The Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the United States

By Darioush Bayandor

The Islamic Revolution in 1979 transformed Iranian society and reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East. Four decades later, Darioush Bayandor draws upon heretofore untapped archival evidence to reexamine the complex domestic and international dynamics that led to the Revolution. Beginning with the socioeconomic transformation of the 1960s, this book follows the Shah’s rule through the 1970s, tracing the emergence of opposition movements, the Shah’s blunders and miscalculations, the influence of the post-Vietnam zeitgeist and the role of the Carter administration. The Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the United States offers new revelations about how Iran was thrown into chaos and an ailing ruler lost control, with consequences that still reverberate today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319961194

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Part IThe Pre-revolution Setting

© The Author(s) 2019

Darioush BayandorThe Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the United Stateshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96119-4_1

1. A Retrospective

Darioush Bayandor¹  

(1)

Nyon, Switzerland

Darioush Bayandor

1 Social Forces and Political Dynamics in Modern Iran

Revolutions emerge from the past; their foundations are laid in history.¹ The Islamic Revolution in 1978–1979 in Iran was no exception. One can search into the more esoteric roots, going back to the birth of the Shi’ism in the fourteenth century, given the revivalist essence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s doctrine. Yet the manifold factors that went into the making of the Islamic Revolution are primarily a product of, and require an understanding of, latter-day Iranian society and the dynamics that the clash of traditional and modernist forces unleashed to shape that monumental event. In the final analysis, the Islamic Revolution was a product of those dynamics. This introductory chapter aims to address that need while offering a panoramic view of the main post-war occurrences that provided the backdrop to the years of crisis.

At the onset of the twentieth century, the crown and the ruling elite still held all the instruments of power while the clergy held unrivaled sway over the masses. A third social group, the intelligentsia, comprised of secular modernists, social democrats and the radical left, had just emerged and was soon in a position to challenge the establishment. Foreign influence in different shapes and forms was yet another factor: Anglo-Russian rivalries, wartime alliances, Britain’s often pernicious prying into internal Iranian affairs, the Soviet post-war gaze over northern provinces of Iran and, finally, the Cold War context, which brought an implacable American influence during the final decades of Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi’s rule.

Beginning with the Constitutional Movement (1905–1909), virtually every landmark event in Iran resulted from the interplay of the above three internal socio-political groups meshed with foreign input. Alliance between two against the third invariably defeated the latter. During the Constitutional Movement, the clergy and the intelligentsia worked in harmony, to the detriment of the reigning monarch, who was compelled to accept significant limitations to his absolute power imposed by the (1906–1907) constitution. In 1924, the three principal Shii divines underwrote Premier Reza Khan’s bid for dynasty change, leading to the advent of the Pahlavi dynasty.² The all-powerful Reza Khan had initially planned to replace the Qajar dynasty with a secular republic along the lines of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkish model. That was anathema to ‘ulama’, who made a display of their rabble-rousing prowess to bring Reza Khan to see reason.³ In the late 1940s and early 1950s the liberal-nationalist movement championed by Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq benefitted from a tactical alliance with a high-profile activist cleric, Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqassem Kashani, whose mixed bag of followers included a terrorist group called ‘Fada’ian Eslam’. Mosaddeq ’s road to power was paved by the latter group through the assassination of the incumbent prime minister—and Mosaddeq ’s principal adversary—Ali Razmara.⁴ In 1953, a different coalition, this time between the crown and the clergy, resulted in the downfall of Mosaddeq.

The victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 did not escape the shifting pattern of alliances among social groups in as much as the clergy-led grand anti-Shah coalition in 1978 encompassed the full spectrum of intelligentsia on the left and in the center, which included the intellectual and literary community. Without the fully fledged participation of these groups, the uprising in 1978 would have been crushed.

Another point of historical relevance—ignored by historians—needs elucidation. Much of the political commotions in Iran in the years prior to the revolution were rooted in the eclectic character of Iran’s 1906–1907 fundamental law in as much as it was an incongruous blend of the 1831 Belgian constitution with clerical exigencies. It was the outcome of a grand bargain struck precisely among secular modernists, the clerical estate and the ruling elite. Secular democrats obtained an elected assembly known by its short name, Majles, with wide legislative and supervisory powers. The Shia hierocracy earned a prerogative to ensure that Majles legislation would not infringe Islamic law.⁵ This came with a ringing endorsement of the Shii faith as the official religion of the country, which the sovereign was duty-bound to protect.⁶ The crown’s absolute powers were curtailed, but significant prerogatives were retained (Articles 35 to 57 of the constitution). They notably included the function of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (Article 50).

In later years ambiguities in the formulation of the crown’s prerogatives would lend themselves to contrasting interpretations, with troubling ramifications through much of the post-war history of Iran. The French word "inviolable, included in the 1831 Belgian constitution, was translated in article 44 as magham’e mobara az mas’ouliat," a classic case of double entendre which could mean the absence of real executive responsibility or alternatively denote an exalted authority with well-defined prerogatives but not accountable to parliament. The conflicting interpretations caused an irreparable rift between the Shah and Mosaddeq in 1952 and became an impediment to later reconciliation attempts in the post-Mosaddeq era. A whole generation of Iranian literati grew up in the belief that the prerogatives accorded by the constitution to the Shah were nominal and inoperative.

