Iran: Empire of the Mind
Page 29
After the coup the Shah’s government kept a tight grip on politics. Candidates for the elections to the eighteenth Majles in 1954 were selected by the regime and the assembly proved duly obedient. In 1955 the Shah dismissed Zahedi and effectively took control into his own hands. Mossadeq’s National Front was disbanded and Tudeh sympathisers were relentlessly pursued by a security agency (known as SAVAK from 1957) that grew increasingly efficient, with help from the CIA and the Israeli secret service, Mossad; and increasingly brutal. Two puppet political parties were set up for the Majles, controlled by the Shah’s supporters—Melliyun (National Party) and Mardom (People’s Party)—satirised as the ‘Yes’ party and the ‘Yes sir’ party.27 Important members of the ulema like Kashani, and the prime marja-e taqlid, Ayatollah Borujerdi, had supported the coup of 1953 because they disliked what they saw as Mossadeq’s secularising tendency and the influence of Tudeh. They continued to support the Shah thereafter, and relations between the Shah and Borujerdi in particular, were cordial. But many clerics grew more uneasy and hostile as time went on.
The population of Iran had expanded from around 12 million at the beginning of the century to 15 million in 1938 and 19.3 million in 1950; it would jump to 27.3 million by 1968 and 33.7 million in 1976. The regime invested heavily in industry, but also in education, though the rural areas still lagged behind. There was also substantial private investment, and over the years 1954-1969 the economy grew on average by seven or eight per cent a year.28 As well as military expenditure, a lot of government money was spent on big, showy engineering projects, like dams—dams that sometimes never linked up to the irrigation networks that had been their justification. As in any other time of major change, the new often looked crass against the dignity of the old that was being pushed aside, and the benefits of change were distributed unequally. But there was a general improvement in material standards of living and the new, educated middle class expanded, encompassing entrepreneurs, engineers and managers as well as the older professions, the lawyers, doctors and teachers.
In 1957 a British diplomat with more than ordinary perspicacity wrote the following of Tehran, prefiguring the tensions that came into higher relief in the ’60s and ’70s and making an early differentiation between the different character of the westernised north of the city, and the more traditional, poorer south:
Here the mullahs preach every evening to packed audiences. Most of the sermons are revivalist stuff of a high emotional and low intellectual standard. But certain well known preachers attract the intelligentsia of the town with reasoned historical exposés of considerable merit… The Tehran that we saw on the tenth of Moharram [ie Ashura] is a different world, centuries and civilisations apart from the gawdy superficial botch of cadillacs, hotels, antique shops, villas, tourists and diplomats, where we run our daily round… but it is not only poverty, ignorance and dirt that distinguish the old south from the parvenu north. The slums have a compact self-conscious unity and communal sense that is totally lacking in the smart districts of chlorinated water, macadamed roads and (fitful) street lighting. The bourgeois does not know his neighbour: the slum-dweller is intensely conscious of his. And in the slums the spurious blessings of Pepsi Cola civilisation have not yet destroyed the old way of life, where every man’s comfort and security depend on the spontaneous, un-policed observation of a traditional code. Down in the southern part of the city manners and morals are better and stricter than in the villas of Tajrish: an injury to a neighbour, a pass at another man’s wife, a brutality to a child evoke spontaneous retribution without benefit of bar or bench. 29
In 1960 the Shah put forward a proposal for land reform, but by this time the economy was slowing down, and the US government (after January 1961 the Kennedy administration) was putting some pressure on the Shah to liberalise. Many of the senior ulema disliked the land reform measure (their extensive land holdings from endowments appeared to be threatened, and many considered the infringement of property rights to be un-Islamic), and Borujerdi declared a fatwa against it. The measure stalled. Prompted by the US, the Shah lifted the ban on the National Front, and their criticisms, along with the economic problems, led to strikes and demonstrations. At the beginning of 1963 the Shah regained the initiative with a package of reforms announced as the White Revolution. This included a renewed policy of land reform, privatisation of state factories, female suffrage, and a literacy corps of young educated people to address the problem of illiteracy in the countryside. Despite a boycott by the National Front (who insisted that such a measure should have been presented and applied by a constitutionally-elected Majles) the programme received huge support in a referendum, with 5.5 million out of 6.1 million eligible voters supporting it.30 The programme went ahead, augmenting and broadening the changes in the country that were already afoot.
But early in 1963 a cleric little-known outside ulema circles, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, began to preach in Qom against the Shah’s government for its corruption, its neglect of the poor, and its failure to uphold Iran’s sovereignty in its relationship with the US (he also disliked the Shah’s sale of oil to Israel). He made this move at a time when, following the death of Ayatollah Borujerdi in 1961, many Iranian Shi‘a were unclear whom to follow as marja-e taqlid. In March, on the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Emam Ja’far Sadeq, troops and SAVAK agents attacked the madreseh where Khomeini was preaching and arrested him, killing several students at the same time. He was released after a short time but continued his attacks on the government. He made a particularly strong speech on 3 June, which was Ashura, and was arrested again early on 5 June.31 When the arrest became known there were demonstrations in Tehran and several other major cities, which drew force from the intense atmosphere of mourning for Emam Hosein, and were repeated and spread more widely in the days that followed. The Shah imposed martial law and put troops on the streets but hundreds of demonstrators (at least) were killed before the protests ended. These deaths, especially because they took place at Ashura, invited comparison with the martyrs of Karbala on the one hand, and the tyrant Yazid on the other.
