Though the Shah’s sense of authority had never been stronger, the events of August 1953 had laid a tripwire; one that his rivals would use to great effect twenty-five years later. Where was the Shah when the nation descended into chaos? He’d already fled, and was standing atop the safety of a penthouse balcony in Rome. His rivals would later claim his power was restored by Western powers as much as any supporters on the streets of his country.
Why did the pendulum swing to the Shah in that critical week of August 1953, when it seemed so unlikely? General Zahedi’s nerve to persist with the coup? The CIA’s deft hand in the key moments? The loyal military? Or perhaps, did the merchants and shopkeepers see the downsides of anarchy, and march to support stability as much as the Shah himself? Like all coups, it is probably a combination – when faced with a choice, the people of Iran wanted familiarity, and something they knew.
A quarter of a century later, that would not be the case.
The Mahdi And The Shia
No story of Persia and Iran can proceed very far without examining religion, and the incredible tapestry of the Shia faith. The thickly bound rope between Iran and the Shia has been tightened over and over for nearly half a millennium. In 1501, Turkoman tribesmen conquered much of modern-day Iran and imposed Shia doctrine on a population that, at the time, was more than two-thirds Sunni.28 Iran was not unlike much of the modern Muslim World, where somewhere between 85 and 90% of the population remains Sunni to this day.
Outside Islam, the distinction between Sunni and Shia is thinly understood by many, and fully understood by few. The bare facts29 are worth repeating. Soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD, disagreement arose on the question of who should succeed him. Much of the Prophet’s support base believed that a community process should determine the next leader, but the Shia worldview was that leadership should stay within the bloodline, and go to a man named Ali, who was married to Muhammad’s daughter, Fatimah.
This disagreement is the singular point of origination in the Sunni–Shia split. The Sunni opinion won out. They chose a successor to be the first caliph, but after the death or murder of the first three caliphs, Ali got his opportunity to rule; only for he himself to be killed in battle in 661 BCE near a town called Kufa, in modern-day Iraq. Ali’s son Hussein took up his father’s cause, but his own death and decapitation on the battlefield against a far stronger army became the crystallising moment for the Shia and their struggles against a larger religious force in the centuries that followed.
Shia’s literal translation is something between “faction” and “party”, precisely from its origins as a political movement with a deep grievance of history. Under Sunni persecution, the Shia continued with their own line of succession: a series of “imam” commanders with direct male lineage from Ali and Fatimah. The Twelfth Imam in this succession vanished after an appearance at his father’s funeral in 874 BCE, and after a period of communication with the Shia people through four successive intermediaries, this last Imam ceased to do so in 941 BCE. Like so many religions across the human story, the Shia are now waiting for this Mahdi30 (or “rightly guided one”) to return, and the world to end in a moment of justice and harmony.
For centuries, the Shi’ite ulama, or clerics, have run religious schools, arbitrated disputes, acted as judges, managed charitable giving and endowments, and generally been seen as overseers of the Shia social fabric. With every surge in the presence of European colonialism, the clerics were seen to be the first line of defence.31
The critical effect of the Shia story on Islam, and our modern world, is that they believe attempts to govern are simply provisional steps awaiting the true judgment of all men and women. In the most conservative Shia mindset, the act of government is essentially a temporary delegation of a power statesmen do not really possess. The clergy exist to keep social decorum, protect the weak, and most critically of all in Iranian history, regulate an honest version of commerce. They are the guarantors of the orthodoxy and way of life that any Mahdi would hope to see in the moment he returns to Earth – and in a twentieth century where the world became more liberal, open-minded, connected and selfish, it is easy to see why a collision between the clergy and modernity was inevitable.
From The Mosque
To The Market
The Shia’s relationship with the market bazaar brings a particular twist to the tale of Iran in the twentieth century. The arid, unproductive terrain of pre-petroleum Iran resulted in an “Imam’s Share”, or tributes from pious followers that often rivalled the wealth of many feudal lords. With an aristocracy of their own, and the legitimacy of claiming “blood descent” from the Prophet’s family, the clergy played a hand in almost every aspect of daily life.
The bazaar has always been the heart of the Iranian universe.32 Long stretches of the region’s history are poor and lawless; but in a country without a historically strong police force or military cadre, the bazaars acted as a melting pot of social mores, as well as a hotbed of rumour and political discussion. Limited basic services and poor supply chains meant almost every family needed to go to the bazaar each week for food, clothing and consumables.
The clergy always understood the hidden power of the bazaar. They regularly owned the land in and around the traditional town quarters; if they didn’t, they were the beneficiary of bazaar charity, and regularly offered regular private counsel to the most important local tradesmen. Antiquated taxation schemes based on land holdings meant the merchants paid almost no tax; they looked to the clergy as the true establishment of Iran, with funds diverted to mosques, seminaries and the welfare of clerics who, for the most part, lived fairly modest lives.