In practice, Iran’s Magna Carta as forged by the constitutionalists was never respected. As early as 1911, the Regent Nasser-Al-Molk felt compelled to evince deputies by force and exiled the more recalcitrant among them to rule in the next three years by decree.⁷ The power of veto granted to clerics in Article 2 of the 1907 supplement was also trampled on by the advent of the First World War and long periods of legislative interregnum followed by the drive to secularization under Reza Shah (1926–1941), which rendered that provision inoperative. The Pahlavi monarchs rode roughshod over the Majles and ignored much of the other constitutional provisions. Even Mosaddeq , who in the public consciousness personifies constitutional rule, moved to curtail the powers of the Majles by obtaining special legislative powers known as ekhtia’rat and ended up dissolving the upper house and the Majles in two separate strokes.

2 Events and Protagonists in Post-war Iran

In February 1921 a military coup d’état—encouraged by local British military and diplomatic agents without the knowledge or approval of London—ushered in a new era in Iran.⁸ The coup’s military leader, Reza Khan Mirpanj, swiftly trashed political rivals and engineered his own accession to the throne to found the Pahlavi dynasty. His roughly 20 years as strongman and king transformed Iran from an archaic near-failed state into a country with the rudiments of modern statehood. He laid the foundations for a modern army, a universal system of schooling and modern judiciary; he dramatically improved the status of women and built the first fully fledged modern university as well as roads, hospitals, factories and more; but along the way he also quashed liberties, subdued the Majles, humiliated the clergy and abused his power for self-enrichment. His reign came to an abrupt end after the Anglo-Russian wartime allies invaded Iran in August 1941, giving a pretext for the presence of a sizable number of German technicians in the country accused by the invaders to be the German fifth column. In actual fact Britain sought to secure the British-run oil installations, of immense strategic value, in the south of Iran and run a secure a supply route from Persian Gulf to the Caspian to feed Russia’s war efforts.

The political system that replaced Reza Shah’s autocracy had all the trappings of a parliamentary democracy but was closer to an oligarchy. The eruption of liberties spawned a full spectrum of political parties as well as a plethora of newspapers and tabloids.

Prompted by the Soviet Embassy in Tehran , the Tudeh party (the party of masses) was founded in 1941 from the wreckage of the ephemeral Communist Party of Iran, formed in Anzali in 1920.⁹ Its founders were the remnants of a group of 53 leftist intellectuals imprisoned under Reza Shah using a law he had enacted that proscribed the communist ideology. The Tudeh party, which shunned the communist label, soon became a major political force, falteringly present on the political scene to the time of the Revolution and beyond.

On a different terrain, steps were taken in 1943 to roll back Reza Shah’s secularization measures, which restored ulama to the social standing they enjoyed prior to his advent.¹⁰ The revival brought in its wake a campaign against apostasy, culminating in the assassination in 1946 of Ahmad Kasravi, an outspoken Azari free-thinker and renowned historian. The move heralded the birth of radical Shia Islam, then championed by a young seminarian named Seyyed Mujtaba Mirlohi, alias Navvab-Safavi, who created that same year the terrorist cell named Fada’ian Eslam. The restoration process provided space for the emergence of clerics of a different stamp and temperament; the mid-ranking Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini was active in the anti-apostasy campaign in concert with Navvab-Safavi.¹¹ His treatise Kashf’al-Asrār (Revelation of secrets), anonymously published in 1944, was a militant manifesto that pugnaciously argued for the primacy of the Sharia. He argued that no government, of any form or constitution, could be regarded as legitimate unless it applied the divine law, which he considered eternal and unalterable by mortals.¹² At the time, Khomeini held a chair at the Qom seminary and was close to the supreme leader Shia Marja, the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Boroujerdi.¹³ The quiescent school maintained that in the interval before the reappearance of the Occult Imam the ulama should leave temporal affairs to secular leaders. Khomeini concealed his inner thoughts in line with a Shii rule of Taqiah; he was not of a sufficiently high rank to play any role other than discreet exhortation and advocacy. Political Islam was then being championed by Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqassem Kashani, with whom Khomeini maintained discreet ties.¹⁴

The Azerbaijan Crisis, 1945–1946

The episode known as the Azerbaijan Crisis has its relevance to the history of the revolution insofar as it left a strong imprint on the mindset of the young Shah and influenced his future conduct. The crisis was sparked by the Soviet refusal to withdraw forces from Iran at the expiry of the evacuation deadline agreed with the occupying Allied forces. Documents extracted from the Baku archives in recent years reveal a stunning secret scheme adopted by the Kremlin in July 1945 to implant separatist movements in the entire expanse of northern Iran conceived as security buffer as well as a possible economic zone for the Soviet Union.¹⁵ In the immediate, Stalin decreed the creation of autonomous districts in the Iranian provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, with help from the local branches of the Tudeh party.¹⁶ By then a showdown between the wartime Allies was looming. In March, the US Secretary of State, James Byrnes , warned Stalin to withdraw his troops from Iran at once.¹⁷ Stalin was unwilling to confront the west and decided to withdraw, but not before securing from the Iranian prime minister, Ahmad Qavam, a promise for an oil concession and a pledge to pursue in earnest the autonomy talks with the rebel authorities.¹⁸ The Baku archives also indicate that Qavam was colluding with Moscow.¹⁹ In June 1946, he signed an agreement with the head of the Azerbaijan insurrectional authority granting almost all their demands.²⁰ He created his own political party and enlarged his cabinet by inclusion of three Tudeh and two center-left Iran Party ministers. His strategy seemed to be to organize, with Moscow’s blessing, a broad-based coalition of leftist forces under his own patronage to sweep the impending Majles elections, reaping dividends that could extend to eventual regime change.²¹

In complicity with the US ambassador, George Allen , and assured of support by army chiefs, the young Mohammad-Reza confronted Qavam and forced his hand to make a swift policy reorientation. All along he had urged the dispatch of troops to Azerbaijan to dislodge the puppet regime in Tabriz and end the Mahabad Kurdish Republic. In an about-turn, the shrewd Qavam dropped the Tudeh ministers and found face-saving arguments for the dispatch of troops to Azerbaijan. Stalin did not react and told the leaders of the breakaway provinces to cease resistance.²² The country had narrowly escaped disintegration, and the Shah knew he owed this to Washington. That recognition underpinned his staunchly pro-western posture for the rest of his reign.

