While the night posed a challenge to authority of the sultan, it was also opportunity to showcase the power of the ruler. By illuminating mosques, Sufi lodges and palaces; in public and private light spectacles, and through court-produced texts, Ottoman sultans in the eighteenth century sought to associate themselves with light and through this association, to project their power and legitimate it in the eyes of their subjects and rivals. The two mediums, words and light, were intentionally and intricately connected to serve this purpose. While Ottoman use of actual and figurative light to project royal power and legitimacy had a long history, the palace elite of the early eighteenth century, and in particular the ruling clique of the so-called Tulip Era (narrowly defined 1718–1730), took it to a whole new level.

It would seem that with the reopening of the taverns in 1827, everything was back to normal. The night in the capital assumed its old, familiar form, allowing what the day forbade. But, with the eradication of the janissaries and the final marginalization of the Bektaşis, the forces that had pushed back against the incursion of sultanic authority into the night and kept it as a space of ambivalence and ambiguity, but also of much violence and insecurity, were finally gone. The night would now be gradually colonized by an increasingly centralizing government promoting more orthodox Islam.1

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as faith. First, the chapter attempts to clarify the use of the term “faith” as opposed to “religion.” The notion of dignity/karama is not just related to Islam, but also to a social condition that is embedded in one’s religious status and the accompanying process of socialization. The discussion of a human’s worth, central to understanding dignity/karama, is often related to religious studies. Given the broad context of this relationship, the focus here is to look only at the scholarship suggested from the interviews: notably dignity for Spinoza, for Pico della Mirandola, and for the secularists versus Islamists and in their debate with each other. The chapter gives milestones for the understanding of the discussion of karama and faith/religion in the interviews presented in this chapter.

The standard works place the coup against Mossadeq solidly in the context of the Cold War and the fear of communism – both of the Tudeh Party and of the Soviet Union. This chapter instead locates it firmly within the context of the wider American concern that successful nationalization in Iran would inevitably became contagious and endanger business enterprises elsewhere, especially oil investments in Latin America, Indonesia, and other parts of the Middle East.

The 1906 Constitutional Revolution had tried to create a parliamentary form of government with the monarch as titular figurehead. Reza Shah, however, in 1925–41, had reduced parliament to a rubber stamp. Mossadeq, in addition to nationalizing the oil industry, tried to reassert parliamentary authority and civilian control over the armed forces. This brought him in conflict with Mohammad Reza Shah. Thus the oil crisis and the constitutional crisis became interwoven paving the way to the coup.

The book is an analysis of recently released CIA and State Department documents on Iran during the period of Mossadeq’s premiership beginning in April 1951 until his overthrow by the CIA in August 1953. These documents had been kept classified some thirty years beyond their scheduled date of release. They reveal that the United Kingdom and USA resorted to “fake news” and “electoral collusion” to undermine Mossadeq. They also reveal the existence of a “deep state” within the Truman administration advocating Mossadeq’s removal as early as May 1951.

The United Kingdom and USA favored the removal of Mossadeq as early as 1952 but the main obstacle to a military coup had been the shah. He insisted the removal had to be through non-military means. The CIA began drawing up plans for a coup early on, but succeeded in persuading the shah to lend his name to the coup only after the parliament method had failed. It even had to resort to intensive pressures including the threat of replacing him with one of his brothers.

Our knowledge of the 1953 coup has been distorted in part because US documents remained classified until recently – the British ones remain so; and in part because revisionist historians have argued endlessly that external powers played merely secondary roles while the primary actors were internal ones, namely the conservative clergy. The new documents show that without the CIA there would have been no royal participation, no parliamentary obstructionism, no tank officer coordination, and no clerical involvement. The coup, by undermining the legitimacy of the monarchy, helped pave the way to the 1979 revolution – precisely the reason the shah had been reluctant to lend his name.