Despite deepening economic difficulties and the disappointing realization that he could expect no help from the United States in his confrontation with the British, Mossadeq continued as prime minister, enjoying massive support both in Majles and in the country itself. But tensions between different elements of the National Front coalition increased, as did the apparent strength of Tudeh, and there were more demonstrations. The government brought in new reforms, including measures that changed the relationship between landlords and peasants in favor of the latter, and Mossadeq used his support to pursue an older agenda of limiting the power of the monarchy. But in the summer of 1952 when Mossadeq demanded the right to appoint the minister of war to deal with the increasing unrest, the shah refused, and Mossadeq resigned. His successor immediately announced negotiations with the British to resolve the oil dispute, and the country erupted in demonstrations of disapproval in which Tudeh took a prominent role. The shah quickly caved in and reappointed Mossadeq, who broke diplomatic relations with Britain altogether at the end of the year. By this time the British were encouraging the United States to cooperate in engineering a coup to get rid of Mossadeq.
Finally, in August 1953, the plan went ahead: Mossadeq was to be removed as prime minister and replaced with General Zahedi, a fervent monarchist. But the plot misfired. Mossadeq found out about the coup, probably through Tudeh, and was able to forestall it. The shah fled the country and anti-royalist rioting broke out. Mossadeq sent in police and troops to control the riots, and they succeeded, but they also alienated many of Mossadeq’s own supporters, as well as Tudeh. So when a new demonstration appeared two days later on August 19, this time against Mossadeq, his supporters stayed away. This demonstration included supporters of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani—previously loyal to the National Front, but now on the other side—from the bazaar, and people paid to participate by the CIA, which had given the coup the code name Operation Ajax. Many members of the murky south Tehran underworld took part, including gang leaders like Sha’ban Ja‘fari Bimokh (Sha‘ban the Brainless).23 In the wake of this demonstration Mossadeq was arrested, the army and Zahedi were in control, and the shah returned. Mossadeq was tried and convicted of treason by a military court but was allowed to live under house arrest until he died in 1967.
The coup could perhaps not have happened without mistakes of Mossadeq’s own making—and in fact it nearly failed. But it certainly would not have happened without the intervention of the British SIS and the American CIA.24 Although the story of the coup did not emerge for many years and perhaps has not done so fully even now, Iranians blamed these two agencies at the time and have done so bitterly ever since. The idea that everything that happened in Iranian politics was manipulated by a hidden foreign hand was again reinforced, fathering dozens of improbable conspiracy theories in later years. Mossadeq became a national hero across most ideological, class, and religious boundaries.
The coup also had significance in a number of other ways. It established the United States in Iran as the prime ally and protector of the Pahlavi regime, and it achieved the aim of eclipsing Soviet communist influence. But it also took away much of the enchantment the United States had previously enjoyed popularly as a virtuous alternative to the older powers. The significance of the event took some time to sink in. For a while some Iranians still believed, or hoped, that the Americans had been duped by the British, and that fundamental U.S. values would reassert themselves. But the United States was Prince Charming no more. One could draw a parallel with British decisions in the 1870s and at other times, which appeared to serve immediate short-term British interests but treated Iran as an instrument to other ends rather than with the respect due a partner. In the long run, as with British actions in the previous century, the removal of Mossadeq damaged U.S. interests in a much more serious way than could have been imagined at the time.
The events of 1951–1953 also alienated many Iranians from the young shah, making popular support for him in subsequent decades equivocal at best. Beyond Iran, the significance of the struggle to nationalize Iranian oil was widely felt in the Middle East. It is generally accepted, for example, that the episode played an important part in the thinking of Egypt’s Jamal Abd al-Nasser (Nasser), who in July 1956 followed the example of Mossadeq and nationalized the Suez Canal. It would not be the last time that Iran, for better or worse, would indicate in advance the way events would unfold in the region more widely.
But the Mossadeq era disillusioned many young Iranians about politics and the chances for change. One such was Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a complex man who was against many things, and only ambiguously in favor of a few. He had been born into an ulema family in Tehran in 1923, but turned against a religious career (having read Kasravi) and later became a Marxist under the influence of Khalil Maleki, one of the group arrested by Reza Shah in 1937. But in the long run Ahmad was too critical and too individualistic to be a conventional Marxist. Like Maleki, he disliked the way Tudeh had to toe the Soviet line after World War II. He actively supported Mossadeq, but after his fall renounced politics dramatically and publicly. Like Kasravi, he had an aversion to the traditions of classical Persian literature, favoring a lean style of writing that echoed the colloquial Persian of ordinary people. The most influential of his ideas was that of gharbzadegi—often translated as “Westoxication” or “West-strickenness”—which he put forward in talks and a book with that title in 1962. This attacked the uncritical way in which Western ideas had been accepted, advocated, and taught in schools. The result, said Al-e Ahmad, was the creation of a people and a culture that were neither genuinely Iranian nor properly Western. Following a story by Mawlana Rumi, he compared it to a crow that one day saw the elegant way a partridge walked. The crow tried to imitate the partridge and failed, but kept trying, with the result that he forgot how to walk like a crow—but never succeeded in walking like a partridge.
