Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  There were Americans everywhere in Tehran in the ’70s. James A. Bill has estimated that between 800,000 and 850,000 Americans lived in or visited Iran between 1944 and 1979, and that the number resident there increased from less than 8,000 in 1970 to nearly 50,000 in 1979. Ten thousand were employed in defence industries around Isfahan alone. There were of course some Americans living in Iran who made an effort to understand the country, but many did not. For the most part, the Americans lived entirely separate lives, shopping in the US commissary (the biggest of its kind in the world) and often living on American-only compounds (many British expatriates lived in a similar way). The American school admitted only children with US passports (unusual by comparison with American schools in other countries) and occasional suggestions that the children be taught something about Iran generally failed—a school board member said in 1970 that the policy had been ‘Keep Iran Out’. In the mid-’60s an American hospital in Tehran took on some well-educated Iranian nurses to supplement their staff. The Iranians were not allowed to speak in Persian even among themselves, and were excluded from the staff canteen, which was kept for US citizens only. They had to eat in the janitor’s room. The hospital cared only for American patients, and when one day a desperate father tried to bring in his child, who had just been seriously injured by a car in the street outside, he was sent away to find transport to another hospital. Other Americans, notably those working for the Peace Corps, worked with ordinary Iranians and were much appreciated. But the majority were in Iran for the money and the lavish lifestyle, which they could not have afforded at home:

  As the gold rush began and the contracts increased, the American presence expanded. The very best and the very worst of America were on display in the cities of Iran. As time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high proportion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillusioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran. Companies with billion-dollar contracts needed manpower and, under time pressure, recruited blindly and carelessly. In Isfahan, hatred, racism and ignorance combined as American employees responded negatively and aggressively to Iranian society.42

  Iranians returned the compliment and incidents between US residents and Iranians led to newspaper articles about drunken and lewd Americans, encouraging anti-American attitudes.

  There was another kind of tension too, within Iranian society. The young men of south Tehran, newly-arrived from traditional communities in the countryside, either with no job or with only poorly-paid jobs, with little prospect of being able to afford to marry or support a family for some years, saw (if they took a bus or taxi uptown) pretty young middle-class women sashaying up and down the streets, flush with money, unaccompanied or with girlfriends, dressed in revealing western fashions, flaunting their freedom, money, beauty and (from a certain point of view) immorality.43 On hoardings, garish depictions of half-dressed women advertised the latest films. Status, and the lack of it, is not just about money—it is also about sex and desire. Tehran was a place of aspiration, but in the late ’70s it became a place of resentment, frustrated desire and frustrated aspirations for many.

  In an inspired passage Roy Mottahedeh described this time in Tehran as the time of montazh, when imported things were being assembled and put together in the city, often rather less than satisfactorily, and never quite completed—a time when everything in Tehran seemed to be ‘intimately connected with the airport’—when:

  … in joking, Tehranis called all sorts of jerry-built Iranian versions of foreign ideas true examples of Iranian montazh.44

  The most obvious examples of montazh were the ubiquitous Paykan cars assembled just outside Tehran from imported parts (to the design of the British Hillman Hunter), but the same principle could be seen or imagined at work elsewhere too—in corrupt property deals, in big buildings put up without enough cement, in the chaotic traffic, and in the new plaques and statues of the Shah that appeared everywhere.

