Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam

168. Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 - Part 3
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA

 

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 US 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.

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 author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)