Iran: Empire of the Mind (42 page)

For some members of the minorities in Iran the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah was a good time of relative freedom and absence of persecution,
in which some Jews and Baha’is in particular were able, especially through their cultural emphasis on education, to achieve a degree of prosperity. But poorer Jews in some towns continued to suffer as second-class citizens
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and through this period many Iranian Jews emigrated to the United States and Israel. The Shah had passed a new Family Protection Law in 1967, which made divorce law fairer and more equal, and in particular made child custody dependent on the merits of the case in court rather than simply giving custody to the father.

The Shah’s rule was a mixture of failures and successes; neither all one nor all the other. Some of the vaunted economic and developmental achievements were impressive—others were shallow and superficial. But in the end the important failures were primarily political—the Shah had no programme for restoring representative government and his only solution for dissent was repression. If he had succeeded in making the monarchy truly popular, perhaps he could have sustained that for a time—but instead the monarchy became more remote and disconnected from the attitudes and concerns of ordinary Iranians. In a sense, paradoxically (perhaps partly as a result of combating underground Marxists for so long) the Shah made the mistake of a Marxist analysis: he thought that if he could just secure material prosperity through successful development, then everything else would follow. But few economies deliver continuous sustained growth indefinitely.

In 1977 the Shah, if not actually under pressure from the new Carter administration in the US then certainly aware that Carter and his advisers were less sympathetic to repressive allies than their predecessors had been, began slowly to relax some of the instruments of repression. In February some political prisoners were released, and later on court rules were changed to allow prisoners proper legal representation, and access to civilian rather than military courts. The Shah met representatives from Amnesty International and agreed to improve prison conditions. In May a group of lawyers sent a letter to the Shah protesting at government interference in court cases. In June three National Front activists, including Karim Sanjabi, Shahpur Bakhtiar and Dariush Foruhar, sent a bolder letter to the Shah criticising autocratic rule and demanding a restoration
of constitutional government. Later that month the Writers’ Association, repressed since 1964, resurrected itself and pressed for the same goals, and for the removal of censorship (many of the leading members were Tudeh sympathisers or broadly leftist). In July the Shah replaced Amir Abbas Hoveyda, his Prime Minister for twelve years, with Jasmshid Amuzegar, who was perceived to be more liberal. In the autumn more political associations formed or reformed; including the National Front, under the leadership of Sanjabi, Bakhtiar and Foruhar; and the Freedom Movement, closely allied, under Mehdi Bazargan and Ebrahim Yazdi.
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On 19 November the Writers’ Association held a poetry evening—the tenth of a series of such evenings—at the Goethe Institut. There were about 10,000 students present, and this time the police tried to break it up. The students went onto the streets to protest, and the police attacked them, killing one, injuring seventy and arresting about a hundred. But on this occasion civilian courts tried the students and quickly acquitted them.

While in exile Khomeini, as well as keeping up a stream of messages and speeches critical of the regime (which were smuggled into Iran and distributed, often using cassette tapes), had developed his theory of opposition into a full-blown theory for Islamic government. He set this out in a book (based on lectures he gave in Najaf in 1970) with the title
Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e Faqih
(Islamic government: Regency of the Jurist).
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In this text the Usuli thinking of the previous two centuries, that had helped the ulema develop a hierarchy and had allowed them in effect to deputise for the Hidden Emam, was developed to a logical extreme that permitted the ulema to rule directly. This was the meaning of the term
velayat-e faqih
, which needs explaining. A
vali
was a regent or deputy, someone standing in for the person with real authority—it was the title taken by Karim Khan Zand in the eighteenth century, when he forbore to make himself Shah.
Velayat
meant regency, guardianship or deputyship, or rather, by extension, the authority of the deputy or regent. The term
faqih
signifies a jurist, an expert in Islamic law—
fiqh
. The logic of the concept was that the shari‘a, derived from the word of God and the example of the Prophet, was there to regulate human conduct, and was the only legitimate law. In the absence of the Hidden Emam, the mojtaheds were the right people
to interpret and apply the shari‘a. So obviously, they were the right people to rule too. Who else? From this point onward Khomeini demanded the removal of the Shah and the establishment of Islamic government; clear and consistent demands that the whole country could understand (at least, they thought they could—what exactly Islamic government might mean in practice remained less clear) and which increasingly made him the focal point for opposition to the Shah.

