples, and they have been ruled in this imperial domain for many, many centuries. But it is a Persian empire and it has to be understood as an empire. That's the first thing. This is the heir to not just the ancient empires that we know about, the Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great, not just the Sassanids, but also very recently, in the 18th and 19th century, you had self-made shahs founding dynasties and leading massive tribal armies of conquest.

33:22In 1789, a shah of Iran actually takes Delhi and takes northern India, for example. So first of all, there's an imperial ethos. But in the early 20th century, it's falling apart. In the World War I, it's basically a battlefield between Russian and British and Ottoman fighters. And then the end of World War I, the British wonder what to do with it. And it's important to Britain because of its oil. They have oil there. And that's the oil that funds the British Empire, funds the Royal Navy. And so they wonder what to do with it. And they find a candidate to take over. And that is Reza Shah. Reza Khan, who becomes Reza Shah.

34:00He, in 1925, becomes king of a new country that he calls Iran. It's a new but an ancient name for this kingdom. He is one of the most remarkable characters in this story, one of the nation builders. He's six foot seven. He's autocratic. He's a Cossack officer in the Persian army. And he makes himself king and founds a dynasty. He opens up Iran to railways and education. He founds universities. He emancipates the Jews. He frees the women from wearing hijab and so on. But in 1941, he makes a terrible mistake at the beginning of World War II when he tries to remain neutral between the Allies and the Nazis.

34:40Bad idea. Stalin and Churchill get together and they occupy Iran completely, which is why the Tehran Conference of 1943 takes place with FDR in Tehran. It's occupying. And so they run it and Stalin actually tries to keep some of it after the war. But the young Shah who succeeded his father is Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. He's the one we call the Shah. And without going into his story in detail, he is both a highly gifted politician, a radical reformer, an emancipator of women, a promoter of female education, an opponent of the hijab and clerical Islamism. And he's also brilliant at foreign policy, playing off the Soviets and the Americans.

35:28And ultimately, he makes Iran the regional superpower, master of the Straits of Hormuz, policemen of the Gulf, and the greatest power. He has relations with everybody. He controls his own oil. But he also makes the mistake of concentrating power more and more in his own hands, to the extent that there is no ability for any part of the Iranian body politic to express themselves, to protest, to take any part in ruling. And in the end, this is disastrous because the Shah becomes exhausted. The Shah controls everything. And in the end, the Shah runs out of ideas and becomes a victim of his own success, particularly in his industrial and agricultural reforms, which lead millions of peasants to move to the cities.

36:14There's corruption. The oil wealth goes adrift. And suddenly, at the end of the 70s, the Shah is increasingly vulnerable. The whole Iranian society is gradually turning against him. who should lead this. They should turn to moderate Islamists or liberal Democrats or anybody. But all of these peoples have been excluded from power, all of these parties. And so it's in the nature of Iranian society that they turn to a clergyman. And the clergyman is Ayatollah Rouhala Khomeini, who looks like a brutal firebrand from the 7th century. He is, in fact, one of the great revolutionary statesmen of the 20th century who ranks in brutal ruthlessness and cunning with Stalin, a Mao, a Lenin.

37:04And he basically tricks everybody. He puts together a coalition of all parts of Iranian society, from liberals all the way to Islamists, and including Leninists and Marxists and socialists and Marxist-Islamists in the middle. All of them believe that he's going to do what they want. And his brilliance is not really to tell anybody what he thinks or what he does, but just to remain inscrutable. He also tricks the Americans into what he's going to do because they begin to think the Shah is doomed. There are millions of people in the streets. And this guy may turn out to be a kind of papal figure, a kind of Gandhi-like figure.

37:45And as, like today, large parts of American leftist academia sort of see him as a wonderful humanitarian liberator. Right. No, they fall in love with these kinds of characters. It should have been entirely predictable. Yeah. And of course, those articles all appear in the New York Times, and I quote them in the book. So in 1979, the Shah leaves because he doesn't want to massacre his people. And in a way, that's a problem of monarchs because they never want to do that because they're always worrying about the succession of their sons. And so he leaves knowing that he'll never return. and Ayatollah Khomeini flies back.

