Catherine Perez-Shakdam

Iran’s clerical establishment has spent nearly half a century insisting – always with that brittle certainty peculiar to ideologues – that history culminated in 1979. That the Shah is a hushed embarrassment, monarchy a quaint relic, and the very notion of a crown something to be packed away with mothballs and other discarded finery. Yet

There are moments in the life of a democracy when ambiguity becomes complicity. On Sunday, in the heart of London, such a moment unfolded with eerie precision and devastating clarity. During the annual Quds Day rally – an event imported from the revolutionary streets of Tehran – demonstrators hoisted images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the