Mohammad-Reza Shah’s Early Years

Mohammad-Reza ’s debut was tottery and insecure. His psyche was a product of the disturbances that had placed him on the throne in September 1941, at the age of 22. His father, Reza Shah, had left him with few definite loyalties outside the armed forces. Upon accession to the throne, Mohammad-Reza tried to assuage his internal foes and appease the occupying allied powers. He knew that the British, who had helped his father to power in 1941 and engineered his abdication twenty years after, were at best lukewarm towards him; they had come close to discarding him as heir to the throne in view of his perceived pro-Axis sympathies.²³ This background nourished the Shah’s fears and suspicions of Britain, distorting his judgment until the final days of his reign in 1979. His sense of insecurity made him chary when faced with strong or popular prime ministers along the lines of Mosaddeq . The Shah also had an as yet suppressed propensity to hold the reins of power in his own hands, with a predilection for the army and foreign affairs. He was fiercely patriotic, capable of cold calculation in what he perceived as the high interests of the crown and the nation—two ideas that he juxtaposed and frequently confused. His acute sense of realism was often misconstrued as indecision or timidity—although he did have these qualities too. The Azerbaijan episode had boosted his standing as well as the morale of the army. Another wave of sympathy came after the failed assassination attempt in February 1949. The Shah took advantage by having the constitution amended to increase his prerogatives. He was thenceforth empowered to dissolve the parliament and fill half of the senate’s seats by appointment. Perennial constitutional debates on the nature and extent of the crown’s prerogatives continued. Mosaddeq and his National Front (NF) allies considered those prerogatives as nominal and never recognized the validity of the Shah’s 1949 constitutional amendments.

Mohammad Mosaddeq and the National Movement of Iran

The Azerbaijan saga had left behind a fractious body politic consumed by squabbles over the oil issue. Britain’s oil concession for southern Iran, dating back to 1901, had once been revised under Reza Shah in 1933 with marginal gains, yet Reza Shah had also agreed to extend the duration of the oil concession by another 30 years.

In 1947, the Majles approved a resolution calling upon the government to reopen oil negotiations with Britain with a view to full restitution of Iran’s rights in the British-run southern oil fields. A ‘Supplemental Oil Agreement’ negotiated by the Sa’ed government became a bone of contention and failed to get past the outgoing 15th Majles. Nationalists called for the abrogation of the 1933 accord, a move that entailed confrontation with Britain. In contrast, the court-affiliated pragmatic politicians supported a non-confrontational approach that could allow increased oil receipts without compromising the country’s traditional ties with the west. The government was in bad need of funds to help finance the seven-year development program and increase its creditworthiness. The dichotomy grew in time to form a permanent fault-line between politicians who emphasized national interests versus those who pleaded for national rights, with the former group denounced by the intelligentsia as unpatriotic and subservient to foreign interests.

The tug of war between the two factions was highlighted in dramatic fashion during the 1949 campaign for the upcoming 16th Majles elections, which included the assassination of the Shah’s confidant, the court minister Abdul-Hossein Hazhir, the cancellation of the rigged Tehran elections and the birth of the NF in November 1949. The latter was an umbrella organization of political parties and independent politicians all subscribed to Mosaddeq ’s nationalist cause. In the renewed Tehran elections Mosaddeq and most of his slate, Ayatollah Kashani included, were elected, forming a vocal minority with a platform to end British control over the country’s oil resources.

The idea of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) as an alternative to abrogation of the 1933 oil accord had been developed at a Majles sub-committee chaired by Mosaddeq , but the Majles oligarchs at the plenary session initially refused even to discuss it. It took another assassination—that of Prime Minister General Haj Ali Razmara in March 1951—to compel the reluctant deputies to enact the Nationalization Law shortly afterwards. Less than two months later, on April 28, 1951, Mosaddeq was named prime minister.

The British, on the verge of financial ruin but with unshaken imperial pride, explored the full gamut of measures to regain control. These ranged from internal subversion, boycott and naval blockade to a military plan to occupy Abadan, code-named Buccaneer. More astutely, with the complicity of other major oil powers, Britain helped foment an oil glut by ratcheting up the production elsewhere in the region; this put the Iranian oil virtually out of the market.²⁴ In parallel, London also embarked on American-assisted oil talks with Iran and resorted to all available diplomatic recourses. Mosaddeq remained steadfast and valiantly pleaded Iran’s case at the UN Security Council, and later at International Court of Justice in The Hague , where he emerged victorious. The Shah had reluctantly supported Mosaddeq and resisted incessant pressure from Britain and his own entourage to remove him.²⁵ Things came to a head when, in July 1952, Mosaddeq challenged the Shah’s prerogative as commander-in-chief. The old demons, noted earlier, reappeared. In the face of the Shah’s resistance, Mosaddeq resigned and the oligarchs in the Majles voted Qavam back into office. The ensuing bloody uprising on 30 Tir [July 21, 1952] returned Mosaddeq to power with his standing enhanced, allowing him to rule by decree. This and a host of other unrelated issues ended Mosaddeq ’s alliance with Kashani and caused a rift with the conservative wing of the NF.

