by Tony Judt
forget.
America: The New and “Unique”
Superpower
In analyzing the 1953 coup, Iranian Nationalist forces failed to
recognize their own weaknesses in leading the oil nationalization
negotiations with the British. The reality is that by counting too much
on the American support, they failed not only to evaluate their real
national political basis but also the world’s changing realities—thus
letting the negotiation to turn into an open international and national
crisis. This crisis not only alarmed the Americans but also led to con-
cerns among many conservative political and social forces regarding a
possible communist takeover of Iran. Instead, and with the impor-
tance given to the role of superpowers in the destiny of Third World
countries, Iran’s elite put all the blame on Americans. In other words,
by fomenting the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, America not only
became the disloyal friend, but, in the nation’s psyche, it came to
occupy exclusively the place reserved for Britain and Russia since the
nineteenth century. From 1953 until today, it is thought that
American influence on Iran’s political scene has had a decisive impact,
this is why political actors who enjoyed American support think that
they do not need the cooperation of other actors for their policies. As
a first example of this important feature in Iranian politics, we could
follow the experience of the reformist prime minister who came to
office in 1961, the first American intervention in the country’s
domestic affairs since the 1953 coup.
The year 1953 was an important one for Iran because it was the
juncture where Iran finally managed to nationalize its oil. It was also
the year in which Mossadegh was removed from power. However,
1953 was certainly not a turning point in the country’s short-term
political life. In fact, as soon as the essential objective of the coup,
namely the prevention of a communist takeover in Iran was achieved,
the Americans revived their pressure on the Shah to limit his authori-
tarian rule and to organize real and free parliamentary elections as
soon as possible. The elections to the twentieth parliament, which
were supposed to fulfill the American demand, were in fact a mas-
querade. The Shah was forced to name Ali Amini—an American pro-
tégé—as prime minister. Amini’s cabinet started its work in May 1961
with promises of political and economic reform. In the 14-month
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period of premiership, Amini’s assurance of having U.S. backing pre-
vented him from paying any serious attention to nationalist forces.17
For the same reason, he did not pay enough attention to the growing
discontent among teachers and to the very important problem of con-
trolling law enforcement units which savagely cracked down on
teacher and student protests.18 He also did not pay enough attention
to his most important project, that is, the land reform program.19
Following the military crackdown on the Tehran University, Amini’s
government resigned and the Shah was able to negotiate a morato-
rium to resist the American pressures for parliamentary elections.
Manoutchehr Eqbal, a pro-Shah prime minister, replaced Amini and
Iran never witnessed a free election until the 1979 Revolution.
The fall of Amini’s government underlined two facts in the eyes of
Iran’s political elite: first that their own role in Iran’s domestic affairs
was insignificant, and second that the United States played an essen-
tial role in the country’s domestic affair. The question was no longer
whether the United States played a crucial role in Iran’s political life,
but whether this role was to Iran’s advantage or to her disadvantage.
Before the 1953 coup, only Iran’s pro-Soviet communists regarded the
U.S. role as malefic for Iran. However, after the Amini experience,
nationalists as well as rightist democratic political forces also shared the
communist’s point of view. The only missing opposition political
element in that phase consisted of religious political groups.
The Race for Anti-Americanism
Evidently, religious authorities and a multitude of religious groups
had a forceful and dominant presence as the leaders of the anti-Shah
and anti-American manifestations during the turmoil that preceded
the 1979 revolution. This raised important questions as to when and
how religion became such a revolutionary political force in Iran?20
And the crucial question for our discussion is why and how religious
forces chose the Shah and its U.S. backers as their worst enemy in
place of the atheist Iranian communists and their ally, the Soviet
Union.
The Fear from Communism
It is true that the Bolshevik Revolution initially relieved Iran’s political
life from the menace of a powerful and threatening neighbor, but
the intervention of the Bolshevik army in Gilan, the northern province
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195
of Iran during the Jangali revolt, put an end to this short period of
peace.21 However, the event that really shocked the whole political life
of Iran was the 1945 Azerbaijan crisis. The Azerbaijan crisis indicated
to Iran for the first time that the Bolsheviks were the true and also
more active and more ideological heirs of the Russian Empire.