  As the 1970s advanced, the political culture of the Shah’s regime both became more repressive and hardened on the one hand, and more remote and attenuated on the other. In the 1970s SAVAK had a new target—radical movements prepared to use violence against the regime: notably the Marxist Feda’i and the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO)—both of which fused Islam and Marxism. SAVAK expanded, and its use of torture became routine. In 1975 Amnesty International pronounced the Shah’s government to be one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The previous two tame parties in the Majles became one, called Rastakhiz (Resurgence)—with a role simply to support and applaud the Shah’s efforts. Politics became a matter of who could be most sycophantic to the Shah in public:

  The Shah’s only fault is that he is really too good for his people—his ideas are too great for us to realise them45

  The Shah himself rarely met ordinary Iranians, went from place to place by helicopter and, following various assassination attempts, usually viewed parades and other events from inside a special bullet-proof glass box. In 1971 he held an event at the historic sites of Persepolis and Pasargadae to celebrate, supposedly, the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian monarchy. This was folie de grandeur on a sublime scale. Heads of state from around the world were invited, but those from monarchies were given precedence, so Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was specially honoured, while President Pompidou of France was set low in the precedence order, took umbrage and sent his Prime Minister instead.46 Thousands dressed up as ancient Medes and Persians, television coverage of the event was beamed around the world by satellite and the distinguished guests drank champagne and other imported luxuries (the catering was laid on by Maxim’s of Paris in three huge air-conditioned tents and 59 smaller ones, and 25,000 bottles of wine were imported for the event—rumours of the overall cost ranged as high as $100 or $200 million47). The Shah made a speech claiming continuity with Cyrus and a rebirth of ancient Iranian greatness.

  But for most Iranians the Achaemenids meant little—they had probably never been to Persepolis, and what they knew of ancient Iran revolved around the stories of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh rather than what might or might not appear in Herodotus, or what had been discovered at archaeological sites. There had long been an anti-clerical, secularising strand of nationalist thinking that appealed to the pre-Islamic, monarchical tradition of Iran, but it was a slender reed to carry this burden of regime self-projection. For most the Iranian heritage was an Islamic heritage, and the jollifications at Persepolis left them nonplussed. Khomeini denounced the event from Iraq, thundering that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy in principle, that the crimes of Iranian kings had blackened the pages of history, and that even the ones remembered as good had in fact been ‘vile and cruel’.48 The Shah also replaced the Islamic calendar with a calendar that took year 1 as the year of the accession of Cyrus, which again left most Iranians irritated and baffled.

  For some members of the minorities in Iran the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah was a good time of relative freedom and absence of persecution, in which some Jews and Baha’is in particular were able, especially through their cultural emphasis on education, to achieve a degree of prosperity. But poorer Jews in some towns continued to suffer as second-class citizens49 and through this period many Iranian Jews emigrated to the United States and Israel. The Shah had passed a new Family Protection Law in 1967, which made divorce law fairer and more equal, and in particular made child custody dependent on the merits of the case in court rather than simply giving custody to the father.

  The Shah’s rule was a mixture of failures and successes; neither all one nor all the other. Some of the vaunted economic and developmental achievements were impressive—others were shallow and superficial. But in the end the important failures were primarily political—the Shah had no programme for restoring representative government and his only solution for dissent was repression. If he had succeeded in making the monarchy truly popular, perhaps he could have sustained that for a time—but instead the monarch
y became more remote and disconnected from the attitudes and concerns of ordinary Iranians. In a sense, paradoxically (perhaps partly as a result of combating underground Marxists for so long) the Shah made the mistake of a Marxist analysis: he thought that if he could just secure material prosperity through successful development, then everything else would follow. But few economies deliver continuous sustained growth indefinitely.

  In 1977 the Shah, if not actually under pressure from the new Carter administration in the US then certainly aware that Carter and his advisers were less sympathetic to repressive allies than their predecessors had been, began slowly to relax some of the instruments of repression. In February some political prisoners were released, and later on court rules were changed to allow prisoners proper legal representation, and access to civilian rather than military courts. The Shah met representatives from Amnesty International and agreed to improve prison conditions. In May a group of lawyers sent a letter to the Shah protesting at government interference in court cases. In June three National Front activists, including Karim Sanjabi, Shahpur Bakhtiar and Dariush Foruhar, sent a bolder letter to the Shah criticising autocratic rule and demanding a restoration of constitutional government. Later that month the Writers’ Association, repressed since 1964, resurrected itself and pressed for the same goals, and for the removal of censorship (many of the leading members were Tudeh sympathisers or broadly leftist). In July the Shah replaced Amir Abbas Hoveyda, his Prime Minister for twelve years, with Jasmshid Amuzegar, who was perceived to be more liberal. In the autumn more political associations formed or re-formed; including the National Front, under the leadership of Sanjabi, Bakhtiar and Foruhar; and the Freedom Movement, closely allied, under Mehdi Bazargan and Ebrahim Yazdi.50