Washington was concerned that an oil-less economy would make Iran prone to communist encroachment and eventual domination. Mosaddeq tapped into those fears. Though officially banned, the Tudeh party enjoyed a full range of liberties. In time, its negative attitude toward Mosaddeq shifted to tactical support. When Eisenhower moved into the White House in January 1953, he was determined to break the oil logjam and allow the flow of Iranian oil back into the market to allow the Iranian government to remain solvent.²⁶ A new oil proposal, ironed out between London and Washington in early 1953, went a long way to attaining that objective. The Iranian oil experts considered it a reasonable compromise and urged the prime minister to accept it.²⁷ Mosaddeq demurred, fearing that Iran might be saddled with paying an exorbitant amount of compensation to the defunct Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In a fateful decision on March 11, 1953, he turned down the proposal and broke off the tripartite talks. That, for Washington, was a step too far.²⁸ The CIA was now tasked to join hands with Britain in a plot to unseat him.²⁹

The Anglo-American plot to overthrow Mosaddeq, code-named TP-Ajax, was launched in the late hours of August 15 but was aborted. The Tudeh party, well implanted in the military barracks, had learned about the planned coup and communicated details to Mosaddeq. Putschist officers were detained and the coup leader, General Fazlollah Zahedi, went into hiding while the Shah, who had reluctantly acquiesced in the plot, flew in panic to Baghdad. The foiled coup unleashed a chain of events that culminated in the overthrow of Mosaddeq on Wednesday August 19—a tectonic event. Between August 15 and 19, boisterous street rallies by the Tudeh party and pro-Mosaddeq crowds had foreshadowed the end of the monarchy. The Tudeh had gone as far as calling for a democratic republic to be formed in a joint anti-imperialist front with pro-Mosaddeq forces.

These commotions seriously alarmed senior clerics in Qom and Tehran. The high quiescent clerics upheld the institution of monarchy as the guarantor of the Shii faith (Article 1 of the 1907 constitution). In earlier years, the supreme leader Boroujerdi had exhorted clerics to keep away from politics, but, as CIA files now reveal, he did not remain indifferent when he thought the higher interests of the faith were in jeopardy. As early as April 1953, according to these files, Boroujerdi, Kashani and Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Behbahani, the senior-most cleric in Tehran, had arrived at an understanding to support the Shah against Mosaddeq.³⁰ The cacophony about a republic became the clincher, unleashing forces that only the clergy were capable of mobilizing. As of the early hours of Wednesday August 19, their supporters formed throngs and set alight pro-Mosaddeq press organs and political parties without being seriously challenged by the security forces. Pro-Shah elements in the military were waiting in the wings, and street events that day drew them into the fray leading to the downfall.

The TP-Ajax operatives were still in Tehran on the day of the event. Their chief, Kermit Roosevelt , was quick to claim credit for the feat; in his debriefing in Washington he claimed that a political and military plan for that day had been devised some 48 hours earlier at the US embassy compound. The CIA files released in 2017, however, reveal that as late as the morning of August 19, Roosevelt and his team were completely in the dark about the events that were about to unfold.³¹

The myth about the CIA having engineered the fall on August 19—bist’o hasht’e Mordad in the Iranian calendar—has haunted generations of Iranians ever since. Over the years, it eroded the Shah’s credibility in the eyes of the intelligentsia. He had added insult to injury by putting Mosaddeq on trial. Helped by the Tudeh party propaganda, a process of demonization of the Shah and the ruling elite became anchored in the public consciousness of educated Iranians.

In 1955, following a failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister, Hossein Ala, the Fada’ian Eslam leadership were put on trial and executed. There were some indications that the Fada’ian might have acted in collusion with, or been inspired by, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Shah’s nemesis.³² The Shah turned a blind eye to an appeal for clemency made by Boroujedi.³³ Khomeini was utterly dismayed.³⁴

By the end of the 1950s, the pressure for structural reforms drove the Shah to make overtures to the NF in a bid to create a common front for such reforms. The fractious NF leadership, however, were unable even to test the good faith or viability of the Shah’s repeated overtures. In the words of the Socialist Party leader, Khalil Maleki, The National Front missed a historical opportunity to return to business.³⁵ The advent of the Kennedy administration in January 1961 was yet another signpost. The Shah felt under pressure to name the reformist Ali Amini—deemed a Washington favorite—as prime minister. In an alliance of convenience, the two worked successfully to relaunch the elusive land reform. Amini in turn tried but failed to rally the NF behind his reform and anti-corruption agenda. Instead, the landed oligarchs, in concert with a few clerics and disgruntled military figures, embarked on a major destabilizing ploy in January 1962. Beset by internal adversity and unable to balance the budget, Amini resigned in July 1962. Washington had refused a bailout. The Shah now assumed the full ownership of the reform drive, extending it beyond the land reform to include gender, literacy and income distribution reforms. The package of six major reforms was referred to as the White Revolution. When in January 1963 the package was put to public vote, the ulama of all strains reacted negatively. Two top clerics in Tehran and Ayatollah Khomeini in Qom called for a boycott of the referendum. Pro-Mosaddeq activists of every stripe joined in the boycott.

