Riches of the World - 11
Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution of 1979
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord , CA
Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi was vulnerable on multiple fronts. Iran as a society was like an inverted pyramid. Oil revenues had made the Shah and a few of his cronies enormously rich. Trickledown economics had not worked. The vast majority of slum dwellers in the cities and the peasants in the countryside saw none of its benefits. Income disparities between the super rich and the poor increased. Corruption became endemic, further exacerbating the tensions between the rich and the poor.
The Shah was surrounded by sycophants. Drunk with pretenses of imperial grandeur he assumed that he was the savior of the Iranian nation, a second Cyrus the Great, and in a grand ceremony attended by kings and presidents from around the world, crowned himself the Shahanshah of Iran in October 1967. The problem was that the Persia of 1967 was not the Persia of Cyrus the Great.
The Shah ruled over a corrupt oligarchy. Corruption is the bane of sound economics. No economic theory predicts the destructive effects of black money, under-the-table transactions and nepotism. It introduces uncertainty into the future. It makes planning impossible. It scuttles a rational allocation of resources. It grotesquely distorts the performance of a business and at the macro level, it warps the economic performance of a nation. It gnaws at the social fabric, eating it from within, and ultimately destroys a society.
Secondly, the Shah confused the trappings of democracy with democracy itself. The lopsided vote in the referendum of 1964 about his White Revolution was a sham. No democratic election can give a partisan a 99 percent edge over an adversary. Did the Shah really believe that the world would buy into this sham plebiscite, a mockery of the democratic process?
The truth was that the Shah lived in a make-believe world which he had himself created with his vast network of informers. Like a spider that weaves a web and gets caught in it, he became a prisoner of his sycophants.
There are no checks and balances in a monarchy. It can only be moderated by constitutional constraints or done away with by outright removal. The verdict of history is clear: he who rules by the law becomes a saint; he who rules by his own power becomes a scoundrel.
Third, women’s suffrage and the rights granted to women were not always welcome in a traditional, conservative society. It left the Shah open to an attack from the religious right.
Fourth, the land reforms hit at the power base of the traditional landed aristocracy as well as the clergy that benefited from large waqfs. It was not uncommon to find entire villages “owned” by a single landlord. Many of the clergy were themselves landowners or were married into land-owning families. The social matrix was not unlike that in rural Punjab in pre-partition India in the 1940s where a coalition of sajjada nashins and rich landlords proved to be a decisive factor in the defeat of the Unionist Party and the emergence of the Muslim League. The Iranian landlords coalesced around the clerics who were willing to articulate their grievances in religious jargon and challenge the power of the Shah.
Fifth, and this was perhaps the most sensitive issue, was the admission of the Baha’is to the judiciary. The issue of the Baha’is has been a controversial one in Iran much as the issue of the Qadianis is in the Punjab. The clergy did not take it lightly that their traditional role as judges was usurped by not just lay Muslims but by Christians, Jews and the Baha’is.
The Shah made no attempt to build political institutions commensurate with his proclaimed reforms. By 1975, he abolished the multi-party system of government in favor of a one-party state under a single party. Reformers and would-be reformers often overlook the organic relationship between reform, structure and people. Liberal reforms require a liberal political structure and vice versa. Political structures must be consistent with the historical and cultural experience of a people which are colored by their deeply held religious beliefs.
The land reforms deprived the traditional rural proletariat their protective cover from the landed aristocrats and the clerics whose income depended on the waqfs. There was not enough land to go around and in spite of the millions of acres that were distributed among peasants, millions more remained landless. Mechanization created a flight of surplus labor to the slums of Tehran and Tabriz where they were an easy target for the sermons of the mullahs. So, the land reforms were a triple whammy for the Shah: he lost the traditional support he had enjoyed from the landowners; he failed to cultivate the allegiance of the emerging affluent classes in the cities; and he had no contact with the growing slums and the bazaars in the cities.
Add to these woes the Shah’s cozy relations with Israel and his all too obvious dependence on the United States and you can understand the multiple flanks from which the Shah was vulnerable.
