There was a moment this summer when we all adjusted ourselves to Iranian standard time. As the protests over the June 12 presidential election caught on and Tehran began bundling out foreign correspondents, a unique interpretation of Iran was transacted. Blogs betrayed sleepless obsessiveness as they tracked protests, compiling email and cell-phone videos streaming out of the country. And people around the world changed their Twitter profiles to indicate they were messaging from Iran and thereby confuse the censors.

Now, as the streets become quiet once again, making sense of the relative calm is proving to be more difficult. The contested results, in this, the thirtieth anniversary of Khomeini’s Revolution, have brought out into the public domain fissures in the Iranian establishment, with children of the Revolution, like Mohammad Khatami, and some of Qom’s Ayatollahs making the strongest assertions of differences with the Supreme Leader and the re-elected president.

Hooman Majd’s book was published before the election (though oddly it has only now been made available in India), but to read it is to make the events of this summer that much more comprehensible. Majd, a US-based grandson of an Ayatollah and related to Khatami, brings a unique perspective. He brings in observations of both insider and outsider, of course, but his sporadic work for different Iranian presidents informs the book with a profile of the current leadership. He says he served as an “unpaid adviser” to Khatami, and also as translator at the UN to him and to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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