*
In their own ways, the Qajar Dynasty of the nineteenth century and Pahlavi family of the twentieth century both tried to bring the merchants of the bazaar under the patronage of the administration, much like Cairo and Istanbul had needed to do on their own journeys into modernity. But centuries-old habits are hard to break. When leaflets or menacing political flyers were handed out in the market laneways, the Iranian people had a reflex of turning to the clergy for endorsement. This was an almost unbreakable trait, and one that would play a role in Mohammed Reza’s eventual undoing.
But in August 1953, when Foreign Minister Fatemi rallied to the defence of Mossadegh and roared for the end of the Pahlavis, the Tehran bazaar ominously closed. Why? Because of an influential clergyman named Mohammed Behbehani. In the weeks prior to the coup, with tensions rising and rumours of insurrection everywhere, Mossadegh tried to get ahead of the story. He called for a referendum for 3rd August, granting him permission to dissolve Parliament and have his position of Prime Minister rule by decree.
Behbehani’s father (Sayyid Abdullah Behbehani) had been a constitutional hero, a clergyman whose influence in the early 1900s led to many of the checks on power that had existed for half a century. The choice felt clear to Behbehani: the Shah had his flaws, but he’d never asked for unfettered power. When the moment of truth arrived, Behbehani instructed his many followers in the Tehran bazaar to close. The clergyman’s verdict undoubtedly echoed around the nation and played a role in the muted mood for ending the Pahlavi family reign.
And yet, a preference for the Shah to continue a place in Iranian life did not mean the clergy condoned his lifestyle. Mohammed Reza took a lavish route to everything. He spent wildly on jets and remote retreats, his wife Soraya chose French designer dresses, constantly modelling herself on the ostentatious royal families of Europe, and the Shah himself was notoriously unfaithful.
The dynamic was delicate, and a balancing act on both sides. The clergy regularly overplayed their hand, arguing for deep acts of piety and social constraint that didn’t chime with much of the Iranian population’s daily habit. In some cases, they took chances to attack minority faiths like the Bahai, destroying property and intimidating those around Bahai or Sunni sites of worship.
Equally these
overreaches gave the Shah greater political capital through the late 1950s in the things that actually mattered: tactical alliances with Israel, closer military support from the US, and crucially, the establishment of the SAVAK security force, a fearsome secret police that would come to carry out the worst injustices of the Shah’s reign.33 In 1958, the neighbouring Iraqi monarchy was overthrown; and yet Mohammed Reza’s legitimacy now seemed untouchable in a way it didn’t five years earlier.
But his wife Soraya had failed to produce a male heir, and when she fled to join her mother in Europe, the marriage was terminated. Meanwhile a wonderful young athlete and architecture student in Paris had returned home for summer vacation; her name was Farah Diba. Introduced through the Princess Shahnaz, the Shah seemed smitten by Farah’s lovely face and hands; he proposed on her twenty-first birthday (himself approaching forty). They were married within two months, Farah adorning a jewelled tiara from New York, and an Yves Saint Laurent dress from Paris.34 A male heir named Reza (after Mohammed Reza’s father) came into the world in the autumn of 1960.
With the close on a dramatic decade, the clergy watched on with quiet concern at the direction of Pahlavi rule. Since a powerful speech given at his father Reza’s coronation in 1926, there were those who believed the distinctive feature of Iran was monarchy; naturally, Mohammed Reza was one of them. Yet for many others, it was always the Shia faith: the holy sites, the unbroken connection to the blood of the Prophet, the unique Shia demography in the nation that had adopted this interpretation of Islam. For the latter group, this was a long game. Much of the clergy hoped to eventually rein in Mohammed Reza’s adventurous foreign policy and the poor example he set to devout Muslims everywhere – but one cleric in particular had plans to recast the story of his nation forever.
Enter The Ayatollah
A young cleric’s son entered the world on 24th September 1902, born into a small farming town south of Sultanabad. Three quarters of a century into the distance, Sayyid Ruhollah Khomeini would rise to overthrow the Shah and reshape the world – but his beginnings certainly didn’t suggest this. The trackless roads and remote lawless bends in the area around Sultanabad had been unchanged for a century; poor, neglected and short on hope.
He was barely five months old when his father Sayyid Mostafa was murdered on the Sultanabad road in a highway disagreement, and from then the young Khomeini (he would not take that name until later in life) lived with his family in a house fortified by two towers, with a wet nurse and a few blood relatives of his mother.35
Those few women in his life who’d cared for him were all taken in 1917 by the influenza and cholera outbreaks that swept the world during World War I. With few places left to shelter, Khomeini followed in the footsteps of his late father, converting his teenage love of religious passages and poems into formal clerical studies. Perhaps his chosen sect, or perhaps an accident of convenience and proximity, Khomeini chose a curriculum at a nearby seminary in Arak, one that donned the conservative black sayyid and had not changed its teaching practices for centuries.
An interesting contradiction developed in Khomeini’s early years of study. He was not politically active, but the forensic nature of his teachings and writings clearly suggest he believed in clerics being capable of political activism in the right circumstances.36 He pushed beyond the traditional subjects of Islamic law (or Sharia) and developed a particular sense of philosophy and ethics that had implications for the way people organised their daily lives. At some point in the mid-1930s, Khomeini rose to motjahed, or someone who could deploy holy law to make pronouncements on every aspect of daily life (this was also the level his father achieved).
