by Abbas Milani
Ayatollah Khomeini took the unusual step of writing a letter to the Shah. The letters exchanged were notable both for their decorous language and their firm, unbending positions. Ayatollah Khomeini had heard “reports that in the new election law . . . Islam is not indicated as a precondition for standing for office and women are being granted the right to vote. . . . As you know, national interests and spiritual comfort are both predicated on following Islamic laws. Please order all laws inimical to the sacred and official faith of the country to be eliminated from government policies.”32
A couple of days later, the Shah responded. The first noticeable part of the retort is the way he chose to address Khomeini. In an obvious dig, the Shah did not use the title of ayatollah but instead called him “Hojat-al Islam,” a much lower rank. The Shah said that the “new laws proposed by the government contain nothing new, and I want to remind you that I am more than anyone keen on respecting our religious rules. . . . At the same time, I want to remind you of the conditions of the time, and the situation in other countries of the world.”33 The Shah ended his note by telling the cleric that he would forward his letter to the Prime Minister.
A few days after receiving the Shah’s terse note, Khomeini wrote back, this time threatening the monarch with the wrath of the Muslims. At the same time, he offered him some words of advice. “Don’t allow sycophants to attribute their anti-Islamic acts to your Majesty.” If ever there was a chance for a compromise between the Shah and Khomeini, it was in the course of these rare epistolary contacts. But compromise was not on either man’s mind.
The clergy finally brought enough pressure on the government that Alam, in a press conference, announced that the proposed bill had been withdrawn. Ayatollah Khomeini, till then a little-known figure outside religious circles, took the lead in writing a letter to all religious leaders around the country congratulating them on their first major victory. He wrote less like just another cleric but like the leader of an unfolding revolution. The tone was messianic and self-assured, and the goals set for the movement were ambiguous but tantalizing. This was 1962.
For the Shah, however, the decision to withdraw the law was only a tactical retreat. Before long, on January 6, 1963, he announced a six-part program, the first volley of the renamed “Shah and People Revolution.” It included, amongst other things, two articles the clergy adamantly opposed. Article one called for land reform. This was, according to the British Embassy, “one of the most revolutionary measures in 3000[-year] history of Iran.”34 The second article called for the right of women to vote and stand for office. The other four points covered nationalization of forests, sale of state-owned enterprises, profit-sharing by workers in 20 percent of corporate profits, and finally the creation of a Literacy Corps—the idea of using army conscripts as teachers in the Iranian countryside where illiteracy was sometimes estimated to be near 90 percent. While the major controversy of the Literacy Corps was simply the question of pride of authorship (three different sources claimed to have initially come up with the idea), the land reform and women’s right to vote became the most contested issues of the White Revolution. The entire clerical hierarchy went into high gear to oppose these two elements. Moreover, on January 9 the Shah announced his decision to hold a referendum on January 26. The date was picked “in order to complete operations before the beginning of the Ramdam [sic]”—the month of fasting for Muslims.35
To counter the argument that the Iranian constitution did not allow for a referendum—an argument made against Mossadeq—the Shah argued that addenda 26 and 27 to the constitution “stipulate that the powers of the country are derived from the nation,” thus allowing him to go directly to the people and ask for a legal mandate for his White Revolution.36 The White House was not pleased with the decision for an entirely different reason. The Shah, they concluded, had decided “to wrap himself firmly in mantle of ‘revolutionary monarch.’ ” In their opinion, the Shah had “bought Arsanjani’s idea of building political bases among the peasantry and decided to have his own revolution without US advice.”37 Moreover, in what in retrospect turned out to be an almost prophetic prediction of the 1979 revolution, the White House was worried that land redistribution without extensive social reform would result in chaos and turn the “newly activated peasantry against the Shah.”38 What they failed to predict was that with the rise of Iran’s oil revenues, cities would become magnets for these disgruntled peasants and that in the cities they would turn against the Shah and be absorbed by the clergy’s wide network of organizations, becoming foot soldiers of the Islamic Revolution. The life of Iran’s controversial twenty-first-century president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, follows this trajectory rather closely.39