The Advent of Khomeini

Khomeini had already led a successful campaign a year earlier against a municipal reform bill which accorded women the right to vote and provided for full participation of religious minorities in the municipal elections. The withdrawal of that bill by the government earned Khomeini fame and respect in conservative milieus. Now, in the aftermath of the referendum, he made an impressive networking effort to build alliances. At his behest, the remnants of Fada’ian Eslam affiliated with bazaar mosques merged to form a militant Islamist group named hay’at-hay’e Motalefeh Islami (affiliated Islamic congregations). They geared up to play a critical role in the upcoming upheaval and re-emerged as the operational arm of the radical clerics in the travails of the Revolution.

A decisive showdown was prepared to coincide with the Muharram season of mourning in June 1963. The sequence began with a provocative harangue aimed at the Shah on the day of Ashura, which led to Khomeini’s arrest and set off a well-prepared uprising on 15 Khordad—the now familiar date in the Persian calendar that corresponds to June 5, 1963. The ferocity of assaults by the fired-up counter-elite gangs, who torched all vestiges of modern living on their trail, took the regime by surprise. The Shah was given to be ‘on pins and needles’. At the time, the Qashqai tribe was already in revolt, with arms reportedly shipped from Egypt. A parallel plot featuring the renegade ex-intelligence chief, Teymur Bakhtiar, was also in the making. Evidence emerged at the time suggesting that President Abdel Nasser might have attempted to encourage and finance Khomeini’s anti-Shah campaign in 1963—attested to by a close confidant of the Egyptian president in post-Revolution years.³⁶ A collapse was narrowly avoided by the resolute reaction of Premier Amir-Assadollah Alam, who jolted the Shah out of indecision and made him authorize the use of live ammunition to crush the uprising. The showdown resulted in several dozen deaths and hundreds of gunfire injuries.

The Shii clerics of all strains mobilized to obtain the release of Khomeini and other detained religious leaders. Moderate elements within the regime were keen to spare the Shah the consequences of yet another high-profile trial. In hindsight it is known that the execution of Khomeini was never an option: resort to such punishment could have entailed a rupture between the crown and the clergy. The face-saving solution, in which the regime was complicit, consisted of having three top ulama recognize Khomeini as a Grand Ayatollah, or source of emulation, a distinction that carried immunity from prosecution.³⁷ Khomeini thus returned to Qom unharmed, only to be rearrested a year later, when he once again harangued the Shah over the issue of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed with the United States, which he portrayed as a return to the long-abolished capitulation regime. This time the Ayatollah was banished to Turkey, from where he migrated to Najaf in October 1965.

The attitude of the opposition parties was mixed. The NF leaders had joined the ban on the referendum but did not endorse the clerical movement. However, the nationalist-religious strain in the pro-Mosaddeq camp that had formed the nehzat’e azadi Iran, or Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI), in 1961 embraced Khomeini’s cause, for which its leadership paid a high price. Mehdi Bazargan, Yadollah Sahabi and Seyyed Mahmoud Taleghani (later Ayatollah) were put on trial and received long prison terms. Scores of its radicalized younger members went to Cairo for training in use of weapons.³⁸ The secular NF leaders escaped prison but, torn by infighting and rejected by Mosaddeq , they withdrew from the political scene in what for most became a permanent farewell to politics. Three of them, however, returned to activism in circumstances discussed in Chap. 6.

The hardcore Khomeini backers had not run out of steam. On January 21, 1965, only three months after Khomeini’s exile to Turkey, Prime Minister Hasan-Ali Mansur was gunned down in front of the entrance to the Majles by a young zealot from hay’at-hay’e Motalefeh Islami. The flamboyant Mansur had been named prime minister in a bid by the Shah to replace the old guard with new blood. The Shah named Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the closet associate of the slain prime minister, as his replacement, to ensure continuity of the new technocracy. Less than three months later, on April 10, Mohammad-Reza narrowly survived an attempt on his life by a conscripted Imperial Guard soldier, also an Islamist fanatic.

The new technocratic approach adopted by the executive branch in the backdrop of the Shah’s White Revolution heralded a new era marked by economic prosperity but also by political drift; it is subject of in-depth examination in the next chapter.

3 Socio-cultural Mutations in the 1960s

The intellectual and literary climate under the first Pahlavi monarch and in early post-war years was decidedly secular in nature, bordering on irreligiosity.³⁹ Reza Shah’s intrusive secularization, while unpopular, was given solid intellectual support by educated men, many of whom willingly abandoned clerical attire to take up positions in state administration or civil society. Luminaries such as Allameh Mohammad Qazvini, Saeed Nafisi, Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, Seyyed Ahmad Kasravi, Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda and Ali Dashti were fiercely secular; their writings bore an anti-clerical slant which was tolerated in the prevailing politico-cultural environment under Reza Shah. Dashti was the anonymous author of Bist’o-seh Sal (The 23 years), a critical review of the Prophet Mohammad’s 23-year path from the revelation to his death in June, 632 CE. Ali-Akbar Hakamizadeh, the editor of a literary journal, Homayoon, wrote Asrar Hezar Saleh (The secrets of the thousand years), which provoked indignation from Khomeini and spurred his rebuttal in Kashf al-Asrar in 1944.⁴⁰ The best-known member of this group was Kasravi , the author, among several other books, of Shieh’gari (Shia-mongering), who, as noted earlier, became a victim of the anti-apostasy campaign and was assassinated by the Fada’ian Eslam in 1946.