38:23And it's just worth pointing out, because the Shah is such a notorious autocrat, that it's just worth pointing out that in his entire 41-year reign, about 4 ,000 or 3 ,000 people were violently killed by that regime, many of them in fights with terrorists and urban guerrillas. And in the last months before of 1978-79, within weeks, the Islamic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini had killed way more than that. And I think it's true to say that in a couple of days in January of 2026, our time, they killed more than the Shah had killed in his entire 41-year regime by 10 times. But when Khomeini takes power, he immediately appoints a rather civilised-looking prime minister in a suit and tie, Mehdi Bazagan.

39:13But he also sets up in a girls' school his secret Islamist committee. In 1970, Khomeini had written a very eccentric book. And in this book, he said, Iran shouldn't be ruled by kings anymore, and it shouldn't be ruled by elected politicians. It should be ruled by an Islamic clergyman, an Islamic scholar, who, before the return of the Mahdi, the Mahdi or the sacred imam who vanished in the 10th century, before the return of that apocalyptic figure, a messianic figure, a scholar should rule. And of course, he's thinking of himself. But no one believed this would really happen. It was an innovation that he'd come up with.

39:55But within months of his returning to Iran, he begins to put this into practice. And he creates, partly aided by Kurdish and Marxist rebellions when they turn against his regime, the invasion of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, all of these things turn the regime into a crisis regime. And he enables him to massacre his opponents and to create this new, weird hybrid constitution where they have elections, but it's ruled by a sacred monarch, scholar, and that's him. So for 10 years, he rules and he creates this new society. And it's extremely repressive. It's extremely brutal. It massacres its opponents.

40:39And that is the regime that is still in power. As your viewers, your listeners all know, and you know very well too, Dan, this is obviously a Shiite regime. And the Shiites are different from the Sunnis. It used to be one of those kind of hot takes that experts on the Middle East always said is that we all know that, you know, if you know the Middle East, you know that Sunnis and Shias can't work together. Well, that's nonsense. They really can. And what happened as soon as he came back was among his many incredibly clever moves was to use Israel and anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism to rally support across the Arab Sunni world.

41:18Of course, there were large Sunni minorities, particularly in Lebanon and particularly in Iraq. But actually, he was very clever and he used this to rally an Arab world that had become disaffected and disillusioned with the pan-Arabism of Nasser that had been defeated by Israel in 1967 and discredited to a certain extent. Many of the pan-Arab nationalist rulers had become long-serving pro-Western autocrats, often with brutal secret police, like Saddam, like Nasser and Sadat in Egypt, for example, like in Syria. And so these people looked stagnant, looked brutal. And what Khomeini offered was the kind of like on steroid injected a new version of Islamism, of Sunni Islamism, but injected with ultra anti-Western nationalism as well.

42:12And it really looked to Islam rather than the Arab nation as the answer, as the inspiration, but also the actuality, the way that estates could be run, could be run like this. So, for example, among Sunni communities, Hezbollah is founded not against Israel, but it's founded to create a Khomeini-like entity in Lebanon. And it's only later that it becomes anti-Israeli. But all over the Middle East, everybody is excited, is inspired, is encouraged by this process. And this becomes a Sunni Islamist cause that really inspires the whole Arab world. And it's cleverly merged. Islamism is merged with anti-Western radicalism.

42:59And so, you know, for example, Yasser Arafat is one of the first to fly in to see Khomeini when he takes power. And all over the Middle East, Iranians, despite being Shiite, start to back these entities. And it takes a long time. Where it really takes off is long after the death of Khomeini, who dies in 89. In 89, he makes sure his successor is chosen, Ali Khamenei. And Khamenei is still in power 37 years later until this very year. But the key date here is 9-11. That's a good cliffhanger to end part one of my conversation with Simon Sabag Montefiore. Please tune into part two on Thursday.

43:54Hi, it's Dan Sinor. Israel is heading into one of its most consequential elections. And this time, the whole world is watching closely. Hot takes and daily noise are pretty much guaranteed to populate your media diet. But as with any election, there's a deeper story about identity, religion, democracy, and what kind of country Israelis want to live in. That's why ARK Media launched Israel Votes, a special initiative across Call Me Back, For Heaven's Sake, and ARK News Daily. You'll hear from the leading candidates shaping the race, along with analysis and reporting from two of Israel's leading political analysts, ARK Media contributors Nadav Ayal and Amit Sego.

44:37Join us for Israel Votes, your front row seat to the election that could define Israel's future. Go to arkmedia.org forward slash votes to watch and listen. See you there.