Context: The revolution of 1905-1911, the Anglo-Russian active opposition to the revolution, the abdication of a shah and ascendance of another, reactionaries and conservatives continued to promote royalism and the execution of one of them–Fazlullah Nuri*. “My countrymen I loathe and execrate, My country is the object of my hate! I represent the Monarch wise and great, Who to my hands commits the nation’s fate! ‘Tis time for breakfast. Put this business through! Who bids? Who bids? Come Sir, a bid from you!” Quoted in E. G. Browne’s The Press and Poetry of Modern Iran , 1914, Cambridge University Press * Nuri “was hanged in his turban and cloak, an eloquent tableau of clerical authority subordinated to profane law. It is a telling commentary on the spread of constitutional ideas that the sentence was endorsed by many of the senior ulema of Iraq, as well as Nuri’s own son, Mahdi, who ‘stood at the foot of the gallows, reviling his father, and urging the [executioners] to br
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51