Ebtekar’s tweet was accompanied with a photograph of Khomieni, and so our conversation took a turn to discuss him. Limbert, who holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, knows his history. In 1968, years before he was a diplomat, he published an article on the Kurds in pre-Islamic in the flagship journal Iranian Studies. Since then he has published books not only on the familiar topic of US relations but on the city of Shiraz in the medieval age and its fabled mystical poet, Hafez.
“If you read history,” Limbert tells me. “you’d know Khomeini started off as a far-right politician. He was preaching against the White Revolution in 1962 and his positions were on the extreme of the religious spectrum. Not a lot of people paid attention before he shifted to a much more nationalist point of view. But people like Niloofar should have known better!” Limbert humorously uses the birth name of Masoumeh Ebtekar before she swapped the Persian name Niloofar for the more religious-sounding Masoumeh, the name of a 9th-century relative of Shia Imams buried in the holy city of Qom in central.