In the post-war years, the intellectual climate was almost exclusively dominated by leftist literary figures. Figures such as Nima Yousheej—the avant-garde poet who shed the straitjacket of classical rhyme to introduce sheer’e no, or new poetry—the dramaturge Abdul-Hossein Nushin and the novelist Bozurg Alavi were active or lapsed communists. The iconoclastic writer–essayist Sadeq Hedayat (1903–1951), who more than any other literary figure epitomized the era in which he lived, was closely associated with the Tudeh party but, not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre , shunned membership. Sadeq Hedayat’s opposition to religiosity took an irreverent, even contemptuous, slant. He disparaged Islam as an alien cult forcibly grafted onto the fabric of Persian culture: What did they [Arab Muslim invaders] bring us after all? A dungy hotchpotch of contradictory precepts and opinions borrowed undigested from the previous creeds, sects and superstitions, opposed to all human instincts, the antidote to the uplifting of mind, to human ingenuity and pursuit of excellence; this is what was forced upon us by the sword.⁴¹

The Intellectualization of Islam

The earliest flashes of the backlash against cultural alienation were sparked by Seyyed Fakhruddin Shadman, a polymath from a traditional Shii family. An establishment intellectual by affiliation—he had served the Pahlavis in ministerial and cultural positions—Shadman took issue with the cultural drift associated with modernization in the1940s. He derided the craze for all things European among the modernizing elite through a mock-up character he referred to as Fokoli (from the French faux-col), who, standing halfway between the two cultural poles, had not fully grasped either.⁴²

The most coherent and convincing articulation of this backlash came from the Swiss-trained sociologist Ehsan Naraghi , who criticized westernization as a social ill that had afflicted the higher strata of Iranian society. The glare of western innovations, he argued, had blinded Iranians to their own heritage, with its rich diversity, endowed with sufficient sources of knowledge and wisdom to obviate the need for borrowed values. He tied Iran’s cultural identity to the Persian language—essentially a post-Islamic phenomenon—enriched by the mysticism of Rumi, the agnosticism of Khayyam and Hafez, the rhymed aphorisms of Saadi and the epic poetry of Ferdowsi. Like Shadman , Naraghi was an establishment intellectual from a clerical background.⁴³ To the extent that the reigning technocracy preferred western tools and methodology to indigenous methods and values, Naraghi ’s commentary was an implicit criticism of the Shah’s modernization and secularization drive.

Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Qarb’zadegui

A more acerbic criticism of the phenomenon of alienation appeared in the early 1960s under the buzzing title Qarb’zadegui (Westoxication) by a well-known literary figure, Seyyed Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923–1969).⁴⁴ The loaded term "Qarb’zadegui, casting westernization as a social pathology, had been coined in the mid-1950s by the German-trained Iranian philosopher Seyyed Ahmad Fardid (1912–1994), a counter-enlightenment" thinker.⁴⁵ Not unlike his mentor Martin Heidegger , Fardid had zigzagged through contrasting schools of thought and had bounced over political divides. He had befriended Saddeq Hedayat, flattered the Shah and eventually rallied to Khomeini to claim that the Islamic Republic was the apotheosis of Heidegger’s thoughts and the embodiment of his paradigm.⁴⁶

Al-e-Ahmad had also trodden an uneven intellectual path. An autodidact born into a clerical family, he embraced Marxism in the 1940s, before accompanying Khalil Maleki in his historic split from the Tudeh party in 1947 and becoming one of the founding members of the pro-Mosaddeq socialist party, Niroy’e Sevvom (The Third Force), in 1952. His irreligiosity in early life, for which he admitted the influence of Kasravi, just as his marriage with the erudite Simin Daneshvar in 1950—a literary figure in her own right—had irritated his black-turbaned father.⁴⁷ After the fall of Mosaddeq in August 1953, Al-e-Ahmad is said to have plunged into despair and introspection, before emerging with a mindset akin to a born-again Christian. This metamorphosis brought him to pronounce in Qarb’zadegui the perfection of Islam while denouncing everything that stemmed from the west. He cast Islam as the only historical force that had outfaced the west; as a result, it had become the victim of treacherous manipulation by the west in the ensuing centuries. By the same token, Al-e-Ahmad was dismissive of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and the attendant glorification of the Persian Empire that was fashionable in the Pahlavi era. His treatise could thus be regarded as the first intellectual vindication of the Shii clerics. The title had captured a social phenomenon that was real but had remained nameless; it resonated with the middle-class youth who uncritically fell for a pseudo-historical narrative as palliative to pent-up anger against the elite. Qarb’zadegui and its author soon became a literary phenomenon, discussed by affluent members of society in upscale salons.

Ali Shariati, the Oracle

The main thrust in the ideological indoctrination of the young, however, was to be accomplished by a man with a different profile and intellectual horizons. Ali Shariati has been described with some justification as the ideologue of the Islamic Revolution, having had a phenomenal impact on the outlook of Muslim youth in the years prior to the return of Khomeini to the limelight. In poetic, at times semi-gnostic, language he sought to make the core Islamic precepts unassailable. His skill in repackaging archaic concepts in a revolutionary mold helped instill in young university audiences a sense of belonging and pride in the Shii doctrine as a main feature of national identity. Tapes and transcripts of his sermons were widely circulated in campuses around the country.

