by John McHugo
After the oil price rises of 1973–74, Saudi Arabia became the epitome of a ‘rentier state’, one that lives on the revenues from its resources. Left-wing political prisoners were released from jail or allowed to return home from abroad, and were showered with patronage. In other words, most of the former activists allowed themselves to be bought off. Once they had compromised themselves in this way, they were able to take up a new life as bureaucrats, businessmen, or even journalists. Some of the Shi‘is among them also returned to the old politics of the Shi‘i notable families, seeking to represent their community (or part of it) in their dealings with the organs of the Saudi state. But there remained memories of the times when some young people had dreamed dreams of subversion, although these had turned bitter. Secular opposition had failed. Nor could anyone forget the harshness and disdain with which the security forces treated the Shi‘is. An irony resulted. Members of Shi‘i notable families who might once have made a career out of religious scholarship now chose other paths instead. The same pattern could be seen in the classes that had provided the religious scholars in some other Arab countries, notably Syria.10 Among Saudi Shi‘is, the old, respected elite of religious scholars ceased to enjoy the status in the Shi‘i community that it had once enjoyed. This left a gap that others might one day be able to fill.
The impulse behind the spread of religious politics in Arab and some other Muslim countries from the late 1960s onwards was the revival of Islam and its defence against Western ideologies like socialism and Marxism. Socialism and Marxism had become popular among the intellectual elite across the Muslim world, just as they were in many Western countries at the time. Their hostility to imperialism and thirst for social justice made them especially attractive to young people. There were figures who succeeded in introducing many of their ideas to an educated and youthful public in a way that allowed them to be blended with Islam. One such figure was the devout but anti-clerical Iranian Ali Shariati (1933–1977).
He is regarded as one of the greatest Iranian intellectuals of the twentieth century and, in many ways, was the thinker behind the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. He was a hugely popular figure and it is more than possible that, had he not died in exile in 1977, the Iranian Revolution would have gone down a very different track. A sociologist by training, he set out to reconcile Islam with Western thought including the principles of democracy and the variant of Marxism that was so fashionable at that time.
He was fascinated by Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, one of the Prophet’s earliest companions whom he contrasts with the caliphs Uthman and Mu‘awiya, both of whom Abu Dharr upbraided in public for their pomp, fine living and extravagance. Abu Dharr even rose in revolt against Uthman. Ali Shariati wrote a biography of Abu Dharr, portraying him as someone who spoke truth to power and campaigned passionately for social justice. He presents Abu Dharr as a model for Muslims in the modern world. Under the Caliph Uthman’s rule, ‘the humiliated working masses and the helpless were suppressed under the heels of usurers, slave merchants, the wealthy, and aristocrats’. It was easy for a reader to see these references to Uthman’s rule as coded references to that of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi who then ruled Iran. The unabashed Marxist influence is also apparent. ‘This capital, wealth, gold and silver which you have hoarded,’ Ali Shariati’s Abu Dharr tells Uthman, ‘must be equally divided among all Muslims. In Islam’s economic and ethical system, everyone must share in the others’ benefits, and in all blessings of life.’11
One of the criticisms from the Iranian religious scholars who were upset by Ali Shariati’s radical message was that he had departed from Shi‘i doctrine by teaching that Abu Bakr had indeed been the first successor to the Prophet Muhammad, and had been validly elected to that position. Although Ali Shariati was actually very much a Shi‘i (note how he cites the Caliph Uthman as an archetype of injustice), there is no anti-Sunni polemical strain in his writing. His focus on Abu Dharr is interesting in this context. Abu Dharr is one of the few Companions of the Prophet who are accepted by both Sunnis and Shi‘is. On the Sunni side, he is seen among Sufis, including major mainstream figures such as al-Ghazali, as a figure of great piety who renounced the world and was the exemplar of the spiritual ideals of faqr, poverty and of tawakkul, trust in God. For Shi‘is, his courage in confronting Uthman and Mu‘awiya made him a hero.
Although Ali Shariati was not necessarily focusing on Abu Dharr as a figure to unify Sunnis and Shi‘is, he intended his teaching that Islam should be the answer to the problems of the modern world to be shared equally by Sunnis as well as Shi‘is. For him as for many other leading voices, the dichotomy was not between Sunnis and Shi‘is but between Islam on the one side and capitalism and imperialism on the other. Sunni-Shi‘i sectarianism was not an issue; the struggle was between Islam and the ‘West’ and its local stooges. This was also the view of many conservative voices, who would have abhorred the Marxist influences on Ali Shariati’s work.
Nevertheless, when looking back on this period we can see with hindsight that the building blocks for Sunni-Shi‘i discord were slowly but surely being put in place. The role Wahhabism played as Saudi Arabia’s official ideology ensured that official attitudes to Shi‘ism in that country would be at best disdainful. This would ensure that the Twelvers of the Eastern Province would be corralled off from any real participation in the public life of the kingdom, and be forced to retreat into their own identity. Even worse, now that Saudi Arabia had vast sums to spend on disseminating its brand of Islam across the world, this disdain for Shi‘is and Shi‘ism would be one of its principal exports (after hydrocarbons, of course).
