Michael Axworthy
Former diplomat who challenged the image of Iran as an ‘evil empire’ and sponsor of global terrorism
MICHAEL AXWORTHY, who has died of cancer aged 56, was a former career diplomat who became a leading authority on Iran and the author of several nuanced accounts of Iranian history, academic and popular, which sought to dispel the caricature of that country as an evil empire ruled by fanatical mullahs implacably hostile to the West.
Axworthy, a frequent contributor to print and broadcast media, was no apologist for what he called a “repressive, autocratic regime run in the interests of a narrow clique that systematically denies political freedoms and natural rights to the Iranian people”. But he contended that more opprobrium had been heaped on Iran than is justified by the facts.
In an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2013 Axworthy observed that Iran is not a highly militarised state and its defence spending is low to moderate by international standards. Neither the Islamic Republic nor previous Iranian governments had had a history of initiating aggressive war: “Rather the contrary – they have taken a defensive stance and have been the victims of such wars, notably the Iran-iraq war of 1980–88.”
The theme running through Axworthy’s books was that Iran has always seen itself as misunderstood and exploited or threatened by external enemies.
In works such as Iran: Empire of the Mind (2007) he explored its distinct civilisation, contrasting the “Axis of Evil” stereotype with the country’s self-conscious pride in its inheritance of the ancient civilisation of Persia, with its elegant poets reciting ghazals about nightingales and its thinkers and prophets whose works influenced Jesus, Plato and the humanists of 15th and 16th century Italy.
It was the Persian prophet Zoroaster, Axworthy pointed out, who introduced the idea of a monotheism linked to moral rectitude, and it was the Persian leader Cyrus the Great who restored the Israelites to Jerusalem. Christianity, he argued, “probably owes more to Tehran than Athens”.
The real problem for Iran was its position in the “Great Game”, when by turns Britain, France, Russia, Germany and the United States required its strategic compliance in wider geopolitical issues. Foreign powers saw Iran as not important in itself, but important for tactical reasons, breeding a climate of resentment against which figures such as
Ayatollah Khomeini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are best understood.
After the Islamic revolution the West largely sided with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-iraq war, which began when Iraq launched an invasion in 1980, continuing to back Baghdad even when Saddam used chemical weapons. The experience confirmed Iran in its belief that “fine words in international institutions counted for little”.
There had been moments of rapprochement, even between Iran and Israel (Iran gave Israel intelligence to help it destroy Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, Axworthy claimed, and Israel subsequently supplied Iran with weapons worth $500 million), but those openings had been squandered.
The accusation of support for terrorism derived from Iran’s largely self-defeating position that all means are legitimate to counter Israel. But Axworthy saw this as an anomaly within the wider picture of a foreign policy geared towards maintaining stability in the region.
Iran condemned the 9/11 attacks, and in both Iraq and Afghanistan helped to establish the protodemocratic governments backed by the West (in the Afghan case they were thanked at the time for this by US negotiators). Iran is also accused of destabilising the region through its support for militias in Iraq, but this, Axworthy pointed out, ignores how these militias are a prime prop to the Western-backed Shia-led government and have been a leading element in the fight against Isil.
As for its animosity towards Israel, Axworthy contrasted Iran’s warlike rhetoric with the decision to withdraw support from Hamas and the reduction of violent activity towards Israel by Iran’s ally, Hizbollah, as it tries to present itself as a Lebanese political party rather than a paramilitary group.
Iran’s reward, however, had been to be lumped together with Iraq and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil” by George W Bush and caricatured by Donald Trump as the leading world sponsor of terrorism.
The fact is, Axworthy argued, that almost all
Islamic terrorism is associated with Sunni groups with links to the West’s “ally”, Saudi Arabia: “There is nothing on the Iranian or Shia side to compare with the damage done by the extreme Wahhabi world-view that led to the attacks of September 11 2001, the atrocities of IS in Iraq and Syria and its outrages in Paris, Nice, London and Manchester.”
In a region where many other states are repressive and ruthless in pursuit of their own interests, Axworthy concluded in The Daily Telegraph in 2017, “it is all the more important to see Iran and the region as they are, rather than as the bogeyman that is the sum of all our fears.”
Michael George Andrew Axworthy was born at Woking in Surrey on September 26 1962. His father worked for a British bank and the family spent much time abroad, including, from 1975 to 1978, in Iran, where the teenage Michael would spend his holidays from the King’s School, Chester. He was in Tehran in the summer of 1978 when the uprising against the Shah entered its crucial phase.
Axworthy read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he fell under the influence of Maurice Cowling. After graduation, he entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1986, serving in Malta and Bonn before being appointed first secretary and head of the Iran Section in the FCO’S Middle East department in 1998.
Two years later he switched to an academic career, teaching Middle East History at Durham and at Exeter, where he became Director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies. In 2017 he was a Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, and the following year became a Senior Research Associate there.
His first book, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006) told the story of a central figure in Iran’s early modern history – a shepherd boy who rose to liberate his country from foreign occupation and make himself ruler of Persia from 1736 to 1747, leading it from political collapse to become the dominant power in the region.
In Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (2013), Axworthy showed how a revolution whose original spurs were economic and political, rather than religious, gave rise to the first Shia Muslim theocracy in the world. Iran: What Everyone Needs to Know (2017) provided general readers with a concise overview of Iranian history from ancient times, following that with sharp summaries of the key events since the 1979 revolution. He also co-edited Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War: The History and Historiography of 18th Century Iran (2018).
In 2015 Axworthy launched the Westphalia for the Middle East project, a joint initiative of the Forum on Geopolitics of the University of Cambridge and the Körber Foundation. The aim was to examine new approaches for resolving conflict in the Middle East by looking at solutions that worked in the 1948 Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War; with P Milton and B Simms Axworthy wrote Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East (2018).
In 1996 he married Sally Hinds (currently Britain’s Ambassador to the Vatican), who survives him with their three daughters and a son.