Why was this contradictory? Khomeini studied so hard in the science of thinking, but still resorted to impulse and emotion. Moreover, he would do this throughout the key political moments of his life. Khomeini was known as a falsafa by his peers, someone who fell back on the old-fashioned clichés of the poems in his youth for a definitive answer. He avoided inconvenient facts and used extreme language to end an argument. If pushed on a point of deductive reasoning, those in the Khomeini school of thought would simply conclude the conversation with some vacuous words or give an explanation of complex life-long journeys that took time to show how God was truly known.
Islam has a deep link with this idea of time, patience and personal inquiry; but when Khomeini began teaching in public or at his home to small groups from the mid-1930s, his first mentor Haeri-Yazdi noticed a brimstone element to his words. For a long time, Khomeini was known to be outside the mainstream in his new home of Qom, one of the most traditional seats of the Shia faith.
Upon the death of Haeri-Yazdi in 1937, the state of the seminaries across Iran was a rather desperate one, not dissimilar to the recruitment challenges of mainstream Christian churches today: the number of clerical students numbered in the hundreds, while the mosques across Iran requiring staffing numbered in the thousands. Desperately poor through their studies, and living with barely any food or creature comforts, the lure of a nice government job was too tempting for most.
It was around this time that the honorific title “Ayatollah” came into widespread use; and eventually the numbers who adorned it became so great, a “Grand Ayatollah” was introduced to provide a level above. At some point during World War II, Khomeini took a sabbatical from his teaching to pen a polemic on the application of Islam to daily life, known as The Unveiling of the Secrets. Like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kempf, it is far from a classic work, and probably would’ve fallen into obscurity had the author not become so important to events. This text (written in Persian) would be Khomeini’s first foray into social matters, though many of the future Islamic Republic’s ideas clearly have their beginnings in it.37
Its key messages38 were relatively straightforward: the world has all the laws it needs from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet; the men who rule should be appointed by a class of men who’ve penetrated the mysteries of the Koran; wine shops, unveiled women, dancing and new medicine are all examples of the corrosive influence of modernity; and crucially, the Shah must protect the property, chastity and honour of the masses, not exploit the throne to indulge his own lifestyle.39
Khomeini spent the 1950s at a distance from the tumult of the 1953 Mossadegh coup, 1954 oil renegotiations and economic reforms around the country. With shifting factions through all these events, he seemed unable to forge an alliance with people who shared all of his concerns. He had no financial backing from a merchant city, had not continued writing beyond his wartime polemic, and at the beginning of the 1960s, he remained an isolated figure from the major authorities in the seminary.40 In a dramatic rise to fame (and infamy) over the next four years, he would become one of the most significant figures in the Islamic World. How did this happen?
Firstly, the death of the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi from a heart attack on 30th March 1961 led to a vacuum of leadership in the Shia faith.41 Khomeini saw the gap and, in a bid to bolster his claims to be a marjiyat or supreme authority, published a work in 1962 entitled Clarification of Problems.42 The booklet covered all the usual ways that faithful Shia subjects could transgress, but it also touched on the defence of Muslim life against foreigners and foreign influence.
This coincided with one of Mohammed Reza’s most ambitious reforms of all, in the autumn of 1962. A bill was introduced for elections to local councils in which, for the first time, women could vote and stand for office, and candidates could take their oath of service on any “Heavenly Book” – this might include the Bible, Zoroastrian Avesta, or even the Jewish Torah.43 It seemed a shrewd political move to bundle both measures together, wedging those who supported women’s suffrage.
For Khomeini, a man of sixty years who’d dedicated his life to a conservative Shia worldview, he saw the bill as the beginning of secular Iran’s project to “extirpate Islam from the country”.44 The following evening, he convened a meet
ing of the main clergy in Qom, on the neutral ground of the house of his late mentor, Haeri-Yazdi.45 After disagreement over a single communique, Khomeini wrote the message himself, addressing the Shah directly as “His Serene Majesty”, protesting the decision, and demanding that such actions were beyond the remit of government and party policy.46 Against “his better judgment”, Mohammed Reza dropped the bill.47
Both men had metaphorically stared each other down, with their own differing versions of the country’s future – Khomeini won out, and in many ways, he never turned back from this moment, ratcheting up the language and inciting his supporters for ever greater rebellion. Khomeini’s credentials as a revolutionary have always been peculiar; an ageing man who’d married a young woman when she was only fifteen (and he twenty-seven), a man who had never handled money, paid a phone bill or worked a day of manual labour in his adult life.48 And yet he was forever emboldened from this clash, becoming Mohammed Reza’s nemesis for fifteen years, at least until the events of January 1979 – when the Shah saw his dream of a modern, secular Iran in pieces.
The Khomeini Uprising
For the Shah, the period from 1963–1971 was bookmarked by four events: an uprising, an assassination attempt, a funeral, and a birthday party that left him feeling like the loneliest man in the world.
Mother Father Revolution Page 4