The Shah and his regime did all they could to turn the referendum into a tour de force. Some of the leaders of the opposition, with the exception of the clergy, were arrested. On January 23, for example, according to the CIA, the government “brought 3000 peasants from Varamin” and “twelve buses from Karaj” to march in the streets of Tehran and shout pro-Shah slogans. Flexing his military muscle, the Shah also ordered a battalion of paratroopers to parade through Tehran that day. A tank company was ordered onto the Jalaliye racetrack—earlier the site of the big National Front rally.40 The symbolism was hard to miss. On the same day, in the city of Qom, about 300 seminarians led about 3,000 demonstrators on a march against the referendum in the morning, while in the afternoon the government brought 5,000 peasants into the city to show support for the Shah. The peasants allegedly attacked the mullahs who had been against the regime, shouting slogans and wielding sticks.41
The referendum was at once unusually democratic and expectedly undemocratic. It was democratic in that women were for the first time allowed to vote, but their votes were not going to be counted. This was partially to put women on a collision course with the clergy who had opposed women’s suffrage. Khomeini’s views at the time, for example, were clear and categorical. Using a thinly disguised allusion to the Shah, Khomeini said, “the Court of the illegitimate Usurper has decided to offer men and women equal rights and trample on the edicts of the Qor’an and Sharia’ and they want to take eighteen year old girls to serve in the army.” Other ayatollahs were even more vituperative in their opposition to women’s right to vote and their equality before the law. In many areas—from laws of inheritance and divorce to laws on custody of children in a case of divorce to testimonies in the court of law—Islamic sharia is decidedly against women. Some critics have pointed to the composite of these laws as the legal foundation for gender apartheid in Iran.42 The early signs of this gender apartheid were evident in the clergy’s opposition to the Shah’s intended reforms in favor of women. Ironically, the Iranian opposition, even amongst the feminists, also never supported these reforms, dismissing them as “cosmetic” and superficial. But in 1963, the participation of women in the referendum was intended to show them who their foes were and also to give them a taste of power. “Women were unlikely to leave the political world,” the American Embassy reported, “without a fight.”43
While the participation of women, albeit merely symbolic, added to the democratic value of the referendum, the fact that voters were required to vote in open ballot boxes, under the watchful eyes of the police and security forces stationed in every voting place, made the results highly suspect. Not surprisingly, 99.5 percent of those who voted cast a ballot in favor of the White Revolution, with a little more than 4,000 people out of an electorate of nearly 6 million daring to ask for a “No” ballot.
The success of the referendum was a cause of tempered joy in the Kennedy White House. Robert Komer, President Kennedy’s point man on Iran, who was refreshingly frank in his views and notes, decided that “it has been a long time since we last massaged the Shah.” The referendum and the proposed reforms, he said, “provide a first-class occasion for JFK to do it (and to remind him that Big Brother is watching).”44
Kennedy did write the note of congratulation; no sooner had the Shah r
eceived it than he decided that it offered him an opening to further consolidate his relations with the American President. He immediately sent a message inviting President and Mrs. Kennedy to visit Iran at their earliest convenience. The response was not satisfactory to the Shah. Kennedy, after “expressing deepest gratitude” and reiterating his “interest in the Shah’s progressive reform movement,” informed him that he must nevertheless decline the invitation.45
But the Shah had other, more immediate problems to face after the referendum. He was aware of the clergy’s opposition to his reforms and their boycott of the referendum, and he was angry at what he felt was a de facto alliance between them and disgruntled landowners; he went on a carefully calibrated offensive. The regime had also received reports that the clergy were planning to turn the roused passions common in this month of Muharram into political demonstrations against the Shah and his reforms. It is during the first ten days of the month that Shiites mourn the martyrdom of their Third Imam, Hussein, in the Battle of Karbala in A.D. 642, and processions of flagellating men and weeping women crowd city streets. The Shah and his trusted prime minister, Alam, set out a multifaceted strategy. They began marshalling military and security forces for the possible day of reckoning, and the Shah also commenced a public relations campaign against the mullahs.
