From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith
SOHRAB AHMARI
(Ignatius Press, 240 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 4064

A powerful story of conversion offers too many answers, too few questions

I find this a difficult book to review and feel rather churlish for saying so. It’s the brave, honest and often very dramatic story of a young Iranian, born into a comfortable, middle-class, not particularly religious, Shia family, in Tehran, in 1985, and his journey, through a litany of disillusionment, towards the Roman Catholic Church. Sohrab Ahmari was born exactly six years after Ayatollah Khomeini had been brought home in triumph from Paris, to turn Iran upside down. His family had flourished under the Shah, whose regime Ahmari describes, in a sweeping overstatement, as “a benevolent autocracy” – a bit rich when you consider the extravagance, corruption and cruelty of Mohammad Reza Shah’s last decades in power, and his use, from 1953, of Savak, arguably the nastiest secret police force in the long dark history of political repression.

Sohrab Ahmari, of course, came from a pro-Western milieu and from the beginning he’s clear about his admiration for American values and culture. Many middle-class Iranians shared this admiration and one of the fascinations of the book is a boy’s-eye view of what it was like to live in Khomeini’s theocracy in the 1980s, balancing your preferred lifestyle with the intrusions of the religious police – the dreaded Komiteh.