At the same time, in both Iraq and Syria the government was in the hands of a clique largely drawn from a religious minority. While in theory each government was Ba‘athist and therefore thoroughly secular, in reality the dictators who ruled these countries were forced to rely on patronage for much of their support. Although they succeeded in recruiting the support of many individuals from all sects, while many other people backed them because they feared civil strife if the regime fell, members of the president’s minority sect received a grossly disproportionate share of state patronage. What could be a better place to seek the foot-soldiers for your brutal security services than among the members of your own minority religious grouping? And what could be more calculated in the long run to sow the seeds of sectarian hatred?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Iranian Revolution and The Iran-Iraq War
I
This chapter concerns just two events: the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War that broke out in September 1980. That war continued until 1988 and ended just over a year before the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. As he was the figure who led the revolution and whose ideas shaped the new Islamic Republic of Iran, his death seems a fitting point at which to close this chapter.
The Shah who ruled Iran before the revolution was a controversial figure. He was a friend of the West, but it was well known that his regime was extremely repressive and that torture was widely used by his secret police, the much-feared SAVAK. When his days in power began to seem numbered, most people in the West who followed the events in Iran hoped that the country would be able to join the ranks of the democracies. It already seemed to be well on the path to becoming an industrialised nation, so such an expectation did not seem unreasonable. Instead, observers were forced to watch in bafflement and sometimes horror as Iran took a seemingly bizarre and regressive path. As commentators in the Western media grappled for ways to explain this, the words Sunni and Shi‘i began to creep out of the rarefied academic discourse of Islamic studies faculties in universities, and into the media for the first time.
There is no doubt that the Iranian Revolution changed the world. We need to understand the forces that drove it, because in a short space of time Shi‘i Iran became characterised by many other regimes as a threat to stability, both within and between nations. The events, and their outcome, also provided a motivation for Shi�
��ism itself to be condemned. What happened in Iran in 1979 would open up the sectarian split in Islam as a fault-line. Yet there is a paradox here: the revolution had no sectarian agenda and aimed to unite all Muslims against the onslaught of the West.
II
The history of Iran in the century or so before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 can be summarised only very briefly here. Throughout the nineteenth century the ruling Qajar dynasty were unable to provide anything more than weak government, while Britain and Russia engaged in imperial power politics that eventually led to the country being divided into spheres of influence. In the 1920s a tough professional soldier called Reza Khan seized power, proclaiming himself Reza Shah in 1925 and taking Pahlavi as the name of his dynasty. He would rule Iran with a rod of iron until he was ousted by Britain and Soviet Russia in 1941. His son Muhammad Reza Shah then ruled, until he was overthrown in the revolution in 1979. Both shahs treated parliament and the constitution as a mere process of administration.
The Pahlavis changed Iran from a country of peasants and tribal nomads into an urban, industrial society. But a repressive security state stifled any form of opposition, and the country was corrupt to the core. 1976 saw the Iranian economy overheat, while the following year oil revenues began to fall. Inflation, commodity shortages and rising unemployment all arrived together.
Many Iranians were angry at what they saw as the Pahlavi shahs’ subservience to America and Britain. This fed into the existing distrust of Britain that went back to the nineteenth century. Reza Shah was perceived by many as someone who had sold Iran to Britain. For a long time, the British government received more money from Iranian oil than did the Iranian government. His son, Muhammad Reza Shah, kept very close to America and Britain, remaining their firm ally in the Cold War. In return, he was showered with state-of-the-art military equipment sold on very favourable terms.
The cultural side of the Pahlavi modernisation programme rode roughshod over traditional values. This was especially the case with regard to the values of Shi‘i Islam that the peasants brought with them as they flocked to the cities. The Pahlavis disparaged the clergy as relics of the old Iran they were trying to drag into the modern world, but unfortunately for them the clergy were part of the warp and weft of traditional society.
At times it almost seemed as though Muhammad Reza Shah deliberately passed measures that he knew the clergy would dislike, so as to taunt them by displaying his power. He issued decrees instructing Iranians how they should dress. Turbans were replaced with various sorts of headgear, including a brimmed hat for men that meant that they could not touch the ground with their heads while prostrating themselves in prayer. Only the clergy were exempt, but this gave him the chance to decide who the members of the clergy would be. He encouraged women to reveal their faces and hair, forbade head coverings for female teachers, and ordered officials to be accompanied by their wives at state receptions. Chairs were to be installed in mosques to end the immemorial custom of worshippers sitting on the floor, while street commemorations of Muharram and the feast of Zahra, when the period of mourning for Hussein comes to an end, were banned.
The clergy became increasingly aghast at some social reforms under the Pahlavis, especially those concerning the position of women. These chipped away at the traditional interpretation of the Sharia, and granted women the vote. In the late 1970s, political activism increased. Religious scholars who were hostile to the Shah began to establish a network of sympathetic mosques and other religious establishments.