As time went on, Al-e Ahmad was increasingly drawn back to religion (having initially followed the scornful, satirical example of Hedayat), but he always disliked the superstition and empty traditionalism of many of the ulema—“satisfied to be the gatekeeper at the graveyard.” Later, he drew attention to the way oil wealth was spent on imported absurdities that earlier generations of Iranians could never have imagined they could want, and to the artificial, invented historical heritage presented by Mohammad Reza Shah as the backdrop to the Pahlavi monarchy. Al-e Ahmad brought some of the jaded anomie of Western modernism to Iranian literature, while keeping a strongly Iranian voice. He translated Sartre and Camus into Persian, but his firm attachment to intellectual honesty and his search for an authentic way to live did not borrow from anyone. He died young in 1969, and his status as a modernist hero was only slightly weakened by his wife Simin Daneshvar’s later revelations of his grumpy selfishness in their married life. He was a strong influence on a whole generation of Iranian intellectuals who were his contemporaries, and on those who came after him.25
THE RULE OF MOHAMMAD REZA SHAH AND THE WHITE REVOLUTION
The Mossadeq coup ended the period of pluralism that had begun with the fall of Reza Shah in 1941, and inaugurated an extended period in which Mohammad Reza Shah ruled personally with few constitutional limitations. The oil dispute was resolved with an arrangement that gave the Iranian government fifty percent of the profits, out of a consortium in which the U.S. companies had a forty percent stake, now equal to that held by the AIOC (renamed British Petroleum in 1954—BP). The increased oil revenue, which grew as the industry developed, permitted a big expansion of government expenditure. Much of this, as in the time of Reza Shah, was spent on military equipment—augmented by $500 million of U.S. military aid between 1953 and 1963. Many in government circles felt that too much money was being spent on the military budget, and in 1959 that dispute contributed to the resignation of Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, head of the Planning and Budget Organization.26 In return the shah aligned himself unequivocally with the West, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored
in 1954. But from 1953 onward it was plain to all that the United States was now the dominant external power in Iran.
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 sympathizers were relentlessly pursued by a security agency (known from 1957 as SAVAK) that grew increasingly efficient, with help from the CIA and the Israeli secret service, Mossad. It also grew 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)—satirized 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 secularizing tendency and the influence of Tudeh. Thereafter, they continued to support the shah, and relations between the shah and Borujerdi in particular were cordial. But many other 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. Though the regime invested heavily in industry and education, the rural areas still lagged behind. There was also substantial private investment, and between 1954 and 1969 the economy grew on average by seven or eight percent 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. The new, educated middle class expanded, encompassing entrepreneurs, engineers, and managers as well as the older professions—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 1960s and 1970s—and making an early differentiation between the character of the Westernized north of the city, and that of 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 [i.e. 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 U.S. government (after January 1961 the Kennedy administration) was putting some pressure on the shah to liberalize. 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 U.S., the lhah 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, privatization 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 (which insisted that such a measure should have been presented and applied by a constitutionally elected Majles), the program received huge support in a referendum—5.5 million out of 6.1 million eligible voters supporting it.30 The program 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. He attacked its corruption, its neglect of the poor, and its failure to uphold Iran’s sovereignty in its relationship with the United States—and he also disliked the shah’s sale of oil to Israel. Khomeini 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 Jafar 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 shortly afterward but continued his attacks on the government. He made a particularly strong speech on June 3, which was Ashura, and was arrested again two days later.31 When the arrest became known, there were demonstrations in Tehran and several other major cities. Drawing force from the intense atmosphere of mourning for Emam Hosein, these demonstrations were repeated, and they spread 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 he was rearrested. Finally, he was deported and exiled in 1964 after a harsh speech attacking both the Iranian and U.S. governments for a new law that gave the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to U.S. 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 U.S. 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 in exile to Turkey, then to Iraq, and eventually (after the shah put pressure on the Iraqi government to remove him from the Shi‘a center in Najaf) to Paris in 1978. Protest in Iran 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 fam
ily 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. Mostafa 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 enter 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, where as a student of Shaykh Abdolkarim Haeri he wore the black turban of a seyyed. In Qom he received the conventional education in logic and religious law of a mullah, becoming a mojtahed in about 1936.34 It was a young age for such an accomplishment, 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 1930s 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 opposed the rule of Reza Shah and also influenced Khomeini’s politics.35
A History of Iran Page 28