The principle of velayat-e faqih was not accepted by the ulema as a whole, indeed not accepted by very many. But since the First World War the ulema had been jostled and edged out of many of their traditional roles of authority in society by the secularising Pahlavi monarchy. Under Mohammad Reza Shah the regime even attempted, in the late ’60s and ’70s (as part of the White Revolution programme), to replace the traditional ulema with a new religious structure of mosques and mullahs answerable to the state. There was little popular enthusiasm for the state religion (
din-e dawlat
), but it succeeded in alienating the ulema as a whole even further from the Shah. Ayatollahs Montazeri and Taleqani were arrested and sentenced to internal exile after disturbances at Tehran University and in Qom in 1970-72.
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But where Tudeh, the National Front and the violent radicals were battered and disrupted by years of conflict with SAVAK, the informal nationwide network of mullahs and religious leaders, reaching into every social class, every bazaar guild and every village, was still there in the late ’70s, as it had been in 1906; reflecting the enduring power of this alternative source of authority in Shi‘a Iranian society. In the theory of velayat-e faqih and Khomeini the ulema had the defining political principle and the leader that they had lacked in 1906.

By the end of 1977 the Shah had alienated the ulema, alienated the bazaaris, and had created a large, poor, deracinated working class in Tehran. He had also alienated many of the educated middle classes, his natural supporters, through his repression and abuses of human rights. Some of these had in addition been radicalised by their experience of leftist politics in Europe in the late 60s and 70s. But there was another important influence on the thinking of this generation—Ali Shariati.

Shariati was born in 1933, near Sabzavar in Khorasan. He grew up to be an extrovert, lively, highly intelligent youth with a strong sense of humour, who enjoyed ridiculing his teachers. He was influenced by his father, who had been an advocate of progressive Islam in his own right, but also by writers like Hedayat and western thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kafka. Later he went to Mashhad University, and then to Paris, where he studied under Marxist professors, read Guevara and Sartre, communicated with the Martinique-born theorist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, and took a doctorate in sociology (in 1964). His political activism also attracted the attention of SAVAK. Returning to Iran in 1965, he taught students in Mashhad and later in Tehran, attracting large numbers to his lectures, and wrote a series of important books and speeches. The general message was that Shi‘ism provided its own ideology of social justice and resistance to oppression. This had been masked by a false Shi‘ism of superstition and deference to monarchy (Black Shi‘ism, Safavid Shi‘ism), but the essential truths of the religion were timeless, centering on the martyrdom of Hosein and his companions. He was not a Marxist, but could be said to have recast Shi‘a Islam in a revolutionary mould, comparable to the Marxist model—‘Everywhere is Karbala and every day is Ashura’.
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For the Shah’s regime, he was too hot to handle. He was imprisoned in 1972, released in 1975, kept under house arrest, and allowed to go to England in 1977. He died there, apparently of a heart attack, in June the same year (but many Iranians believe he was murdered by SAVAK). Khomeini would never endorse Shariati’s thinking directly, but was careful never to condemn it either. Shariati’s radical Islamism, both fully Iranian and fully modern, was a strong influence on the generation of students that grew to adulthood in the 1970s.
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Through the inflation, followed by economic slump and deflation, many Iranians, including well-off Iranians, had come to doubt their assumptions about steady growth and economic security. There had also been a number of incidents in which the Shah had made himself look foolish or out of touch — the latest came on his visit to Washington at the end of 1977 when TV cameras caught him clinking champagne glasses with President Carter and weeping from tear gas on the White House
lawn when the wind blew the wrong way from nearby demonstration against his visit. An autocrat can get away with many things, but looking foolish undercuts him in the most damaging way.

