The Ayatollah in the Cathedral

Abstract

"The Ayatollah in the Cathedral," to borrow the term coined by Thomas Kuhn, is a book that opens the gateway to paradigmatic tranformations in the theory of international relations and the art of effectively handling foreign affairs. Dr. Kennedy was one of the 50 hostages who went through the 444 days' ordeal in Iran. He gives a detailed account of the events witnessed and experienced by him as a hostage. The traumatic psychological impact of being a hostage in a revolution is not easy for others fully to understand as outsiders; still the reader is able to see that there were many occasions when Dr. Kennedy, as a hostage, thought that his death was imminent. A mediocre author would easily have made his story of captivity a "best seller' by capitalizing on hatred and by saying what the domestic opinion makers in the United States want to hear. Instead, Dr. Kennedy defies this common heritage of American scholarship on the Middle East. In this book, he emerges as a serious thinker with an outstanding ability to analyze the facts with scientific objectivity. What makes this book a remarkable multidisciplinary masterpiece is Mr. Kennedy's professionally skillful and scientific analysis of the process and factors that shape U. S. foreign policy at the State Department; the weaknesses of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East; the causes of the U. S. failure to understand the Third World in general and the Muslim world in particular; and an alternative to U. S. foreign policy making that would ensure mutual respect and trust not only in the Middle East but in the Third World in general, thereby restoring the effectiveness of the United States as a world leader. This book is unique and pivotal in the area of international relations because Dr. Kennedy attempts to provide an alternative approach for U. S. foreign policy. This approach would enable policymakers to protect U. S. interests while at the same time winning mutual trust in the Muslim world; goals which, under present policy, seem to be mutually exclusive. The basic flaw in American foreign policy making, as pointed out by Dr. Kennedy, is that "our analyses of over-seas problems are too often based on abstraction - what the problem should be rather than what really is. We indulge ourselves in the luxury of seeing what we want to see and denying what we do not want to see." (p. 196). Elaborating on the dangers of this approach to foreign policy, he says: "The problem is not professional but cultural. And ...