On the one hand, he needed to label his clerical opponents not just as reactionaries but as lackeys of foreign powers, particularly of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Even with the luxury of hindsight, the Shah, in his Answer to History, suggested that in “1963 Tehran riots were inspired by an obscure individual who claimed to be a religious leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. It was certain, however, that he had secret dealing with foreign agents. Later the radio stations run by atheist émigrés, belonging to the Tudeh Party, accorded him the title of Ayatollah.”46 Virtually every claim in these three sentences is at best inaccurate, if not altogether wrong. Sadly, with many passages like this, Answer to History has become yet another example of what François Dumouriez famously said of the courtiers surrounding the King after the French Revolution—“they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing.”
Moreover, as the Shah confided to Ambassador Holmes in 1963, he knew that in attacking the mullahs, he must not seem “anti-religious.” As a result, concurrently with his surprisingly blistering attacks on the clergy who dared oppose him, he also gave many speeches “reemphasizing his own Muslim faith and that religion is essential for any nation.” More than once he referred to his three spiritual experiences as a child, when he was saved by Shiite imams. He tried to offer himself as at once a defender of the faith and a crusader against reactionary clerics. In Qom, he told the assembled peasants, “I can tell you today that in practice and in past experiences, no one can claim to be closer to God and to saints than me.”47
His attacks on the clergy were surprisingly uncompromising. On April 2, 1963, taking a page out of his father’s playbook, the Shah traveled to the city of Qom, the heartland of Shiite power in Iran, and not only delivered deeds to farmers from eighty-seven different villages but delivered a detailed and stinging attack on the clergy. Never a great speaker, in this and other similarly belligerent talks, he soared to new heights of oratory. Often he talked without notes, and in the excitement of the moment, with the adulation of a crowd that both had a financial stake in the reforms and had been coached to exhibit monarchist exuberance, he eloquently criticized the clergy. Evidence shows clearly that in some of these meetings, uniformed members of the military were spread throughout the crowd, acting both as coaches of exuberance and guards of safety.
On that April day, the Shah spoke of the clergy’s “little, empty and antique” brains that wished to turn back society to the days of the Middle Ages. Making an unmistakable reference to the practice common in some villages whereby every peasant girl was required to be deflowered by the landlord before her nuptial night, the Shah, knowing full well Iranian men’s obsession with questions of “honor” and “virginity,” asked, rhetorically, why these obscurantist mullahs were insistent on keeping alive the feudal system in which “before the first night of nuptial, some shameful acts were required.” And, then, he made a clear threat against his opponents by saying, “if necessary we will even shed the blood of some innocent people to eliminate this group of miserable ignorant elements. There is no alternative and it shall be done.”48
Four days later, in the city of Kashan, he made an even more blistering attack on the clergy. He called them “black reaction”—his unmistakable code name for the clergy opposed to him. By then “red reaction” had also become his favorite code for Communists. He defiantly declared, “the days of black reaction have ended. Theirs were the days when they used to get a free ride off the people’s shoulders. Today is the time of logic and reason, and they, like madmen, are trying to lie.”49
As the Shah was preparing for a confrontation with the clergy who opposed him, the mullahs, increasingly under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, also began to prepare for their fight with the Shah. Until the death of Ayatollah Boroujerdi, Khomeini had been forced to remain in the shadows. Nevertheless, he had, in spite of Ayatollah Boroujerdi’s injunction, decided to support and align with a young, fiery, rabble-rousing cleric turned terrorist called Navvab Safavi, the founder of Feda’yan-e Islam (Martyrs of Islam), the most powerful Islamic terrorist group in modern Iranian history.50 Safavi had been executed by the Shah’s regime in 1955. Now, with Boroujerdi’s death, Khomeini was stepping into the limelight and appealing not only to the more radical, younger elements of the clergy but to the remnants of Safavi’s followers.
