Arabs Rise, Tehran Trembles.

IN ''Garden of the Brave in War,'' his classic memoir of life on a pomegranate farm in 1960s Iran, the American writer Terence O'Donnell recounts how his illiterate house servant, Mamdali, would wake him every morning with a loud knock on the door and a simple question: ''Are you an Arab or an Iranian?'' ''If I was naked,'' O'Donnell explained, ''I would answer that I'm an Arab and he would wait outside the door, whereas if I was clothed I would reply that I was an Iranian and he would come in with the coffee.'' This joke went hand in hand, O'Donnell wrote, with an age-old chauvinism that depicted the Persians' Arab neighbors as ''uncivilized people who went about unclothed and ate lizards.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]