  On 19 November the Writers’ Association held a poetry evening—the tenth of a series of such evenings—at the Goethe Institut. There were about 10,000 students present, and this time the police tried to break it up. The students went onto the streets to protest, and the police attacked them, killing one, injuring seventy and arresting about a hundred. But on this occasion civilian courts tried the students and quickly acquitted them.

  While in exile Khomeini, as well as keeping up a stream of messages and speeches critical of the regime (which were smuggled into Iran and distributed, often using cassette tapes), had developed his theory of opposition into a full-blown theory for Islamic government. He set this out in a book (based on lectures he gave in Najaf in 1970) with the title Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e Faqih (Islamic government: Regency of the Jurist).51 In this text the Usuli thinking of the previous two centuries, that had helped the ulema develop a hierarchy and had allowed them in effect to deputise for the Hidden Emam, was developed to a logical extreme that permitted the ulema to rule directly. This was the meaning of the term velayat-e faqih, which needs explaining. A vali was a regent or deputy, someone standing in for the person with real authority—it was the title taken by Karim Khan Zand in the eighteenth century, when he forbore to make himself Shah. Velayat meant regency, guardianship or deputyship, or rather, by extension, the authority of the deputy or regent. The term faqih signifies a jurist, an expert in Islamic law—fiqh. The logic of the concept was that the shari‘a, derived from the word of God and the example of the Prophet, was there to regulate human conduct, and was the only legitimate law. In the absence of the Hidden Emam, the mojtaheds were the right people to interpret and apply the shari‘a. So obviously, they were the right people to rule too. Who else? From this point onward Khomeini demanded the removal of the Shah and the establishment of Islamic government; clear and consistent demands that the whole country could understand (at least, they thought they could—what exactly Islamic government might mean in practice remained less clear) and which increasingly made him the focal point for opposition to the Shah.

  The principle of velayat-e faqih was not accepted by the ulema as a whole, indeed not accepted by very many. But since the First World War the ulema had been jostled and edged out of many of their traditional roles of authority in society by the secularising Pahlavi monarchy. Under Mohammad Reza Shah the regime even attempted, in the late ’60s and ’70s (as part of the White Revolution programme), to replace the traditional ulema with a new religious structure of mosques and mullahs answerable to the state. There was little popular enthusiasm for the state religion (din-e dawlat), but it succeeded in alienating the ulema as a whole even further from the Shah. Ayatollahs Montazeri and Taleqani were arrested and sentenced to internal exile after disturbances at Tehran University and in Qom in 1970-72.52 But where Tudeh, the National Front and the violent radicals were battered and disrupted by years of conflict with SAVAK, the informal nationwide network of mullahs and religious leaders, reaching into every social class, every bazaar guild and every village, was still there in the late ’70s, as it had been in 1906; reflecting the enduring power of this alternative source of authority in Shi‘a Iranian society. In the theory of velayat-e faqih and Khomeini the ulema had the defining political principle and the leader that they had lacked in 1906.

  By the end of 1977 the Shah had alienated the ulema, alienated the bazaaris, and had created a large, poor, deracinated working class in Tehran. He had also alienated many of the educated middle classes, his natural supporters, through his repression and abuses of human rights. Some of these had in addition been radicalised by their experience of leftist politics in Europe in the late 60s and 70s. But there was another important influence on the thinking of this generation—Ali Shariati.

