A Sure Seller -- Somewhere

By DAVID ELLIS

Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Shi'ite literary critic who upheld a death sentence against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, wants to be a best-selling author himself. Rafsanjani's co-author is offering the 400-page manuscript for Our Revolution: The Ideology Behind the Movement to U.S. publishing houses. Excerpts from the work show that the Ayatullah Khomeini's political heir still has a jaundiced view of the Great Satan. "Our real desire, from the beginning, was to humiliate the United States throughout the world," writes Rafsanjani. Moreover, Westerners "are members of the school of pleasure-seeking, lasciviousness, enjoyment and entertainment . . . ((caught in)) the fetid, slimy bed of lust and pleasure." Showing some worldliness himself, Rafsanjani is offering to provide rare family snapshots and even "unpublished" photographs of the American hostages held for 444 days in Iran to anyone who snaps up his book.

With reporting by Sidney Urquhart