Like Al-e-Ahmad, Shariati was deeply affected by the fall of Mosaddeq in August 1953. As a primary school teacher in Mashhad, he joined the local chapter of the pro-Mosaddeq National Resistance Movement, for which he was briefly detained in 1957. That did not prevent him from obtaining a government scholarship—routinely granted to whoever did best in the graduating class—to undertake postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne.⁴⁸ He arrived in France in 1959, when anti-colonialist struggles, notably in Congo and Algeria, were at their height. He became an admirer of Frantz Fanon ,⁴⁹ who was then militating for Algeria’s independence, a cause Shariati willingly espoused. He was also prominent in Iranian student movements abroad. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Gilbert Lazard , was a translation of a classic religious treatise called Tarikh’e Faza’el’e Balkh (A history of knowledge in Balkh), which earned him a doctorate in 1963. Upon returning to Iran, he became associate professor of history at Mashhad University, where he published his magnum opus, islamshenasi (Islamology). Following the creation of Hosseinieh Ershad—an Islamic propagation and cultural center founded in 1965—he shifted his activities to that center in Tehran.

Shariati has been described as an eclectic thinker. He had certainly been exposed to and influenced by contrasting ideologies and intellectual currents.⁵⁰ Marx, Fanon, Louis Massignon ,⁵¹ Georges Gurvitch ,⁵² Jean-Paul Sartre and even Alexis Carrel are cited as contrasting influences on his vision and outlook.⁵³ With such intellectual baggage, Shariati remained in essence a lay Shia Muslim reformist missionary with a strong revivalist bent and captivating talent as a public speaker. As a sermonizer, Shariati was ahistorical, expounding his utopian view of Shia Islam in passionate oratory, insouciant of historical facts. He also called for the cleansing of the faith from what he saw as dusty cobwebs spun over 14 centuries by torpid and acquiescent Shii ulama, who failed to live up to or bring out the true worth of the Shii doctrine as a creed of protest, martyrdom and revolution. His anti-clerical slant put him at loggerheads with the clerical establishment, and led to charges of Wahhabism and apostasy. Even his death in 1976 did not put an end to the smear campaign waged by his clerical detractors. Ayatollah Morteza Motahari wrote in a letter to Khomeini in May 1977, a year after Shariati’s death, "The least of this man’s [Shariati] sins is that he maligned the image of the ‘rohaniat’ [another word for clerics]."⁵⁴

The Shah’s notorious intelligence service, the SAVAK (Organization of National Intelligence and Security of the Nation), had been on his trail but had decided that his anti-Marxist discourse suited the regime. The agency sought to build on that idea and even attempted to recruit him. Some declassified SAVAK documents could in effect be seen as compromising, but the weight of evidence does not support the presumption of his complicity with SAVAK.⁵⁵ What is certain is that, mainly as a result of the complaints and lobbying by senior clerics, the SAVAK closed down his lecture auditorium in November 1972.⁵⁶ A year later he was arrested and put in prison for 18 months, before being unexpectedly freed in March 1975, possibly after the Algerian president, Houari Boumédiène (or his then foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika), interceded with the Shah on his behalf during the historical Algiers summit on March 6.⁵⁷ Not long after his release Shariati left Iran by a regular flight under an assumed identity, which was said to have escaped the vigilance of the SAVAK. He died of a heart attack shortly after he arrived in London in June 1977. His premature death at the age of 44 contributed to the creation of a myth around his life and death where facts, factoids and falsehoods are intermingled.⁵⁸

While he would have no doubt greeted the triumph of the Islamic Revolution as a vindication of his own teaching, it is unlikely that his kinship with the new order would have lasted long. The Khomeini doctrine cast ulama as the society’s paragon. In contrast, Shariati held that in Islam there was no need for an intermediary between man and the creator: an Akhbari and a mystic perspective. Khomeini’s verdict was unequivocal: I despise these groups whether communist, Marxist or deviant from the Shia faith and consider them traitors to the country, to Islam and Shiism.⁵⁹ Unlike Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who eulogized Khomeini and was in turn highly respected by the patriarch, there is no mention of Khomeini in Shariati’s discourse.

The Socio-political Climate in the 1960s

By the early 1960s ideological and generational divides had crippled the mainstream oppositionist parties at the center and the left of the political spectrum. Split along secular-religious divide, the NF leadership lost the initiative to younger, more radical and more demagogic leaders who regarded the moderate leadership as feckless and old.⁶⁰ In contrast, the Freedom Movement became more respected, and became a beacon for the new middle-class youth, for reasons touched on earlier in this chapter.

Internal ideological divides had equally undermined the Tudeh party, which had already suffered severe setbacks in the years following Mosaddeq ’s downfall. In 1957, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had arranged for the exiled Tudeh leadership to be settled in Leipzig. Under the watchful eyes of the Stasi, a clandestine Tudeh radio station, Peyk Iran (Iran Courier), continued to operate from East Germany, but Moscow was unwilling to sacrifice the trade and economic benefits of normalized ties with Tehran for its ideological interests. Maoist splits in 1964 and 1965 stripped the party of the bulk of its exiled activists.⁶¹ The party became a shambles after the SAVAK secretly recruited its top operative inside Iran in the early 1960s. Unbeknownst to the leadership in Leipzig, the SAVAK was able to fake the party’s clandestine operations and its press organ.⁶² The leadership in Leipzig became little more than a group of bitter intellectual outcasts consumed by interminable bickering. Like the NF, however, the Tudeh party was reborn about the time that waves of unrest began to sweep the country in 1978 (see The Leipzig Connection in Chap. 15).

