342. Iran: The Three Ayatollahs – From Revolution to Dynasty

Hello and welcome back to Empire. It's just me today, I'm afraid, because Anita is on a different project, but she will be back next week. Now we are going to disrupt our Mao series. They're all recorded and you can actually hear them if you're a club member, but we are taking a break from that for the very good reason that the Middle East is in the middle of a war. The Middle East is something that we have very much specialized in here at Empire Pod.

We had the wonderful Ottoman series right at the beginning. We had a long 26-part history of Iran and we did our Gaza series last autumn, which was, I think, the most successful series we've ever done. So we thought we would take a break from now and return to some of our most uh brilliant guests who are Middle Eastern experts and ask how they see history playing out in the present with this conflict. If you are desperate to see Ranamitta and Mao immediately and you are a club member, you just follow the link in the episode description. The good news is that with me I have Ali Ansari, our old friend of the show, who led us through the Iranian Revolution women freedom when things look rather optimistic.

Well, I mean, I'm not sure it was happier times, but uh certainly better times. Uh and with uh certainly a view that uh things would change. I mean I'm not I'm not entirely unconvinced that things will uh not change. I think things probably are in the process of changing even now, but obviously the way in which it's being done is uh is less satisfactory, let's put it that way.

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