The Modern Middle East (29 page)

The fourth and last phase in the history of the Pahlavi state started in 1975 and lasted until its formal collapse in January 1979. In many ways, the year 1975 marked the beginning of the end of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran. Instead of an anticipated surplus, the government’s 1975 budget featured a deficit of $1.7 billion (a deterioration of nearly $6 billion over the previous year), and the 1976 budget had a deficit of $2.4 billion.
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Mismanagement, poor planning, and rampant corruption at all levels of the state were
beginning to take their toll. After nearly thirteen years in office, Hoveida was asked to step aside, and his finance minister, Jamshid Amuzegar, became the new prime minister. The regime’s sense of panic was palpable. The shah’s words to his court minister in January 1977 reveal his paralyzing anxiety: “We’re broke. Everything seems doomed to grind to a standstill, and meanwhile many of the programs we had planned must be postponed. Oil exports have fallen by as much as 30 per cent, and the recent price rise will do little to compensate.”
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The minister’s own words, recorded the following June, were more ominous: “It terrifies me that one day everything will simply cave in around us. Please God that we may be spared this.”
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By now, the Pahlavi state was headed for total collapse, and only a miracle could save it or reverse the course that Iranian history was about to take. A revolution, not of “the shah and the people” but of the people against the shah, was brewing and would succeed in about a year. The dynasty’s collapse was now certain.

The steady atrophy and implosion of the state were expedited by, and in turn reinforced, a popular movement that was increasingly assuming revolutionary dimensions. When faced with internal discord and political opposition, authoritarian states often either clamp down and suppress their opponents or, to preempt the possibility of further opposition, try to placate their opponents by introducing some token reforms. The Iranian state tried a combination of the two tactics, allowing some very controlled expressions of political discontent by a select group of individuals while reacting violently to riots and strikes that did not have official sanction.

As he had done back in 1963, the shah initially appears to have thought that he could make the brewing revolution his own: allow the masses to express their frustrations; convene commissions and parliamentary debates that would place the blame on cabinet ministers and other government officials; create an aura of responsiveness and empathy; and then emerge as the people’s chief defender against unscrupulous officials. This is a charitable interpretation of the state’s overall intent. More likely, the state’s growing incapacitation, symbolized and reinforced by the shah’s spreading cancer, robbed it of the ability to respond to the brewing crisis decisively. At a time when the state needed to respond to the deepening crisis quickly and with foresight, the shah’s legendary political instinct turned out to be more legend than reality. At the same time, the shah was becoming a prisoner of his fixation with his image abroad. His image problem was becoming all the
more pronounced by President Jimmy Carter’s injection of human rights concerns into U.S. foreign policy, coupled with the growing attention paid to Iran by Amnesty International and the International Association of Jurists.
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The shah himself complained bitterly about U.S. foreign policy in the crucial final months of his rule. “The fact that no one contacted me during the crisis in any official way,” he wrote later, “explains everything about the American attitude. I did not know it then—perhaps I did not want to know—but it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out.”
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The regime’s inept responses to the crisis only polarized the situation by helping fan the flames of political discontent that had long been suppressed, making heroes and martyrs out of ordinary demonstrators, and further demonizing the shah and the whole Pahlavi establishment before the court of public opinion. Steadily, the once-scattered riots and strikes became more frequent and organized. Meanwhile, the more permissive political environment began to give more voice to individuals and groups that had been silenced by the SAVAK or by fear. What initially started as the implosion of a state, which in turn set off haphazard strikes and demonstrations, was becoming a full-fledged “movement,” and a revolutionary one, at that. And, slowly, the movement was beginning to acquire “leaders.” Naturally, these “leaders” came mainly from the ranks of the regime’s opponents, whose voices had long been silenced by the state’s authoritarianism.

Broadly, the regime’s opponents and thus the leaders of the revolution could be divided into four groups. The first group was made up of the two nonregime political parties that had been banned in the mid-1950s but had continued to exist clandestinely, the National Front and the communist Tudeh Party. The National Front was organized by Musaddiq out of a coalition of smaller parties that were mostly to the left and/or center of the political spectrum.
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By the time of the 1978–79 revolution, only a few of the original leaders of the National Front remained, most others having either retired or passed away. Nevertheless, the memory of Musaddiq and what the National Front stood for made it popular among a significant group of middle-class Iranians. The same was true of the Tudeh (literally, “masses”), although the party’s overtly pro-Soviet posture did not sit well with the nationalist sensibilities of many urban Iranians. The Tudeh had fared worse than the National Front after the 1953 coup, with many of its members rounded up and executed and others in self-imposed exile abroad. As an astute observer of the party has noted, by the late 1950s the Tudeh was a shadow of its former self.
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By the late 1970s, even the impending death of the Pahlavi state did not go a long way toward reviving the once-impressive party.

A second group of the regime’s opponents was made up of two guerrilla organizations, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, whose ideology was a blend of Islam and socialism, and the Fedayeen-e Khalq, who were Maoist in doctrine and orientation. Both of these organizations were set up by younger individuals from middle-class backgrounds—primarily university students—who were disenchanted with the inactivity of the Tudeh and the National Front and wanted, in their separate ways, to spark a revolutionary movement. The Mujahedeen were formed in 1965 and the Fedayeen in 1971. At different times and independently of each other, both groups had come to the conclusion that the Land Reform Program had effectively neutralized the “revolutionary potential” of the peasantry. As a result, they needed to concentrate their efforts in the cities in order to “dispel the police atmosphere” pervading the country’s urban centers.
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From there, it was thought, the revolution would spread to the countryside and would eventually engulf the entire country.

