A place of paranoia, secrecy, corruption, hypocrisy and guilt

‘Is he a good writer? Is he pro-regime?’ an Iranian journalist in London once asked me of Hooman Majd. Majd is an Iranian-American journalist who was born in Tehran in 1957, but is better known in America. His father was a well-travelled Pahlavi-era diplomat, and his grandfather was an ayatollah. His cousin is married to the brother of Iran’s former president Mohammed Khatami. Majd is not religious, but his criticisms of the Islamic Republic have tended toward the procedural rather than the substantive. He is married to an American, Karri, with whom he has a young son.

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Family is the great theme of his books. His writings give the impression that Iranians are a big family in need of reconciliation, not another traumatic reckoning on the model of 1979. That view is common in Iran, but Majd’s writing about Iranian ‘reformists’ and ‘pragmatists’ is usually over-sweet.