  Shariati was born in 1933, near Sabzavar in Khorasan. He grew up to be an extrovert, lively, highly intelligent youth with a strong sense of humour, who enjoyed ridiculing his teachers. He was influenced by his father, who had been an advocate of progressive Islam in his own right, but also by writers like Hedayat and western thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kafka. Later he went to Mashhad University, and then to Paris, where he studied under Marxist professors, read Guevara and Sartre, communicated with the Martinique-born theorist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, and took a doctorate in sociology (in 1964). His political activism also attracted the attention of SAVAK. Returning to Iran in 1965, he taught students in Mashhad and later in Tehran, attracting large numbers to his lectures, and wrote a series of important books and speeches. The general message was that Shi‘ism provided its own ideology of social justice and resistance to oppression. This had been masked by a false Shi‘ism of superstition and deference to monarchy (Black Shi‘ism, Safavid Shi‘ism), but the essential truths of the religion were timeless, centering on the martyrdom of Hosein and his companions. He was not a Marxist, but could be said to have recast Shi‘a Islam in a revolutionary mould, comparable to the Marxist model—‘Everywhere is Karbala and every day is Ashura’.53 For the Shah’s regime, he was too hot to handle. He was imprisoned in 1972, released in 1975, kept under house arrest, and allowed to go to England in 1977. He died there, apparently of a heart attack, in June the same year (but many Iranians believe he was murdered by SAVAK). Khomeini would never endorse Shariati’s thinking directly, but was careful never to condemn it either. Shariati’s radical Islamism, both fully Iranian and fully modern, was a strong influence on the generation of students that grew to adulthood in the 1970s.54

  Through the inflation, followed by economic slump and deflation, many Iranians, including well-off Iranians, had come to doubt their assumptions about steady growth and economic security. There had also been a number of incidents in which the Shah had made himself look foolish or out of touch — the latest came on his visit to Washington at the end of 1977 when TV cameras caught him clinking champagne glasses with President Carter and weeping from tear gas on the White House lawn when the wind blew the wrong way from nearby demonstration against his visit. An autocrat can get away with many things, but looking foolish undercuts him in the most damaging way.

  Revolution

  In January 1978 an article appeared in the paper Ettela’at, attacking the clergy and Khomeini as ‘black reac
tionaries’. The article had been written by someone trusted by the regime and approved by the court, but had been refused by the more independently-edited paper Kayhan. It twisted facts and invented fictions, suggesting that Khomeini was a foreigner (from his grandfather’s birth in India and name, Hindi), a former British spy, and a poet (the last was true, and was intended to detract from his clerical seriousness: most ulema, with some backing from the Qor’an, disapproved of poetry)55. The article immediately prompted a protest demonstration in Qom, in which thousands of religious students abused the ‘Yazid government’ and demanded an apology, a constitution, and the return of Khomeini. There were clashes with the police and a number of students were shot dead: the following day Khomeini, by now in Paris, praised the courage of the students and called for more demonstrations. Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari, one of the most senior marjas at the time, condemned the shootings.

  After a traditional mourning period of forty days the bazaars and universities closed and there were peaceful demonstrations in twelve cities, including in Tabriz, where again the police fired on the crowd, causing more deaths. The forty-day rhythm continued, like a great revolutionary lung, with the almost unanimous support of the ulema (though many of the clerics called for mourners to attend the mosques rather than to demonstrate). The demonstrations grew larger and more violent, with slogans like ‘death to the Shah’. After the end of May there was a lull (among other reasons, Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari had urged people against further street demonstrations to avoid more deaths), but there was a violent incident in Mashhad in July where police fired on a crowd. On 19 August, the Rex Cinema burned down in Abadan, an incident that is still controversial, killing about 370 people. Government and opposition both accused each other, but events, trials and investigations in later years indicate that a radical Islamic group with connections to ulema figures was responsible.56 At the time, the mood was such that most blamed SAVAK.