Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah Book

In his day, his face was one of the most identifiable in the world; despite that, not much was really known about the Ayatollah in the West. This biography by BBC Persia specialist and Shi'ite seminarian Baqer Moin fills in a great deal of this gap in public knowledge; along the way he has also provided us with a history of Iran going back over a hundred years. The book is educational, absorbing and enjoyable. You get a very detailed look at the different factors involved in the collapse of the Shah's regime, and the ensuing revolution. And you get the roots of Khomeini's family background in the tribal areas around the city of Qom. It would have been interesting to know more about that time, and how Khomeini was affected by the murder of his father at the hands of highway brigands, and the death of his mother a few years later in a cholera epidemic. It happened so long ago that I imagine there just wasn't that much more information at hand.
It's hard to believe now how obscure the concept of "political Islam" was up until a few decades ago. It was people like Khomeini, who, in his publication "The Governance of the Jurist (Velayet-e-Faqih)", laid out the foundations of Islamic government that is the basis for a nation state whose mettle shows no signs of weakness after nearly forty years in the Middle East pressure cooker. As original as his ideas were, it's hard to see how he could ever have swept into power without his wily political acumen, and willingness to break ranks with the Western-imposed world order. It's a fascinating story, and Khomeini's extreme force of will was what was able to carry that revolution over the top. Can we be at all surprised that he was able to defy Carter and his foreign policy so completely that they still hold that grudge forty years later?
The most astonishing portion of the book has to be the chapters that discuss Khomeini's mysticism, and his attachment to the old medieval Persian poetic tradition. It's fascinating to think about how influential that literary heritage was in his life, and poetry of which he wrote several volumes. This information was totally unknown in the West before the publication of this biography.
There was always an indefinable something that was different about Khomeini; I still remember the news reports of him stepping off that jet plane into the huge waiting crowds in Tehran. That scene doesn't really fit our Western sense of the rational forward motion of historical development. So it disturbs our serenity and Western sense of complacency: it's not supposed to be that way. An eighty year old man in a robe and turban isn't supposed to be able to overthrow a modern westernizing country.
But it happened! Great book, anyone interested in the Middle East would learn a lot from reading it.