https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14325/ayatollah-khamenei-books
The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title “En Ma’a al-sabr fathan” (“Patience Leads to Victory”) but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title, “The Drop of Blood That Became a Ruby”. The “Supreme Guide,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recalls his “passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels” and insists on “the deep impact” that reading novels had on him.
Top of Khamenei’s list are 10 of the cloak-and-dagger novels written by Michel Zevaco, the Corsican-French writer who helped popularize what the English call “penny-dreadful” romances in France…. Zevaco’s world is a universe of sex, violence, conspiracy and betrayal. In Zevaco’s best-selling novel “Borgia,” the head of the dreadful Borgia family that dominated Florentine politics in the medieval times, rapes his own sister Lucrece, a seductive blonde. The novel “Nostradamus” is a fictionalized biography of a roaming charlatan who claimed to read the future to gain money, power, sex and fame.
Khamenei says he loved and cherished all those books. Ironically, however, all the novels he devoured with great appetite are on a blacklist of books that “corrupt public morality and violate religious values”, established under President Muhammad Khatami in 1999. Iranians who are today the same age as Khamenei was in his youth cannot read the books he loved.
“Tell me which books you read, and I’ll tell you who you are!” That was how the late Iranian literary critic Mohit Tabatabai used to tease Tehran’s glitterati in the “good old days.” To be sure, the claim wasn’t based on any scientific study but empirical evidence showed that it wasn’t quite off the mark either. Books do offer an insight into the soul of a reader, provided he has a soul.
Thus, those interested in all things Iranian, especially in these exciting times, wouldn’t want to miss a new book on the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if only because it devotes a chapter to books that he loved as a young man.
The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title “En Ma’a al-sabr fathan” (“Patience Leads to Victory”) but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title, “The Drop of Blood That Became a Ruby”. The “Supreme Guide” recalls his “passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels” and insists on “the deep impact” that reading novels had on him.
