Iran: Empire of the Mind (39 page)

Kasravi is significant for a number of different reasons. He stands for a certain strand of thinking in Iran, typical of the Pahlavi period in some ways, which became important again in the ’60s and ’70s, and which rejected the backwardness of Shi‘ism as it was practised, blaming it for many of the weaknesses and failures of the country. His thinking was influential among the middle classes who benefited from the opportunities that arose under the Pahlavis. His disapproval of the cult of Persian poetry is interesting because it again shows the cultural centrality of the great Persian poets, and points to the ambiguity in Iranian culture that they expressed and to some extent sustained. Ray Mottahedeh wrote:

In fact, Persian poetry came to be the emotional home in which the ambiguity that was at the heart of Iranian culture lived most freely and openly. What Persian poetry expressed was not an enigma to be solved but an enigma that was unsolvable. In Persian poetry of any worth nothing was merely something else; the inner space of the spirit in which Persian poetry underwent its thousand transformations was ultimately a place where this ambiguous language reached a private emotional value that had to remain private, because to decode it as mere allegory, to reexpress it in any form of explanatory paraphrase would be to place it back in the public domain and, therefore, in the realm in which it was intended to remain ambiguous.
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Eventually, after a period of tension, negotiations and pressure from the US and Britain, the Soviets announced their intention to withdraw from Iran, and by the end of May 1946 their forces were gone. Iranian troops marched in, somewhat rehabilitating the Iranian army in the eyes of the people, but (in the latter part of the year) reimposing central government control with some brutality. The episode discredited the Soviet Union for many Iranians, but not Tudeh, which grew in influence and took places in the government cabinet, helping to bring forward new labour laws, and to set maximum working hours and a minimum wage. But in 1949 Tudeh were accused of instigating an assassination attempt against the young Shah, and were banned, after which they could only make their influence felt through underground activity and through sympathetic writers and journalists. The US, profiting from the Russians’ unpopularity, increased their presence with advisers and technicians, training assistance to the army and other aid. Nationalist feeling was gratified by the restoration of Iranian territorial integrity in Azerbaijan, and attention turned back to other grievances—especially to the oil question.

Mossadeq

The assassination attempt of 1949 precipitated an extended period of crisis, demonstrations and martial law. In 1950 the Shah appointed a new Prime Minister, Ali Razmara, but Razmara was not popular: he was suspected of pro-British sympathies and his military background encouraged concern that the Shah intended a return to the militaristic, autocratic style of government his father had favoured in the 1930s. Over the same period Mohammad Mossadeq assembled a broad coalition of Majles deputies that came to be called the National Front, around a central demand for
oil nationalisation (he was widely believed also to have reached an accommodation with Tudeh). The Shah’s government attempted to negotiate with the AIOC for a revision of the terms of the oil concession, but the AIOC were slow to accept a 50/50 split of profits that had become the norm in oil agreements elsewhere in the world. The National Front and its demand for oil nationalisation were greatly strengthened in Majles elections in 1950, and in March 1951 Razmara was assassinated by the same extremist Islamic group that had murdered Kasravi. It was inevitable that, as the most popular politician in the country, Mossadeq would become Prime Minister.

Fig. 17. Mohammad Mossadeq became a symbol of Iran’s demand for control of her own oil resources and national integrity, and remained so after his fall from power in 1953.

Mossadeq was nearly seventy in 1951. He had Qajar ancestry and had studied in Paris and Switzerland, taking a doctorate in law. He had left the country in protest at the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, then opposed Reza Shah’s accession to power and was imprisoned for it before returning to prominence in the 1940s. His whole life had been dedicated to the cause of Iranian national integrity and constitutional government. Under his leadership, the Majles voted to nationalise Iranian oil on 15 March 1951 and on 28 April they named Mossadeq Prime Minister.

But nationalisation created an impasse as British technicians left the oil installations in Khuzestan and the British government imposed a blockade. No oil could be exported. Instead of contributing to the national revenue, the maintenance of oil installations and the salaries of oil workers became a drain on finances, gradually creating a large debt and wider economic problems. Mossadeq travelled to the US in the hope of a loan, but was refused.
US oil companies joined a boycott of Iranian oil, and the US government were increasingly concerned at the apparent involvement of communists in the oil nationalisation movement (Tudeh had led strikes and demonstrations). In hindsight the US position seems strange, given the plain fact that nationalisation enjoyed broad support across most classes and shades of opinion, but the movement was vocally anti-British and some voices anti-western. In the atmosphere of the times (especially after the advent of the Eisenhower administration and of Senator Joe McCarthy) the involvement of an underground communist movement with Soviet support was enough to damn the whole phenomenon in US eyes.

Despite deepening economic difficulties and the gradual, disappointing realisation that he could expect no help from the US in his confrontation with the British, Mossadeq continued as Prime Minister with massive support both in Majles and in the country in 1952. But tensions between different elements of the National Front coalition increased, as did the apparent strength of Tudeh, and there were more demonstrations. The government brought in new reforms, including measures that changed the relationship between landlords and peasants in favour of the latter, and Mossadeq used his support to pursue an older agenda of limiting the power of the monarchy. But when Mossadeq demanded the right to appoint the minister of war in the summer of 1952, to deal with the increasing unrest, the Shah refused and Mossadeq resigned. His successor immediately announced negotiations with the British to resolve the oil dispute, and the country erupted in demonstrations of disapproval (in which Tudeh took a prominent role). The Shah quickly caved in and reappointed Mossadeq, who broke diplomatic relations with Britain altogether at the end of the year. By this time the British were encouraging the US to cooperate in engineering a coup to get rid of Mossadeq.