Despite their theoretical aspirations, before the late 1970s neither guerrilla group was able to foster the revolutionary conditions it had hoped for. The efficiency and brutality of the SAVAK had proved a major hindrance; at one point the Mujahedeen had even been penetrated by agents of the secret police.
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Each party also had the serious problem of getting its message heard by a wider audience. Not only did the regime’s repressiveness make this all but impossible, but the parties’ muddled and alien ideologies—with subtle or overt references to socialism (read, atheism)—did not sit well with a majority of Iranians. Devoid of any popular ideological resonance among the people, the most the two organizations could do was to engage in hit-and-run attacks on targets associated with the Pahlavis. On occasion they would rob a bank, attack an American military adviser, or throw Molotov cocktails at the offices of the Israeli Cultural Center.
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But these attacks did little to spark a people’s revolution. The revolution that did come arrived on its own, the result of a people acting at their own behest and not inspired by the heroics of the guerrilla activists.

The third group opposing the Pahlavi state was made up of independent intellectuals who did not necessarily belong to any of the political parties or the guerrilla organizations. A majority of these individuals came from academia or were writers, poets, or journalists. These were men like Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a writer whose celebrated work
Weststruckness
(
Gharbzadegi
) poignantly exposed middle-class Iranians’ fascination with all things Western.
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Another intellectual in the same mold was Ali Shariati, a sociology professor whose occasional public lectures on Islamic modernism riveted and excited those who could hear him.
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Also notable was Mehdi
Bazargan, another academic and an old Musaddiq collaborator, who wrote critically on the general state of Iranian society.

The direct contributions of these and other independent intellectuals to the revolutionary cause, like those of the guerrilla organizations, were minimal. Both Al-e Ahmad and Shariati had passed away long before the disturbances, and most of the other intellectuals who actively opposed the Pahlavi state did so from abroad. Also, again like the guerrillas, the intellectuals had the simple problem of communication. How to communicate with a mass of people suspicious of and unreceptive to grand theories, and to do so in an atmosphere of stifling police repression? Nevertheless, the main contribution of these and other intellectuals of the time was to give currency to a trend of thought best described as political Islam. Through a general revitalization and reformulation of Islamic and Shiʿite precepts, these intellectuals hoped to better equip religion to address the problems of modern society and politics. In sum, most Iranian intellectuals contributed to the revolution indirectly by helping articulate and spread what turned out to be a “theology of discontent.”
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The fourth group of regime opponents consisted of the clerics, or at least those of them who had not opted for ascetic quietism or been coopted by the regime. The clergy, of course, were far from a monolithic group and included men with a variety of political dispositions. But clerics who opposed the regime enjoyed some unique advantages. The pulpit of the mosque gave them relative immunity from the wrath of the SAVAK and bestowed on them a measure of popular authority. Many filled their sermons with double-talk that could be interpreted as either purely religious or highly political. Most important, the central role of mosques as popular social institutions and gathering places afforded clerics a ready and highly receptive audience with whom they could communicate in a language both easily understandable and emotionally compelling. The number of mosque-goers swelled especially after 1975, when the slump in the construction industry prompted more and more unemployed construction workers and other recent arrivals from the countryside to attend religious services with greater frequency. This resulted in the establishment of a crucial and highly effective nexus between the oppositional clerics and a mass of disenchanted, easily mobilizable Iranians. As riots and strikes became more and more frequent, the clerics were in a perfect position to emerge on top and ride the crest of the revolutionary movement.

Meanwhile, Rouhollah Khomeini, the old ayatollah who back in 1963 had opposed the shah’s White Revolution and had been exiled in Iraq, again started to call for the Pahlavis’ overthrow. This time, however, he
was not speaking to an isolated group of individuals. By now the whole nation was in turmoil, and Khomeini’s revolutionary rhetoric suited the tenor of the times. Other clerics inside the country started echoing his sermons, and those unable to attend mosques could hear recordings of his speeches on cassette tapes. The “revolution” was not only gathering steam but, more ominously for the Pahlavi state, also acquiring a symbol in the person of Ayatollah Khomeini. Before long, even average Iranians started to refer to Khomeini as the Imam, a title of tremendous symbolic value for the Shiʿite masses. In a desperate attempt to discredit Khomeini by exposing his archaic views to the world, the shah asked the Iraqi government to expel him from the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, and the ayatollah and his expanding entourage relocated to a suburb of Paris. Ironically, when the Western media and expatriate Iranians flocked to the cleric’s modest home, they were disarmed by the simplicity and appeal of his revolutionary message and the firmness of his resolve. A number of Western-educated Iranians became his spokespersons and his collaborators, and together they set out to lead what had by now become a revolution of historic proportions. The shah could now do little but frantically react to circumstances outside his control. His reactions, in hindsight, helped him little.

The end for the Pahlavis came in the early weeks of 1979. In a desperate attempt to keep his state and his whole dynasty from collapsing, from 1977 on the shah appointed and fired a series of prime ministers with unprecedented frequency. As a final move, he turned to an old figure in the National Front, Shapour Bakhtiar, a man with impeccable oppositional credentials who was still loyal to the monarchical system. He then hurriedly left Iran on January 18, 1979, for “medical” reasons. By now, millions of Iranians were pouring into the streets on a daily basis, demanding the abolition of the monarchy, the death of the shah, and the return of Khomeini. Bakhtiar could do little. The army, once among the most powerful in the world, was disintegrating at a rate of one thousand to twelve hundred desertions a day.
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Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, greeted by an estimated one million jubilant people who lined the streets of Tehran to welcome him back. On February 11, a group of technicians in an air base located at the heart of the capital mutinied against the Pahlavi regime, and Bakhtiar’s orders to military commanders the following day to bombard the air base were ignored. Instead, the commanders went into hiding. The shah’s massive army had collapsed. Bakhtiar also went into hiding. The revolution had succeeded. Power now was in the hands of the people, and their leader was Imam Khomeini.