Demands grew for the authorities to allow the return from exile of a religious scholar called Ruhollah Khomeini. Few people outside Iran and the world of Twelver Shi‘ism had heard of him. When the Shah and his empress were on an official visit to Washington in November 1977, both the empress and the American ambassador to Iran, who was meant to know the country well, saw demonstrating students carrying posters with a picture of Khomeini. Both were surprised that the students had chosen the face of such an obscurantist figure to symbolise their opposition to the Shah.
At the end of 1977, the British ambassador to Tehran reported home that the political and economic difficulties Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran faced were ‘no threat to basic stability’. Yet the following twelve months saw a wave grow until it swamped the ship of state. Once several demonstrators had been shot, protests spread across the country against the ‘Government of Yazid’ (a reference to the second Umayyad caliph, blamed for the death of the Shi‘is’ Third Imam, Hussein). Leading religious scholars issued calls for restraint, fearing that the protests would lead to action against religious institutions. Yet from the safety of his base near Paris, Khomeini called for the demonstrations to continue. Those protesting increased in numbers, and dissent spread across a wider segment of society.
Demonstrations in Tehran on 4 September took place to mark the feast at the end of Ramadan. Up to half a million people walked through the city carrying pictures of Khomeini. Three days later another march openly called for an Islamic republic. That night the Shah appointed a hard-line general as military governor of Tehran, and the following day troops fired into the crowds, killing around eighty people and injuring many more.1 Many of those who marched had little idea of Khomeini’s own thought, which was controversial even among other religious scholars. The old man was a figurehead, a person of towering integrity but someone who had no political experience and no idea at all about how to run a major country like Iran as it blazed its way into the modern world. But the protestors knew what they wanted to end: the Shah’s regime, together with its repression, corruption, kowtowing to foreign interests, and contempt for the traditional values still held by most ordinary Iranians.
The situation continued to deteriorate. Khomeini steadfastly insisted that the Shah had to go, as a precondition for any settlement of the crisis. This made any compromise impossible. By December, strikes had led to paralysis of the economy and shortages of many commodities, including fuel. On 11 December, the anniversary of Hussein’s martyrdom, over one million people attended demonstrations in Tehran. The crowd listened to speeches from all corners of the opposition, who had combined to produce a manifesto. Its demands included: a call for Khomeini to be made the leader of the country; an end to the monarchy; the establishment of an Islamic government; social justice for the poor; the revival of agriculture; and the protection of minorities.2
What support there was for the old regime either melted away or wisely kept a low profile. The Shah left the country on 16 January, officially for a holiday and rest and recuperation. Khomeini arrived on 1 February to a tumultuous reception.
III
Who was this seventy-seven-year-old man with a long white beard, who wore black robes and a turban, held meetings while sitting on a carpet on the floor, and whose name had been enough to unify the protesters who had brought down the Shah? He was a descendant of the Prophet through the Seventh Imam, Musa al-Kazim. His forebears had for generations been important local religious scholars in Khomein, a town in central Iran between Isfahan and Hamadan. He was born in 1902 and lost his father when he was one, and his mother when he was sixteen. These bereavements may have left him with a certain independence as well as an ambition to succeed.3 He received the traditional education for an aspiring religious scholar, especially in the Sharia and judicial reasoning, and he was attracted to classical Persian poetry and Sufi mysticism. These were somewhat unusual interests for a religious scholar. Like Jamal al-Din al-Afghhani, whose ideas he studied, he was interested in the philosophical writings of the seventeenth-century Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra, and the School of Isfahan, associated with a cultural renaissance in the Safavid era. He also wrote a commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam by the early thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Ibn Arabi.4
These were texts that more conservative religious scholars disdained as frivolous flirtations with heresy, and it is quite wrong to see Khomeini as a brittle, religious fundamentalist. As well as being a revolutionary, he was an in
tellectual – but an intellectual rooted in a tradition that owed nothing to modern Western thought (although it stretched back to Plato and Aristotle). He was a rather unusual religious scholar who was more outward-looking than many: he had a greater intellectual curiosity than most, a confidence in the strength of his own intellect, and was prepared to stand out from the crowd when he thought it was right to do so. Unlike many others, he also thought that politics were important.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Khomeini taught in Qumm, and in 1961 he became an ayatollah (a title given to high-ranking Shi‘i clerics with expert knowledge of theology and jurisprudence). He began to make political statements, showing an ability to voice popular grievances while steering clear of issues that might prove divisive for those inclined to listen to his message. Thus, although he was privately against constitutionalism, he spoke positively about it in his public pronouncements.5 In this way, he managed to reach out to nationalists and others who might have been suspicious of a religious scholar. Yet, at the same time, he did not trust secular forces; they were mere allies of convenience. His own thought moved in the direction of rule by religious scholars, by the mujtahids. In 1964 he was sent into exile and lived most of the time in Najaf. He continued to make pronouncements on internal matters in Iran, but also began to develop his theory of Islamic government.