A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Khomeini had a strong sense of himself as well as the dignity of the ulema as a class, and always dressed neatly and cleanly—not affecting an indifference to clothes or appearance as some young mullahs did. He struck many people as aloof and reserved, and some as arrogant, but his small circle of students and friends knew him to be generous and lively in private. For his public persona as a teacher and mullah it was necessary for him to exemplify authority and quiet dignity. Through the 1940s and 1950s, as he continued to teach in Qom, it is perhaps correct to think of Khomeini as taking a position between the anti-colonial and anti-British activism of Ayatollah Kashani on the one hand, and the more conservative, withdrawn, quietist, less politically interventionist stance of Ayatollah Hosein Borujerdi on the other.36 But Khomeini’s combination of intellectual strength, curiosity, and unconventionality made him different from either. Potentially more creative and innovative, he still for the time being deferred to his superiors in the hierarchy of the ulema. Khomeini was made an ayatollah after the death of Borujerdi in March 1961, by which time he was already attracting large and increasing numbers of students to his lectures on ethics. He was regarded by some of them as their marja, their object of emulation.

  The events of 1963–1964 made Khomeini the leading political figure opposed to the shah—along with Mossadeq, who was still under house arrest and thus effectively neutralized. Khomeini, though he disapproved of constitutionalism in private, had been careful to speak positively about the constitution in public.37 His attack on the new law governing the status of the U.S. military was calculated to win over nationalists, some of whom might previously have been suspicious of a cleric. Intellectuals like Al-e Ahmad gave him their enthusiastic support. He was already applying the political method by which, through addressing popular grievances and avoiding pronouncements on issues that might divide his followers, he would later make himself a national leader.

  But from 1964 Khomeini was out of Iran and, to all appearances, out of Iranian politics. In a sense, Iranian politics was itself exiled, taking place among Iranian students and others living abroad. Within Iran the press was controlled and censored, the elections continued to be rigged, and SAVAK pursued, arrested, and imprisoned Tudeh activists and other dissidents.

  OIL BOOM AND EXPANSION

  The land reform program went ahead from 1963, but with mixed results. The landlords who were to be expropriated were allowed to keep only one village each, but some landlords were able to evade the provisions—by giving their property to relatives, for example, or by creating mechanized farms, which were exempt. About two million peasants became landowners in their own right for the first time, and some were able to set themselves up on a profitable footing. But for many more the holdings they were given were too small to make a living, and there were large numbers of agricultural laborers who, because they had not had cultivation rights as sharecroppers before the reform, were left out of the redistribution altogether. Because the reform was accompanied by a general push for the mechanization of agriculture, there was suddenly less work for these laborers anyway. The net result was rural unemployment and an accelerating movement of people from the villages to the cities, especially Tehran, in search of jobs. It has been suggested that the rate of internal migration reached eight percent per year in 1972–1973,38 and by 1976 Tehran had swelled to become a city of 4.5 million people.

  In Tehran these people went to poorer parts on the southern edge of the city, to what were little better than shanty towns. They tended to settle down in groups from the same village or area. Often they would know a mullah also from the same area, and he would be accorded added authority in the prevailing circumstances of dislocation and uncertainty.39

  Between 1963 and the latter part of the 1970s, Iran enjoyed a huge economic boom that saw per capita GNP rise from $200 to $2,000.40 Industrial output increased dramatically in new industries like coal, textiles, and the manufacture of motor vehicles, and large numbers of new jobs were created to absorb the increase in population and the large numbers leaving agriculture. Industrial wages were low, however. Government spending expanded education and health services too—the number of children in primary schools went from 1.6 million in 1963 to more than 4 million in 1977; new universities and colleges were set up and enrollment rose from 24,885 to 154,215. Students at foreign universities grew in number from fewer than 18,000 to more than 80,000. The number of hospital beds went from 24,126 to 48,000. Improved living conditions, sanitation, and health services all contributed to a big drop in the infant mortality rate and a spurt in population growth that continued until the 1990s. In the mid-1970s half the population were under sixteen, and two-thirds were under thirty. This was to be the generation of the revolution.41

  Investment rose dizzyingly as Iran benefited from a windfall bonanza of oil income—especially after the shah renegotiated terms with the oil consortium to give himself more control over production levels and prices. Then in 1973 the oil price doubled after the Yom Kippur war, and doubled again at the end of the year when the shah led the other OPEC countries to demand higher prices on the claim that oil had not kept pace with the price of other internationally traded commodities. Yet more money pumped into the system, though a large amount went back to the West—especially to the United States and the United Kingdom—in return for quantities of new military equipment. The shah bought more Chieftain tanks from the UK than the British army owned, and the very latest F-14 fighters from the United States.

