Riches of the World - 10
Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution of 1979
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
What is astonishing about humankind is not that it makes errors – after all to err is human - but that it repeats its errors with a consistency that baffles rational analysis. In this respect, man is like a moth that charges time and again oblivious of consequences and sacrifices itself at the altar of a burning candle. If there is any lesson that can be drawn from the history of the prophets, from Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them), it is that humankind repeats its errors. The appearance of a prophet marks a critical moment in the struggle of man on earth. Divine Grace intervenes through the revelation granted to a prophet to show humankind the straight path. Alas! Humankind does not learn! It forgets and it errs inviting Divine intervention, again and again.
What is true of humankind is also true of civilizations, dynasties, empires, kings, despots, political leaders and individuals. Whether it is imperial overreach or a battered wife, the story is similar. You can see this pattern even in a business. If you have tried to implement Six Sigma quality control in your operations, you must have seen individuals repeating their errors in statistically predictable patterns. And the errors made by one person are not necessarily the same as the ones made by the next person.
Such predictable human behavior has a positive side for a student of history. It makes it possible to formulate empirical theories for the rise and fall of civilizations, dynasties, empires, even businesses and individuals so that if man chooses to do so, he can learn from them. One such universal observation is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The history of Iran falls into this paradigm. The Shah of Iran, hoisted onto the Peacock throne by American power after the coup of 1954 that toppled Mosaddeq, grew increasingly ruthless in his suppression of dissent. The nationalists were silenced. The communist Tudeh party was crushed and went underground where it continued to receive clandestine support from the Soviet Union. The clerics were sidelined; some were persecuted. The Iranian Secret Service, SAVAK grew into a vicious instrument of political suppression and torture. The Majlis became a rubber-stamp parliament. The anti-communist slant of the regime fit in well with the foreign policy of the United States, dominated as it was in the 1950s by a fear of Soviet world domination, and the pact mania of the Dulles era. (John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower Administration from 1953 until 1958. He was known for his hard stand against communism, and against the Soviet Union and China, in international affairs). Iran was drawn first into the Baghdad Pact and then into CENTO which bound Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and the United Kingdom into a mutual defense treaty, supposedly as a shield against an invasion by Soviet armies from the north. In return, Iran received plentiful supplies of military equipment from the United States. The army and the police forces grew even as the budget for development and education nosedived. The pressures in the Iranian body politic grew in proportion to the heavy handedness of the Shah, even as popular discontent was held in check by the dreaded SAVAK and the power of the armed forces.
During this period, Khomeini was not in the political spectrum. He pursued his scholarly work in the cities of Qum and Najaf.
It was not until 1963-64 that the Shah made a serious attempt to address the economic issues facing an oil rich but feudal Iran where illiteracy was rampant and poverty was endemic. The broad-based initiative, dubbed the White Revolution, sought to transform Iran into a modern, Westernized nation. It had nineteen elements, the most important of which were the following:
- Land Reform: The government bought land from the landlords and sold it to landless peasants at a discount.
- Women’s suffrage: Women were allowed to vote for the first time in local and national elections and contest elections to the Majlis.
- Profit sharing for industrial workers and the right to buy shares in corporations.
- Free and compulsory education through high school.
- Nationalization of forests and water resources
- Privatization of government enterprises
- A public works program to improve the infrastructure
- Social Security and national insurance schemes
- Establishment of a literary corps, a health corps and a modernization and reconstruction corps.
- Price control, rent control and anti-corruption measures.
- Free food for needy mothers.
- Encouragement of local self government through the election of village elders to settle local disputes.
The Shah also removed the restriction that the judges be Muslim and opened up the judiciary to Christians, Jews and Baha’is. The United States, as the principal benefactor of the Shah, backed these initiatives perceiving them as forward looking and modernist. It also put pressure on the Shah to increase his cooperation with Israel.
The Shah sought to legitimize his reforms by a referendum which was held in 1964. Official figures showed that 5.6 million people voted for the reforms while only 4 thousand were opposed to it.
Were these reforms cosmetic and self-serving or were they the initiatives of a far sighted monarch? There are many writers who question the sincerity of the Shah to genuine reform and ascribe political motives to his initiatives. For instance, Dorman and Farhang write in The U.S. Press and Iran (University of California, Berkeley Press, 1987): “Admiring press coverage to the contrary, the Shah’s plebiscite was nothing more than a public relations ploy aimed at demonstrating public acceptance of his program and was hardly an indication of democracy at work.”
The Shah made considerable progress in increasing literacy and building up the industrial infrastructure of Iran. The literacy rate went up to 42 percent. Enrollment in primary schools increased more than 15 fold. Enrollment in universities increased to more than 100,000. Almost 50,000 students were enrolled in American schools, many on government scholarships. Iranian manufactured goods began to penetrate the markets in Oman and East Africa. To the policy planners in Washington, this was good news. But Iran was like an old elm tree eaten up by termites from within. Beneath the façade of progress, social unrest was brewing ready to blow up. All it needed was a catalyst. (To be continued)
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