My working hypothesis was that a “War and Peace” for today would be set in the Middle East, perhaps in the Arab world. I had in mind Baghdad as St. Petersburg, with an Iraqi Pierre caught up in the events that followed 9/11. In my version, the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 would be analogous to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812.

If “War and Peace” were to be written today, where would it be set — and who would write it? I posed these questions at a dinner in Silicon Valley on Thursday. The best answer came from the Iranian historian Abbas Milani.

There can never be too many adaptations of “War and Peace,” the greatest novel ever written. I therefore welcome the BBC’s new six-part series soon to air in the United States. For me, however, it is no mere substitute for “Downton Abbey.” Its themes are far more profound, and more urgent.

Milani had a better idea. Iran, he argued, had much more in common with the Russia of Tolstoy’s day than any Arab country. “Take Isaiah Berlin’s book, ‘Russian Thinkers.’ All you need to do is change the names and you have Iran in our time.”


In Iran today, as in 1860s Russia, the regime is autocratic and repressive, but intellectual life is vibrant. And, as in Tolstoy’s time, there is a heated debate in contemporary Tehran between Westernizers and the staunchly Orthodox — though in this case the Orthodoxy is Shi’ite Islam, not Eastern Christianity.

An Iranian Tolstoy, Milani argued, would start his novel in the mid-1970s — the time when he himself returned from the United States as a freshly minted PhD.

Just as Tolstoy’s Pierre starts out as a naive enthusiast for Napoleon, so the young Professor Milani was a convinced Marxist. And just as the events of 1812 gave Pierre a thorough lesson in the wickedness of Bonaparte, so the events of 1979 revealed to Milani the limits of his imported ideology. He and his fellow leftists foolishly believed they could make common cause with the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. A spell in jail, and the executions of many of his comrades, taught him otherwise.


“If the purpose of history is the description of the flux of humanity and of peoples,” Tolstoy wrote in his dazzling final chapter, “the first question to be answered . . . will be: What is the power that moves nations?”

What is the power that moves nations? That same question poses itself in our time. What was the power that caused Islam to revive as a political force in the 1970s? Why, so soon after the overthrow of the Shah, did Iraq invade Iran, launching one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the Cold War era?

The consequences of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War haunt us to this day. Slowly, gradually, we are all coming to understand that the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia — which that war did so much to revive and deepen — could produce another great conflict in our own time. Saudi Arabia’s decision to execute the Shi’ite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr on Jan. 2 has significantly increased the tension between Riyadh and Tehran, at a time when sectarian strife is already tearing Iraq and Syria apart. No one knows what lies ahead in the Middle East, to say nothing of North Africa. Few people can seriously believe that the tide of violence will suddenly recede.


Just as what happened in 1812 had consequences for all of Europe, and indeed for the British and French empires around the world, so the events that followed the Iranian Revolution have affected us all. Today, no greater question confronts Europeans than how to contend with another great “flux of humanity” — the massive migration from the Muslim world triggered by the Syrian civil war and the chronic instability, unfreedom and poverty of other Islamic countries. Yet we struggle to understand, much less to answer, the question.

The Western world desperately needs an Iranian genius, able to illuminate his country’s experience as Tolstoy illuminated Russia’s. For what Tolstoy and his literary contemporaries achieved proved invaluable. It gave us an understanding of the Russian people that withstood even the menace of Stalin. Today, a great part of our difficulty—and it extends all the way to the very top—is that we do not well understand the Iranian people, much less the people of the Sunni world.

Two scenes are immortal in “War and Peace”: Prince Andrei’s heroic near-death at the Battle of Austerlitz, and the coup de foudre when Pierre first sees Natasha. What would I not give for equivalent moments of illumination from some unknown Persian masterpiece!

Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.