Finally, in August 1953 the plan went ahead, to have Mossadeq removed as Prime Minister and to replace him with General Zahedi, a fervent monarchist (Zahedi had been arrested in February on accusations of plotting a coup with foreigners, and had been later released). But the plot misfired; there was a delay, Mossadeq found out about the coup (probably through Tudeh) and was able to forestall it. The Shah fled the country
and anti-royalist rioting broke out. Mossadeq sent in police and troops to control the riots and they succeeded; but they also alienated many of Mossadeq’s own supporters, and Tudeh. So when a new demonstration, this time against Mossadeq, appeared two days later on 19 August, Mossadeq’s supporters stayed away. This demonstration included bazaari supporters of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani (who had previously been an important supporter of the National Front, but had switched sides) and numbers of people instigated or paid to participate by the CIA (who had given the coup the codename Operation Ajax). Many members of the murky underworld of south Tehran took part—gang leaders like Sha’ban Ja‘fari Bimokh (Sha’ban the Brainless).
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Mossadeq was arrested, the army and Zahedi were in control, and the Shah returned. Mossadeq was tried and convicted of treason by a military court, but was allowed to live under house arrest until he died in 1967.

The coup could perhaps not have happened without some mistakes of Mossadeq’s own making (and it nearly failed), but it would not have happened without the intervention of the British SIS and the CIA.
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Although the story of the coup did not emerge for many years (and perhaps has not done so fully even now), Iranians blamed them at the time and have done so bitterly ever since. The idea that everything that happened in Iranian politics was manipulated by a hidden foreign hand was again reinforced, fathering dozens of improbable conspiracy theories in later years. Mossadeq became a national hero across most ideological, class and religious boundaries.

The coup had significance in a number of other ways. It established the US in a strong position in Iran as the prime ally and protector of the Pahlavi regime (and achieved the aim of eclipsing Soviet communist influence), but took away much of the enchantment the US had previously enjoyed popularly, as a virtuous alternative to the older powers—though the significance of the event took some time to sink in. For a time even after the coup some Iranians still believed, or hoped, that the Americans had been duped by the British and that fundamental US values would reassert themselves. But the US was Prince Charming no more. One could draw a parallel with British decisions in the 1870s and at other
times, which appeared to serve immediate short-term British interests, but treated Iran as an instrument to other ends rather than with respect as a partner. In the long run, as with British actions in the previous century, the removal of Mossadeq damaged US interests in a much more serious way than could have been imagined at the time.

The events of 1951-1953 also alienated many Iranians from the young Shah, making popular support for him in subsequent decades equivocal at best. Beyond Iran, the significance of the struggle to nationalise Iranian oil was widely felt in the Middle East, and it is generally accepted that the episode was important for the thinking of Jamal Abd al-Nasser (Nasser), who followed the example of Mossadeq and nationalised the Suez canal in July 1956. It would not be the last time that Iran, for better or worse, would indicate in advance the way events would unfold in the region more widely.

But the Mossadeq era disillusioned many young Iranians more generally about politics and the chances for change. One such was Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a complex man who was against many things, and only ambiguously for a few. He had been born into an ulema family in Tehran in 1923, but turned against a religious career (having read Kasravi) and later became a Marxist, under the influence of Khalil Maleki, one of the group arrested by Reza Shah in 1937. Al-e Ahmad in the long run was too critical and too individual to be a conventional Marxist and (like Maleki) he disliked the way that Tudeh had to toe the Soviet line after World War II. He actively supported Mossadeq, but after his fall renounced politics dramatically and publicly. Like Kasravi, he had an aversion to the traditions of classical Persian literature, and favoured a lean style of writing that
echoed the colloquial Persian of ordinary people. The most influential of his ideas was that of
gharbzadegi
—often translated as Westoxication or West-strickenness, which he put forward in talks and a book with that title in 1962. This attacked the uncritical way in which western ideas had been accepted and advocated, and taught in schools (often without being properly understood); producing people and a culture that were neither genuinely Iranian nor properly Western. Following a story by Mawlana Rumi, he compared it to a crow who saw one day the elegant way that a partridge walked. The crow tried to imitate the partridge, and failed, but kept trying, with the result that he forgot how to walk like a crow, but never succeeded in walking like a partridge.

Fig. 18. Jalal Al-e Ahmad.

As time went on, Al-e Ahmad was increasingly drawn back to religion (having initially followed the scornful, satirical example of Hedayat), but always disliked the superstition and empty traditionalism of many of the ulema—‘satisfied to be the gatekeeper at the graveyard’. Later, he drew attention to the way that oil wealth was spent on imported absurdities that earlier generations of Iranians could never have imagined they could want, and to the artificial, invented historical heritage presented by Mohammad Reza Shah as the backdrop to the Pahlavi monarchy. Al-e Ahmad brought some of the jaded anomie of Western modernism to Iranian literature, while keeping a strongly Iranian voice. He translated Sartre and Camus into Persian, but his firm attachment to intellectual honesty and his search for an authentic way to live did not borrow from anyone. He died young in 1969, and his status as a modernist hero was only slightly weakened by his wife Simin Daneshvar’s later revelations of his grumpy selfishness in their married life. He was a strong influence on a whole generation of Iranian intellectuals who were his contemporaries, and on those who came after him.
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