In those days, the network of Islamic forces was as nebulous and nimble as it was invisible to the untrained eye, which, incidentally, included SAVAK. The network included classes in the Qu’ran, religious camps for different ages, mourning groups in charge of organizing processions and mourning ceremonies, women’s groups, and a number of publishing houses, many located in the city of Qom, which published large-circulation magazines and books. There were also a large number of political groups. Aside from the Freedom Movement—the more religious wing of the National Front—there were at least three other underground organizations active against the regime.
In March 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini called the leaders of the three underground groups to his house and asked them to unite their forces in anticipation of the coming battles with the regime. After some cajoling, the groups agreed and created one organization. Khomeini even suggested a name for the new group—Mo’talefe—the Coalition—a name that would be “neutral” and acceptable to all groups. Under Khomeini’s advice the new group created a military wing to be used in terrorist acts, as well as a political wing. They immediately set out to create a national network that used public phones, often around mosques, to organize united actions. It was a measure of the power of the new group in 1963 that they could distribute 250,000 copies of some of Khomeini’s proclamations. Even then, when tape recorders were a novelty in Iran, tapes of some of his talks were also distributed widely through this clandestine network.51 SAVAK learned of this group’s existence only a year after its creation.52 In 1978, the network of Khomeini’s seminarians became the main vehicle for establishing clerical hegemony over the burgeoning but deeply disunited democratic movement.
Khomeini put only two constraints on the group’s activities. Before killing anyone, they must have the fatwa of a cleric, and they should not “receive arms from anyone but should buy it.” But considering the group’s extensive influence inside the bazaars of the country, finding money to support the group was not a difficult task. Before long, the terrorist tentacles of the group would reach not just deep inside the Shah’s regime, but within the walls of his palaces. The 1965 assassination of a prime minister and the failed attempt on the Shah’s life that same year were both the works of religious zealots.
Once formed, the group, helped by a number of other ad hoc groups and personalities, began advertising for Ayatollah Khomeini as
a new marja-e taglid, or “source of emulation.” Shiism divides the community of believers into two groups: the handful of emulated ayatollahs and the rest of the flock. Each Shiite must choose an ayatollah to emulate. What makes an educated cleric into a marja-e is the publication of a treatise called Towzih-al Masael (Answers to Questions)—a catechism-like narrative that consists of that cleric’s answers (fatwas) to questions. Khomeini, by then a popular teacher at the seminary, decided to publish his Towzih-al Masael at this time. Many of his students claim that they pressured Khomeini into publishing the text. With the death of Boroujerdi, those who “emulated” him would bus people from around the country “in groups of twenty” to Qom, ostensibly to meet with Khomeini and appraise him as a potential ayatollah to follow. In reality, the purpose of these “meetings was to exchange views and information which could then be passed to other groups.”53 A telephone network and a “special fund” to defray the cost of the movement were also established.
The two armies, one composed of the military and security forces and belonging to the Shah, and the other consisting of the supporters of Khomeini, clashed on June 5, the tenth day of Moharram, when passions were aroused. In the early hours of that day, commandos attacked Ayatollah Khomeini’s house in Qom, put him under arrest, and brought him to Tehran in an unmarked car. News of his arrest arrived in Tehran before he and his captors did. His network of supporters took to the streets, shouting slogans, burning banks and cinemas, attacking governmental offices, even attempting to take over the radio station. Alam also estimated that “approximately 2000 of the demonstrators were fanatical and pro-mullah” and the rest were “the South Tehran mob which responds to any opportunity to destroy and loot.”54 Other sources have put the figure of demonstrators in the tens of thousands. It is also true that other bigger cities were participating in this mass uprising.