Revolution

In January 1978 an article appeared in the paper
Ettela’at
, attacking the clergy and Khomeini as ‘black reactionaries’. The article had been written by someone trusted by the regime and approved by the court, but had been refused by the more independently-edited paper
Kayhan
. It twisted facts and invented fictions, suggesting that Khomeini was a foreigner (from his grandfather’s birth in India and name, Hindi), a former British spy, and a poet (the last was true, and was intended to detract from his clerical seriousness: most ulema, with some backing from the Qor’an, disapproved of poetry)
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. The article immediately prompted a protest demonstration in Qom, in which thousands of religious students abused the ‘Yazid government’ and demanded an apology, a constitution, and the return of Khomeini. There were clashes with the police and a number of students were shot dead: the following day Khomeini, by now in Paris, praised the courage of the students and called for more demonstrations. Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari, one of the most senior marjas at the time, condemned the shootings.

After a traditional mourning period of forty days the bazaars and universities closed and there were peaceful demonstrations in twelve cities, including in Tabriz, where again the police fired on the crowd, causing more deaths. The forty-day rhythm continued, like a great revolutionary lung, with the almost unanimous support of the ulema (though many of the clerics called for mourners to attend the mosques rather than to demonstrate). The demonstrations grew larger and more violent, with slogans like ‘death to the Shah’. After the end of May there was a lull (among other reasons, Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari had urged people against further street demonstrations to avoid more deaths), but there was a violent incident in Mashhad in July where police fired on a crowd. On 19 August, the Rex Cinema burned down in Abadan, an incident that is still controversial, killing about 370 people. Government and opposition both accused each
other, but events, trials and investigations in later years indicate that a radical Islamic group with connections to ulema figures was responsible.
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At the time, the mood was such that most blamed SAVAK.

By that time the demonstrations, which had largely been an affair for middle-class students and for members of the traditional bazaari middle class up to then, were being augmented by strikes and other actions by factory workers and others, prompted by the government’s deflationary policies.
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In August there were many large demonstrations in the month of Ramadan, and more in early September. The Shah’s government banned the demonstrations and imposed martial law, but on 8 September there were huge protests in Tehran (and in other cities). Barricades were set up in the working-class areas of south Tehran. The government sent in tanks and helicopter gunships; the people on the barricades responded with Molotov cocktails. In Jaleh Square an unarmed crowd refused to disperse, and were gunned down where they stood.

September 8 was thereafter called Black Friday and the deaths increased the bitterness of the people toward the Shah to such a pitch that compromise became impossible. All that was left was the implacable demand that the Shah should go: the demand upon which Khomeini had insisted since 1970. By the autumn most other opposition groups had allied themselves to Khomeini and his programme. Karim Sanjabi and Mehdi Bazargan flew to Paris, met Khomeini and declared their support for him in the name of the National Front and the Freedom Movement. Demonstrations and riots continued; the Shah (by now increasingly ill with cancer, though this remained unknown to the public) veered between more repression, and concessions (including the release of political prisoners and the dissolution of the Rastakhiz Party). He appeared on television to say that he understood the message of the people, would hold free elections, and would atone for past mistakes.
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But it was all too late. As autumn went into winter more and more workers spent more and more time on strike and the violence intensified again at the beginning of Moharram in December. In Qazvin 135 demonstrators died when tanks drove over them. On the day of Ashura itself (11 December) more than one million people demonstrated on the streets of Tehran. After Ashura
street gangs roamed the capital at will, there were more and more signs that the army was no longer reliable (there were mass desertions especially in Qom and Mashhad), and by this time President Carter’s support for the Shah was on the wane. Many Americans were leaving the country after attacks on US-owned offices and even the US embassy. The Shah had lost control, and on 16 January 1979 left the country. On 1 February Khomeini flew back to Tehran.