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Days of rage.

Article Excerpt
THE CRISIS: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah--1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam.

By David Harris.

Little, Brown. 470 pp. $26.95.

TAKEN HOSTAGE: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam.

By David Farber.

Princeton. 212 pp. $22.95.

On November 4, 1979, a few months after the collapse of the Iranian monarchy and the inauguration of Iran's Islamic Republic, a group of college students calling themselves the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam rushed the gates of the US Embassy in Tehran, scaled its walls and promptly took control of the compound and its diplomatic staff. The students' objective was simple. They would peacefully occupy the embassy's courtyard for forty-eight to seventy-two hours and use the ensuing spotlight both to present their objections to American meddling in Iranian affairs and to publicly discourage Iran's shaky provisional government from aligning itself with the Carter Administration. The students were unarmed--this was a peaceful act of civil disobedience, not a violent takeover. Once their grievances had been properly aired, they would release their captives and hand the embassy back over to the Americans.

This was not the first time the embassy had been attacked during that tumultuous year. Nine months earlier, on Valentine's Day, a smaller group had briefly captured the compound before being immediately dispatched by an irritated Ayatollah Khomeini, who personally apologized to William Sullivan, the American ambassador, for the incident. So when the embassy staff saw the Muslim Students running around the courtyard "like little kids in an amusement park," in the words of one Marine, they assumed this would be a repeat of the Valentine's Day seizure. Surely rescue would soon be on its way, especially once the Ayatollah, who had pledged to protect the embassy, received word of what had happened. No one--not the embassy staff nor their student captors--could have predicted that this would be the beginning of a hostage crisis that would seize the imaginations of both countries for 444...