Political doldrums inside Iran otherwise meant that dissent was expressed through less tangible means. Rumor-mongering, disinformation and allegorical literature were symptomatic of this invisible dissent. The first act of defiance by intellectuals was a boycott of the state-sponsored Congress of Writers in February 1968. Although Queen Farah was a successful patron of art and culture, the viscerally nonconformist artistic community spurned attempts to be brought into the establishment fold. Intellectual orthodoxy dismissed the Shah’s reforms as having been imposed by foreign powers. In March 1968, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and his wife, Simin Daneshvar , spearheaded the formation of an independent writers’ association, Kanoon’e Nevisandegan, which also included poets, dramatists, filmmakers and painters. Some of its founding members were lingering communists whose presence on the executive board further politicized the association.⁶³ Islam, which Al-e-Ahmad had glorified as social panacea in Qarb’zadegui, remained sacrosanct and unassailable even by Marxist intellectuals, some of whom went out of their way to eulogize Shii imams as symbols of social justice and resistance to tyranny.⁶⁴ Renowned artists molded Islamic motifs into modern forms of painting and ceramics—best illustrated in the saqa’khaneh school.⁶⁵ Religiosity was in vogue; Shii rites were resolutely observed. Along with the devout from the bazaar, the well-to-do uptown folks appeared in chest-beating processions while the bluestockings organized religious offerings in chic salons.⁶⁶ Novels, short stories, movie scripts and wistful poetry portrayed melancholic themes. When Samad Behrangi, a young leftist writer, accidentally drowned in the Araxes river in 1968, the opposition—Al-e-Ahmad among them—were quick to blame his death on the SAVAK. Similar whispers clouded the suicide of the wrestling legend Gholam-Reza Takhti in January 1968.⁶⁷ The Olympian Takhti had, however, made his will two days before taking his own life in a Tehran hotel room. In a twist of fate, Al-e-Ahmad’s own death in 1969 prompted similar urban myths.

Footnotes

1

This saying has been attributed to the American abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859).

2

Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran (Albany: University of New York, 1980), 29–30.

3

Yahya Dalatabadi, Hayat’e Yahya (Tehran: Atar Publishers, 1361/1982), 4–361.

4

Mohammad Turkman, Asrar’e qatle Razmara (contains archive files on the assassination of premier Razmara) (Tehran: Rasa Publishers, 1370/1991); Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 194–5.

5

Article 2 of the 1907 Supplement.

6

Article 1 of the 1907 Supplement.

7

Homa Katouzian, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 64.

8

The local British officials were: General Edmund Ironside; the British envoy to Tehran, Herman Norman; and Colonel Smythe. Relevant material from the Foreign Office archives has been scanned by a host of academics, notably Cyrus Ghani, Yann Richard, Homa Katouzian, E. J. Czerwinski and Mahmoud Toluei and published in a several publications in English and Farsi; see, for example, Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of the Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001).

9

For the Soviet role in the creation of the Tudeh party, see Nureddin Kianouri, Khaterat’e Nureddin Kianouri (Kianouri memoirs) (Tehran: Didgah Publishers, 1371/1992), 77–79, hereafter Kianouri memoirs.

10

Bullard to Eden, September 21, 1943, PRO FO 371/EP6088/38/34.

11

Baqer Moin, Khomeini, Life of the Ayatollah (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 60 and note 60n12.

12

For a concise analysis of Kashf’al Asrar, see ibid., 61–63.

13

Moin, Khomeini, 60.

14

Khaterat Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, az 1301 ta 1378 (Memoir of Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri), 54–55, 81. https://​aftabparast.​files.​wordpress.​com/​2009/​12/​montazeri_​memoir.​pdf.

15

These documents were extracted by Dr. Jamil Hasanli (Baku State University) and published in Cold War International History Project Bulletin (CWIHP) 12/13 (2006).

16

Decree of the Politburo of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to Mir Bagirov, Central Committee Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, on Measures to Organize a Separatist Movement in Southern Azerbaijan and Other Provinces of Northern Iran, July 6 1945, top secret, CWIHP.

17

Speech by Secretary James Byrnes at Overseas Press Club, New York Times (March 9, 1946); State Department note to the USSR, March 2 1976, FRUS (1946), vol. 7, Iran, pp. 340–2.

18

Soviet aide-memoire dated February 28, 1946; for the text in Farsi, see the speech by Qavam in Majles, October 21, 1947, Majles proceedings 15th session; for the English version, see Jamil Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War, 217 (full citation in the next note).

19

Jamil Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-American Crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946, Harvard Cold War Series (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 213–18; for Qavam’s secret talks with Stalin see the verbal presentation of the book by Hasanli at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, November 28, 2006. http://​www.​wilsoncenter.​org/​event/​book-discussion-the-dawn-the-cold-war.

20

Details in Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War, 316; see also FRUS (1946), vol. 7, Iran, 498–9.

21

Outline of that strategy is confirmed by both the Soviet and British assessments: see Hassanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War, 328n5; FO.371/52731, 16 April 1946, in Abbas Milani, The Shah (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 123.

22

Full text of Stalin’s message cited by Hasanli from the Baku archives, At the Dawn of the Cold War, 370.

23

FO to Sir Reader Bullard, September 19, 1941, in Sir Reader Bullard, Letters from Tehran (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 82.

24

For details, see this author’s CIA and Iran: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 40ff.

25

Henderson to Department of State, June 13, 1952, FRUS (1952–4), vol. 10, Iran, 396–9.

26

Record of discussion, 135th meeting of the National Security Council, chaired by Eisenhower, March 4, 1953, FRUS vol. X, Iran, doc. 312, pp. 693ff.

27

Fuad Rouhani, Zendegi siasi Mosadde dar matn’e nehzat melli Iran (Mosaddeq’s political biography) (London-1387), 375.

28

Record of the National Security Council, Washington, March 11, 1953, FRUS, vol. 10, Iran, doc. 318, pp. 711–13.

29

Donald Wilber (secret internal