Moreover, the crisis had also shown that this new and young imperi-
alist force had a powerful internal ally, namely the Tudeh Party (The
Communist party of Iran). The acknowledgment of the existence of
internal and external forces that could drag Iran into the communist
sphere of influence had a tremendous effect on the rivalry between state
and religion in Iran. This effect is best seen in one of the most critical
moments of Iran-U.S. relations, during the 1953 coup.22
It is now evident that in the course of the 1953 coup against
Mossadegh, the United States not only had the backing of royalist
forces and a few dissidents of the Mossadeghist movement, but also
enjoyed the tacit backing of a very influential religious figure,
Ayatollah Kashani.23 Later on, radical religious movements wanting to
recuperate the popularity of Mossadegh’s struggle for oil nationaliza-
tion praised Kashani’s role during the period when he supported the
prime minister and never admitted his later shift toward the monarchy.
Even today, the Islamic government of Iran continues to justify their
anti-Americanism partly by referring to the role that the U.S. govern-
ment had played in the 1953 coup. But it is evident that at the moment
of the coup, clerical leaders saw it as a defense against the potential
spread of communism in the country. In an autobiography published
in 1996 in Iran, Hojatol-eslam Falsaf i, a very famous orator, who was
related to Ayatollah Kashani, well summarizes the state of mind of
religious leaders during the weeks that preceded the coup:
In fact, religious leaders were caught between two choices: either they
ha
d to defend the greatness of Islam and the survival of Shiism, in that
case they had to defend the Constitution, which recognized Shiism
as the official religion of the country and this was—willingly or not—
realized through the defense of constitutional monarchy. Or they had
to keep quiet and free the scene for the Tudeh (communist) party to be
active and potentially take power, which could have led to the eradica-
tion of Islam in the country. It was evident that religious leaders had the
duty not to stay impartial and to defend the constitutional monarchy
against communist activism.24
In the light of this event, it is essential to ask what happened between the
1953 coup and the turmoil that preceded the 1979 revolution, which
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gave the religious forces the opportunity to challenge the monarchical
power and its American ally, without the concern that communists
could benefit from the revolutionary situation and drag Iran into the
sphere of Soviet influence?
The answer is that in the quarter century that separates the two
events, the religious elements became the hegemonic political force of
the country. This was achieved via two processes: first, by gaining the
leadership of the opposition—a process helped by the Shah who elim-
inated all other opponents; and second, by developing a new political
discourse that integrated the most important mobilizing themes of
their potential rivals, specifically the nationalists (heir of Mossadegh
movement), as well as leftist political forces, and thus preventing
the latter two currents from gaining the upper hand in the Iranian
political scene.
The 1963 Turning Point and the Search
for Leadership
Khomeini’s revolt in 1963 was certainly the first time that a well-known,
high-ranking clerical figure intervened directly to reverse the half
century long process of giving in of religious institutions to the state.25
This attitude would probably have continued if, by the end of 1962,
the Shah’s authoritarian rule had not emptied the country’s political
scene from all political opposition that could be considered reformist.
Khomeini’s entry was announced in June 1963, when he delivered
a sermon in the Faizieh religious school in Qom, warning the Shah in
blunt language to behave and respect clerical leaders. He was arrested
on June 4. Few hours later, a crowd of protestors was formed near
Tehran’s Bazar and in the mid-morning, troops opened fire. The riots
reached their climax on June 5 (15 Khordad) when they spread to other
major cities. However, the riots were finally clamped down bearing a
heavy loss of life.
When months later some of the Mossadeghist leaders were released
from prison, they decided that participation in elections was unjusti-
fied, especially as election results were known in advance.26 In their
argument about refraining from elections, they also underlined the
fact that after the 15 Khordad riots, prisons were filled and there was
no point in producing more martyrs. They decided to adopt a policy
of “patience and waiting,” leaving to the religious forces the first place
in opposing the Shah. Thus, with the help of the Shah, Ayatollah
Khomeini and his radical followers had won the battle of leadership
over nationalists and other moderate opposition leaders.
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197
Incorporating the Leftist Discourse
The utilization of the most anti-American slogans during the pre-
revolutionary turmoil in 1978 indicated clearly that the religious forces
no longer expressed the fear they had in 1953. In the meantime, the
religious forces were able to use leftist jargon (the promise of a class-
less society and social justice for all) to mobilize people, while staying
critical to the materialistic approach of communism. In fact, during
these 25 years, they had become the most radical anti-monarchical
political force and by incorporating in their discourse the anti-
Imperialist element of the Left, they were in a good position to challenge
secular leftist groups in their own backyard.