Opposition to the Shah’s policies was widespread and it came from the left as well as the right. Faced with the repressive dragnet of SAVAK, much of this opposition disappeared or went underground. The clerics retreated to the mosques where the reach of SAVAK was limited because of the religious sensibilities of the population. The mosque, beyond the reach of SAVAK, became the refuge and the center for resistance and the left as well as the right joined this new alignment. There were progressives such as Ayatullah Taleghani as well as conservatives such as Ayatullah Khomeini among the clerics. The mosque as the venue for protest suited the conservatives more than the progressives who were less successful in formulating and presenting their ideas to a religious audience in a mosque. Thus it was that the center of gravity of opposition to the Shah’s rule gradually shifted to the most conservative elements among the clerics.
Khomeini emerged as the spokesman of these disgruntled masses in the early 1960s. In 1963 he expressed his opposition to the new freedoms granted to women. Said Khomeini: “Can any Muslim agree with this scandalous uncovering of women? ……. They regard the civilization and advancement of the country as dependent upon women’s going naked in the streets, or to quote their own idiotic words, turning half the population into workers by unveiling them ……The repressive regime of the Shah wanted to transform our warrior women into pleasure seekers, but God determined otherwise……”
About the Baha’is he said: “In our own city of Tehran now there are centers of evil propaganda run by … the Baha’is in order to lead our people astray and make them abandon the ordinances and teachings of Islam”.
In June 1963, Khomeini made a frontal attack against the Shah calling him “a wretched, miserable man” and comparing him to Yazid, the tyrant whose name is associated with the tragedy of Karbala. Such powerful imagery excited the population into a higher pitch of resistance. Khomeini called for a boycott of the referendum on the White Revolution and asked the clergy in Qom to oppose the Shah. He was arrested but was released after countrywide protests and riots. In 1964 when the Shah signed the “capitulation” agreements with the United Stated granting American soldiers immunity from prosecution under Iranian law, Khomeini denounced both the Shah and the United States in the harshest terms. A frustrated Shah exiled him.
In Najaf, Iraq, where Khomeini spent many of his years in exile, he gave a series of lectures which were compiled in 1970 under the title, Hukumat-e-Islami, Vilayet-e-Faqih. This formed the basis of his later teachings and his prescriptions for an Islamic government in Iran guided by a supreme teacher who combined in himself the internal and external knowledge of the Shariah as well as wisdom and justice.
The Shah was a driven man, in a hurry, as he saw it, to modernize his country so that it could take its place alongside industrialized nations such as Germany and Japan. He was impatient with opposition to his diktat and used all the oppressive measures of the state machinery to silence any opposition. As the repression grew, so did the opposition. Khomeini became a magnet and a catalyst for the opposition. His writings were secretly carried by tape, by courier and by paper to the mosques in the far corners of the country. Khomeini’s message, cast in religious terms and invoking the sacrifices of Karbala and of the Imams, resonated with the populace. His anti-Western slant was music to the ears of the Iranians who had a bitter taste of foreign meddling in their national affairs. The people, men and women, were willing to put their life and limb on the line. Thousands perished in the struggle.
In 1978, following a diplomatic understanding between the Shah and the Iraqi regime, Khomeini was made to move again, this time to Paris. But this did not diminish Khomeini’s reach to the protesting masses of Iran. Indeed, his chateau in Paris became a magnet for news reporters and Khomeini now enjoyed a global audience.
Protests, strikes, work shutdowns continued in Iran through much of 1978. By January 1979, the Iranian army was tired of shooting at its own people and gave up. The Shah left Iran and Khomeini returned triumphantly as the spiritual head of the Iranian Revolution.
Once in power, Khomeini proved to be less of a loving, protecting religious figure than a shrewd and obstinate politician. In November 1979, elements of the Iranian students calling themselves Followers of the Imam’s Line, invaded and occupied the American embassy and took 52 staff hostage. Instead of freeing these hostages, Khomeini supported the takeover and used the occupation to galvanize support for his regime and for the passage of his version of a new constitution for Iran. The hostages were finally released, after a captivity of 444 days, in January 1981 when Reagan became the President following the defeat of Jimmy Carter. The popularity of President Carter had fallen in large part because of the embassy takeover and the failure of subsequent American efforts to rescue the hostages. The hostage crisis alienated American public opinion against Iran, damaged long term US-Iranian relations and tarnished the image of Khomeini and his legacy in the eyes of the world. (To be continued)
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