Christopher de Bellaigue is a young and successful journalist who is married to an Iranian woman, speaks fluent Persian, and lives in Teheran. Born in 1971 and educated at Cambridge University, he has written for the Economist, the New York Review of Books, Granta, and the New Yorker. “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs” (HarperCollins,304 pages,$26.95) is an anecdotal description of life in Iran by a privileged insider, interspersed with reflections on Iranian politics and Persian and Islamic history.

The most vivid element of the book are Mr. de Ballaigue’s first-person experiences, as he seeks out and interviews men and women who participated in the Islamic Revolution, the lengthy war with Iraq, and the upheavals of the past quarter-century. His colorful reportage fleshes out cultural assumptions (the general acceptance of women’s inferior status, for example) and religious convictions (such as the embrace of martyrdom as a fulfilling goal) that make the reader aware of how different our respective worlds are.

Unfortunately, the book lacks any narrative thread. The author’s fascinating encounters with Iranians do not build to any particular conclusion about the nature of Iranian society; they seem episodic, mini-essays stitched together with no apparent rationale. Similarly, his frequent references to personalities and political events are disconnected and confusing. Mr. de Bellaigue really should have included a biographical reference guide to help the reader keep track of the large cast of clerics, political figures, and ordinary Iranians who people his pages.

I started the book with the expectation that I might gain understanding into a culture that contains many disparate aspects: a dazzling Persian inheritance and a government of harsh Islamic fundamentalism; a history of educated and accomplished women and a present regime that imposes the chador and other restrictions on all women. I had hoped to learn more about the student movement and whether it might be the precursor of a new, democratic Iran. None of these hopes was fulfilled.

Not until the final chapters of the book does the author disclose his own political views, which explained these lacunae to me. When he was a university student in Britain, he says, his course included Iranian Studies but he “had few opinions about contemporary Iran.” At that time, the character of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime was well established, and the author’s diffidence says more about him than it does about contemporary Iran. Then, in 1999, he visited Iran and met his future wife.

Although he writes eloquently about the regime’s purges, assassinations, and press censorship, he does so in a way that is strangely nonjudgmental. Whatever the imams might have done, he says, the Shah and his secret police were worse. The Revolutionary government committed its share of human rights abuses, he admits: “An Iranian-Canadian journalist had been beaten to death while in the care of the chief prosecutor” – but he doesn’t mention that the journalist, Zahra Kazemi, was a woman.

One of his favorite characters says that “You can’t compare the physical torture now with the torture before the Revolution. … During the Shah’s time, they’d pull out nails, attach electrodes to sensitive parts of the body … what they called the Israeli methods.” The imams prefer to “torture” people by disseminating false rumors about financial or sexual improprieties and damaging their reputation. (Apparently what was done to Zahra Kazemi didn’t count as torture).

In the closing pages of the book, we learn that Mr. de Bellaigue is not actually nonjudgmental. Distancing himself from those who are horrified by the reign of the mullahs, he acknowledges that he “wanted the reformists to succeed. I’d wanted them to defy the Iranian exiles, sitting in L.A., who summoned the people to rebellion through the medium of U.S.-funded television broadcasts. I’d wanted them to disappoint America’s neo-conservatives who, from a position of near-complete ignorance, wrote fluid little Utopias about a Middle East built anew in the image of New England.” His dearest hope was that Iran would preserve the newly won “liberty to take important decisions without having to consult a superpower.”

In a concluding chapter, called “Friends,” Mr. de Bellaigue describes his experiences with Hassan Abdolrahman, a black American Muslim once known as David Belfield. The author found a certain kinship with Hassan as they were both “Western men who had married Iranian women and were living in Iran.” Hassan was very different from the author, however: In 1980, on assignment from the Khomeini government, Hassan disguised himself as a postman and assassinated former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai at his home in Bethesda, Md., then fled to Teheran.

While most people would view Hassan’s act as terrorism, Mr. de Bellaigue finds it impossible to judge him. After all, he says, Hassan and Tabatabai were combatants in a “war,” and thus Hassan may have acted legitimately.

Perhaps for similar reasons, Mr. de Bellaigue makes no more than passing reference to Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups. Ultimately, there is something repulsive about a book that finds “brilliant integrity” in a group of men who are willing to kill and die for beliefs that promote terrorism, totalitarianism, and the repression of human freedoms.