The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution

The Persian Sphinx, by Abbas Milani, is the biography of Amir Abbas Hoveyda — the Shah's longest-serving prime minister, in office from 1965 to 1977, who was executed by a revolutionary tribunal in the first months after the revolution in 1979. The English edition appeared in 2000 and a Persian translation a year later.

Milani distilled four years of research — unpublished letters and diaries, archival material, and interviews with more than a hundred of Hoveyda's relatives, friends, and foes — into the book. He casts Hoveyda as a riddle: a cultivated, literary technocrat navigating the political complexities of his era, caught between the ideal of modernization and the political storms of the age. Around his life, the book also sketches Iran's social and political history and US–Iran relations across those decades.

Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford and a Hoover Institution fellow, is among the foremost historians of modern Iran. For diaspora readers, The Persian Sphinx is a key to understanding the technocratic wing of the late Pahlavi state and why it collapsed — and a reminder of the bitter fate of men crushed in the machinery of revolution.