  But the economy was overheating, there was too much money chasing too few goods, there were bottlenecks and shortages, and inflation rose sharply—especially on items like housing rent and foodstuffs, and especially in Tehran. Initially, the shah blamed small traders for the price rises, and sent gangs (backed by SAVAK) into the bazaars to arrest so-called profiteers and hoarders. Shops were closed down, two hundred fifty thousand fines were issued, and eight thousand shopkeepers were given prison sentences—none of which altered the underlying economic realities by one iota. The arrests and fines joined a list of grievances felt by the bazaari artisans and merchants, who were already seeing their products and businesses edged aside by imports, new factories, suburban stores, and supermarkets.

  There was a sense, including in government, that the developing economy had run out of control. In mid-1977 a new prime minister introduced a new, deflationary economic policy designed to restore some stability. But the result was a sudden jump in unemployment, as the growing number of arrivals in the cities either lost or failed to find jobs. Inflation and the sudden faltering of the economy were felt particularly by the poor, but to some extent by everyone. Rents were high for the middle-class engineers, managers, and professionals in Tehran, and those with a stake in new businesses felt the impact of deflation acutely.

  Tehran in the 1970s was a strange place. Large numbers of very wealthy people—many wealthy to a degree most Europeans could only dream of—lived hard by people poorer than could be seen anywhere in western Europe. The city was already largely a city of concrete, with only a core of a few older palaces and government buildings. But despite the traffic and the ugliness, the older Iran was still there in the chadors on the streets and the call to prayer at dusk. The West, and especially the United States, were constant presences, from the Coca-Cola and Pepsi on sale everywhere to American cars and American advertising, but constant also (alongside continuing admiration for America and an associated desire for economic development) were a tension and a distaste for that American presence.

  There were Americans everywhere in Tehran in the 1970s. Author and professor 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 fewer than 8,000 in 1970 to nearly 50,000 in 1979. Ten thousand were employed in defense 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, often living on American-only compounds and shopping in the U.S. commissary (the biggest of its kind in the world). Many British expatriates lived in a similar way. The American school in Tehran admitted only children with U.S. 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-1960s an American hospital in Tehran took on some well-educated Iranian nurses to supplement its staff. The Iranians were not allowed to speak in Persian, even among themselves, and were excluded from the staff canteen, which was kept for U.S. citizens only. The Iranian nurses had to eat in the janitor’s room. The hospital cared only for American patients, and one day when a desperate Iranian 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 with the Peace Corps, worked alongside 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. Incidents between U.S. residents and Iranians led to newspaper articles about drunken and lewd Americans, encouraging anti-American attitudes.

  There was also another kind of tension within Iranian society. The young men of south Tehran, newly arrived from traditional communities in the countryside and either having no jobs or only poorly paid ones, 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 billboards, 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 1970s it became for many a place of resentment, frustrated desire, and disappointed aspirations.

  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 complete—a time when everything in Tehran seemed to be “intimately connected with the airport”:

  . . . 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 became more repressive and hardened on the one hand, and more remote and attenuated on the other. SAVAK had a new target in those years—radical movements prepared to use violence against the regime. This notably included the Marxist Fedai and the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (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 realize them.45

  The shah himself rarely met ordinary Iranians. He went from place to place by helicopter and, following various assassination attempts, viewed parades and other events from inside a special bulletproof glass box. In 1971 he held an event at the historic sites of Persepolis and Pasargadae to celebrate, supposedly, the twenty-five-hundredth 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 honored, while President Pompidou of France was set low in the precedence order. Pompidou 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 fifty-nine smaller ones, and twenty-five thousand bottles of wine were imported for the event—rumors of the overall cost ranged as high as $200 million47). The shah made a speech claiming continuity with Cyrus, and a rebirth of ancient Iranian greatness.

  But the Achaemenids meant little to most Iranians—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 had been discovered at archaeological sites. There had long been an anticlerical, secularizing 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 one 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 citizens,49 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, while others were shallow and superficial. But in the end the important failures were primarily political—the shah had no program 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 it for a time. Instead the monarchy 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 fall happily into place. But few economies deliver continuous sustained growth indefinitely.

  In 1977 the shah, if not actually under pressure from the new Carter admini
stration in the United States then certainly aware that the Carter people 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. 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 criticizing 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—as well as for the removal of censorship (many of the leading members were Tudeh sympathizers 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 with the National Front, under Mehdi Bazargan and Ebrahim Yazdi.50

  On November 19 the Writers’ Association held a poetry evening—the tenth in a series of such evenings—at the Goethe Institut. About ten thousand students were present, and this time the police tried to break it up. When the students poured into the streets to protest, 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.