Khomeini was released in August, but despite SAVAK announcements that he had agreed to keep quiet he continued to speak out, and was rear-rested. Finally, he was deported and exiled in 1964 after a harsh speech attacking both the Iranian and US governments for a new law that gave the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to US military personnel in Iran:
They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him…32
Shortly after the new law was passed in the Majles a new US loan of $200 million for military equipment was agreed—a conjunction all too reminiscent of the kinds of deals done with foreigners in the reign of Naser od-Din Shah. Initially Khomeini went to Turkey in exile, then to Iraq and eventually (after the Shah put pressure on the Iraqi government to remove him from the Shi‘a centre in Najaf) to Paris in 1978. In Iran, protest died down, aside from occasional manifestations at Tehran University and from members of the ulema. For the Shah, the message from the episode appeared to be that he could govern autocratically and overcome short-term dissent with repression. In the longer term, he believed, his policies for development would bring benefits to ordinary people and secure his rule.
Khomeini
Ruhollah Khomeini was born in September 1902 in Khomein, a small town between Isfahan and Tehran. He came from a family of seyyed (descendants of the Prophet) whose patriarchs had been mullahs for many generations and may originally have come from Nishapur. In the eighteenth century one of his ancestors had moved to India, where the family had lived in Kintur near Lucknow, before his grandfather (known as Seyyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi) moved back to Persia and settled in Khomein in about 1839. He bought a large house
there and was a man of property and status. Ahmad’s son Mostafa studied in Isfahan, Najaf and Samarra and married the daughter of a distinguished clerical family. He belonged to the upper echelons of the ulema, a cut above the mullahs who had to make a living as jobbing teachers, legal notaries or preachers. This made him an important figure in the area, and it seems that it was while he was attempting to mediate in a local dispute that he was murdered in 1903, when Ruhollah, his third son, was only six months old.33
Ruhollah grew up in Khomein through the turbulent years of the Constitutional Revolution and the First World War, over which period Khomein was raided a number of times by Lori tribesmen. In 1918 his mother died in a cholera epidemic, leaving him an orphan as he was about to go into the seminary nearby in Soltanabad. It may be that the absence of his father as a child and becoming orphaned as a youth added impetus to the young Khomeini’s ambition and drive to excel in his studies. Later he moved to Qom, wearing the black turban of a seyyed, as a student of Shaykh Abdolkarim Ha’eri. There he received the conventional education in logic and religious law of a mullah,34 becoming a mojtahed in about 1936, which was a young age and a sign of his promise. From that time he began to teach and write. He was always a little unconventional, having an interest in poetry and mysticism (erfan) that more conservative mullahs would have disapproved of. He read Molla Sadra’s Four Journeys and the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn Arabi, and his first writings were commentaries on mystical and philosophical texts. In the ’30s he studied philosophy and erfan with Mirza Mohammad Ali Shahabadi, who as well as being an authority on mysticism, believed in the importance of explaining religious ideas to ordinary people in language they could understand. Shahabadi was opposed to the rule of Reza Shah and also influenced Khomeini’s politics.35
Fig. 19. Ruhollah Khomeini as a student—an extraordinary mojtahed.
Khomeini had a strong sense of himself (and of 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 ‘40s and ’50s, continuing to teach in Qom, it is perhaps correct to think of Khomeini taking a position between the activism of Ayatollah Kashani on the one hand, anti-colonial and anti-British (he was interned by the British between 1942 and 1945); and that of Ayatollah Hosein Borujerdi on the other, more conservative, more withdrawn, tending to quietism and intervening only seldom in political matters.36 But Khomeini’s combination of intellectual strength, curiosity and unconventionality made him different from either; potentially more creative and innovative, though for the time being still deferring 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, and was regarded by some as their marja, their object of emulation.
The events of 1963-64 made Khomeini the leading political figure opposed to the Shah, along with Mossadeq, who was still under house arrest and thus effectively neutralised. 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 US 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 programme went ahead from 1963, but with mixed results. The landlords who were to be expropriated were allowed to keep one village only each, but some landlords were able to evade the provisions, for example by giving their property to relatives or by creating mechanised 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 labourers 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 mechanisation of agriculture, there was suddenly less work for these labourers 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 per cent 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, in what were little better than shanty-towns. They tended to settle down in groups from the same village or area, and often they would know a mullah from the same area also, who would have added authority in 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 1953 to over 4 million in 1977; new universities and colleges were set up and enrolment grew from 24,885 to 154,215. The number of students at foreign universities grew from under 18,000 to over 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-70s half the population were under sixteen, and two-thirds under thirty—this was to be the generation of the revolution41.
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 US and the UK—in return for quantities of new military equipment. The Shah bought more Chieftain tanks from the UK than the British Army owned.
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 S AVAK) into the bazaars to arrest so-called profiteers and hoarders. Shops were closed down, 250,000 fines were issued and 8,000 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 bring inflation under control and 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 poor 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 when the call to prayer floated over the city at dusk. The west, and the US, were constant presences, from the Coca-Cola and Pepsi on sale everywhere to the American cars and the American ad-vertising—but constant also (beside a continuing admiration for America and an associated desire for economic development) was a tension and a distaste for that presence.