In 1943, two years after the departure of Reza Shah and the begin-
ning of the longest period (12 years) of democracy in Iran, some
religious activists were concerned about the attraction of the urban
youth in Tehran and other large cities to the leftist discourse.27 One of
the first political attempts by religious activists to counterbalance the
Tudeh party activities was the Nehzat-e Khodaparastan-e Socialist
(Movement of socialist God-Worshippers)28 that began its cultural
and social propaganda in 1943 and became politically active six years
later. During the six years of preparation for political action, they
published a few booklets, explaining why Islam could give the Iranian
population the means of building a more just and free society, without
being obliged to let down their religion. Nakhshab, the leader of the
group, who wrote all the booklets, argued that man had the moral
capability to intervene into his destiny. For him, Lenin was the first
person who had shown the inefficiency of materialism, because he did
not wait for the materialist force of history to bring down the bour-
geoisie and give the rule to the proletariat. For Nakhshab, Lenin’s
action for building “Socialism” voluntarily in a backward country like
Russia had shown the limit of materialism and demonstrated the
power of idealism. Hence, the best way of fighting for socialism was
through religion and not through materialistic ideas propagated by
the Tudeh party.29
Later, this task was assumed by Ali Shariati. He believed that another
reading of Islamic history is necessary to break down the rigid conser-
vatism of the clergy, responsible for turning Islam into a passive and
soulless religion, unfit to deal with contemporary problems.30 Therefore,
he aimed at reviving Islam as the ideology of liberation of Iran as well
as the ideology of freeing the Islamic world from tyranny and depend-
ency. In doing this, Shariati made a tremendous effort to Islamize
Marxism and to give a new reading of Islamic history through his new
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reading of Islam. He gave a complete Islamic version of Marx’s and
Engels’s Historical Materialism, where the history of humanity starts
with early commune and finishes with the elimination of bourgeoisie,
and the establishment of a “Monolithic Classless Society.”31 He went
even further and produced a thesaurus including Islamic synonyms for
the most important notions and concepts used in the Marxist–Leninist
literature.32 He taught his students that the real Islam had a class pref-
erence and this is the poor and disenchanted.33 Summarizing his own
work in an open letter to his father, he said:
what is the source of the greatest hope and energy to me is that, contrary
to the past, it is evident that future intellectuals, leading mental figures
and builders of our society and culture will not be the Westoxicated
or Eastoxicated materialists, Marxists and nationalists; but they will be
intellectuals that will choose the Islam of Ali [the first Shiite Imam] and
the line of Hussein [the third Shiite Imam] as their school of thought for
sociological behavior and revolutionary ideology.34
Shariati’s revolutionary reconstruction of a new collective under-
standing of Islam was used by Sazeman-e Mojahedin-e Khalgh-e
Iran (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran—MKO), a guerilla
organization that started its military operation in 1971, in an attempt
to disrupt the celebrations of the 2500-year anniversary of Iranian
monarchy. During their six years of theoretical preparation before
launching military actions, the MKO came to the conclusion that the
feebleness of Iran was not caused by the country’s people, but by its
compromising leaders.35 The MKO thought that the Iranian monar-
chy’s dependency on the United States was, at the same time, its
source of power and its Achilles’ heel. It is not a surprise then that
MKO’s military operations were independently directed against the
regime and American presence in Iran. Targets of assassination included
the U.S. military adviser to the Shah, as well as the chief of Tehran
police. MKO assassinated General Price, the highest ranking American
military officer stationed in Iran, and also bombed the Coca Cola
building in Tehran. The organization was also responsible for several
explosions in Tehran on the eve of President Nixon’s official visit to
Tehran in 1972.36
Hence, in less than two decades, while trying to achieve an hege-
monic position in the struggle against the dictatorship of the Shah,
the religious political activists followed the path of radicalization and
anti-Americanism. By being a part of the more radical forces asking
for the departure of the Shah during the events that preceded the
1979 revolution, they demonstrated that they were, in fact, among
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199
the most revolutionary political forces of the country. After the
overthrow of the Shah, they had to demonstrate that they were also