"An American Martyr in Persia" is another fantastic book by Reza Aslan, centering on a chronological narrative and not, for the most part, on moralistic judgment. It is the biography of Howard Baskerville, a 22-year-old Presbyterian missionary from the Black Hills of South Dakota who traveled in 1907 to Tabriz, a town in northern Iran, to do "the Mohammedan work." That is how his church defined the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Baskerville died less than two years later in 1909, shot in a battle between pro-democracy rebels—whose "constitutionalist" cause he had embraced—and the forces of the Shah of Persia, who was determined to snuff out all political rebellion.
Before his death, Howard Baskerville had been told by the American consul in Tabriz not to get involved in a war that was not his own. The young man's answer (as told to us by the Author - Reza Aslan) was stirring: "The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth, and that is not a big difference." On his death, Baskerville's Persian companions granted him a respectful title, "the American Lafayette"—after the French soldier who had fought in the American Revolutionary War. Baskerville was a compassionate, even beguiling, fellow, and the book brings flamboyant panache to his story. Bazaars teem with hirsute brigands, and Maxim guns go “takka takka takka.” If the writing is often overwrought, it captures the mood and drama of the milieu in which the young American found himself. Armed with a letter of recommendation from no less than Woodrow Wilson—his mentor at Princeton—Baskerville persuaded the Presbyterian Church to send him abroad. (There is a tedious tangent in which the Author dwells on Wilson's "unrepentant racism.”) Like many of his era, Baskerville desired to go to China but was transferred to Persia, regarded by the church as a hardship posting. A missionary at the time described the Persian character as "that of treachery and falsehood in the extreme." Persia was in the grasp of a political revolution when Baskerville arrived in September 1907. Ten months earlier, the Shah—Muzaffar ad-Din, of the Qajar dynasty—had yielded to protests and accepted the institution of a parliament and a liberal constitution, new checks on his previously unfettered powers. He was diligently in debt to Russia and Britain, both of whom were using Persia as the "staging ground" (in the Author's words) of the Great Game, the term used to describe the Anglo-Russian rivalry over Central Asia. Muzaffar died only days after making his concession and was succeeded by his son Mohammed Ali, an entirely more hardline Shah in thrall to his Russian advisers. The Author describes him as a "pompous, pudgy young man with a ridiculous mustache" who was "incensed with his father for making his God-given authority suddenly contingent upon the will of the people." Mohammed Ali, egged on by his Russian aide-de-camp, cracked down on Parliament, which led to a prolonged standoff and widespread violence in Tehran. Tabriz, to the north, closer to Azerbaijan and Armenia than to the capital, had always been a rebellious city. This multilingual, multireligious border town was as Turkic as it was Persian. Its council had asserted a striking degree of political independence with the coming of the 1906 constitution and wasn't about to surrender its liberty to a young Shah with authoritarian inclinations. Baskerville arrived as Tabriz seethed and soon drifted away from the "tranquility" of the American Memorial School (where he taught and lived) into the company of local intellectuals and "secret societies" that sought to defy the Shah. The book strains to persuade us that Baskerville's adoption of the constitutional cause sprang from a love of liberty and political freedom that he'd acquired at Princeton (paradoxically from Woodrow Wilson). But more important may be that the genuine young man, who made friends quickly, was heartbroken by the assassination of his best friend, a Persian fellow teacher at the school who was closely involved with the resistance. His friend's death drove him to join the Tabriz rebels, too, and their leader—a reformed bandit, called Sattar Khan—made Baskerville his second-in-command. Sattar was no fool: Although Baskerville had little military skill, he was invaluable as a symbol and a magnet for support. "American Defends Tabriz," screamed a headline in the New York Times just days before Baskerville's death. The Shah's forces encircled Tabriz, and Baskerville was killed as he tried to lead a small posse—an "Army of Salvation"—to break the siege. The martyred Baskerville, says the Author, became a local hero. For many Iranians, he "embodied" a romantic idea of the U.S.: "youthful, impassioned, a little bit naïve, perhaps, but earnest in the conviction that freedom is inalienable." Yet even as he tells us Baskerville's story, The Author can't resist kicking at modern America. Iranians expected America, "a nation of Baskervilles," to support them in their struggle against the Shah in the years before Ayatollah Khomeini, whose revolution he describes with staggering banality as "a different form of tyranny." America, he complains, was more concerned with "its interests than its principles" in Iran. Mr. Aslan tells us Baskerville's story with passion and sweetness. It's a pity he's so sour about the land that gave his family shelter. Baskerville's role in the Persian struggle to become an independent and democratic society made him a hero in his adopted country. Back at home in America, however, his story is not well-known, and his legacy is not celebrated. An American Martyr in Persia highlights the complex historical ties between America and Iran and the potential of a single individual to change the course of history. In this rip-roaring story of his life and death, Aslan offers us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy—and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Interwoven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran—frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville's life and death represent a "road not taken" in Iran. Baskerville's story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy, and whose freedom do we support? An important question to ask as we witness today in Iran, schoolgirls chant "Woman, Life, Freedom" (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi).
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