The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  With his following, money, and moral influence, a marja enjoyed a stature most kings and prime ministers could only dream of. His position was strengthened by the fact that there were usually only three to five marjas alive at any one time. But the marjas had to take care not to grow complacent. Their followers were free to switch support from one to another at any time, and so established marjas were wary of any newcomer who showed himself capable of drawing a decent crowd for fear of losing their revenue base. Nor were their followers obliged to emulate a grand ayatollah who resided in Iran—millions of Iranians considered themselves loyal to marjas who resided in the holy cities of Iraq. The fluid nature of the marja system posed real challenges for the incumbents but especially for Iran’s kings, who kept a wary eye on these religious barons capable of mobilizing their admirers and living independent of the state. Marjas were immune from prosecution and in every respect considered above the law of the land. The greatest fear of any shah was that a marja would send the signal to his followers to come out onto the streets and enter the political arena. The last time this had happened was in 1906, when the country was swept by revolution; at that time the ulama had successfully forced the Qajar Shah to relinquish his monopoly on power. The greatest fear of the ulama, on the other hand, was the Pahlavi state’s emphasis on secularism and state power. Every time public interest in religion waned, the decline in mosque attendance meant fewer followers and a sharp drop in their income.

  Though each marja was technically equal to the others, it also happened that one among them enjoyed more moral authority than his colleagues. By a quirk of tradition, exactly who that was depended on the wishes of the monarch. When Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi died the Shah, as Custodian of the Faith, wrote his letter of condolence to the ulama. Whomever among the surviving marjas received the letter was allowed to claim the exalted status of paramount marja. In 1961 the Shah was anxious not to strengthen the hand of any of the marjas living inside Iran. So he sent his letter of condolence to Grand Ayatollah Mohsen Hakim, who, like his predecessor, lived in Najaf and was firmly opposed to clerical involvement in politics. By now the Shah was determined to proceed with radical social reforms that he knew would anger the clergy.

  Since childhood the Shah had dreamed of ushering in an era of social justice in the tradition of the Shia imams. Madame Arfa’s nursery lessons had not been lost on him—kings could be revolutionaries, too. “If there is to be a revolution in this country,” he said, “I will be the one to lead it.” He believed he had survived illness, the plane crash, and an assassination attempt for a reason. “I concluded that my destiny had already been designed and ordered by God,” he said. “And I must carry it out.” Self-preservation was also a factor in his decision. Five years earlier, King Faisal II of Iraq had been butchered in his palace by renegade colonels. The Shah was determined to avoid his fate by placing Iran’s monarchy not only on the side of social progress but also at the forefront. “I am going to show that revolutions to advance the poor and underprivileged can come from kings and are not the exclusive field of Marxists or socialist-minded young colonels,” he explained. “I am going to go faster than the left.” His Swiss education had convinced him that feudal societies could be reshaped by theories and policies that redistributed income and strengthened the reach of government. But the Shah’s fascination with state activism went very much against the grain of the Iranian experience. Historically, though most Iranians revered the monarchy, and held the king above politics, they viewed government as predatory, corrupt, and oppressive. The idea that government would have a more forceful presence in their lives caused ripples of discontent that spread beyond clerical circles.

  With Hakim now the titular head of the clergy, the Shah decided the time was right to unveil the reforms he dubbed the “White Revolution” and that he hoped would transform Iran from a semifeudal to a modern industrial state in a generation. The White Revolution included land reform; granting women the vote; nationalizing forests; selling shares in government-owned factories to the public; profit sharing for factory workers; and establishing a literacy corps composed of army conscripts whose job would be to bring education to the provinces. Though landowners were promised compensation to surrender their estates they also lost their political clout. The ulama would also have to surrender their landholdings. There was no doubt that both groups would resist this landmark attempt to sweep away their privileges and prerogatives.

  To manage the reform process, in July 1962 the Shah turned to an old friend and confederate, Asadollah Alam, a prominent landowner and aristocrat from eastern Iran whose climb to the pinnacle of power began in 1945, when he was appointed governor of Sistan and Baluchistan. Five years later, Alam received his first cabinet appointment. During the showdown against Mossadeq he had rallied to the Shah’s side, and though a hardheaded realist when it came to politics he held a romantic, almost feudal attachment to the Crown. In marked contrast to the rest of the political establishment, Alam flattered the Shah’s pretensions to rule as well as reign. In appointing Alam as his new prime minister, the Shah chose wisely and with foresight. Alam and the Shah understood that the White Revolution faced defeat if left in the hands of the conservative-dominated Majles. They decided to bypass the legislature altogether and take their plans to the country in the form of a nationwide referendum. The government’s announcement of the referendum in January 1963 caused disquiet in Qom but no immediate unrest—Grand Ayatollah Hakim was hundreds of miles away in Najaf, and the other marjas followed their usual policy of neutrality. Their silence appalled Ruhollah Khomeini, who felt obliged to vent his outrage at the Pahlavi assault on tradition and heritage. The radicals were angered by land reform but above all by women’s rights. “The son of Reza Khan has embarked on the destruction of Islam in Iran,” he thundered. “I will oppose this as long as the blood circulates in my veins.”

  Everyone understood that with Ayatollah Khomeini’s entry into the political arena an important taboo had been broken. Wealthy merchants angered by the government’s economic policies donated generously to Khomeini’s cause. Left-wing students and intellectuals rallied to the side of the first public figure since Mossadeq to challenge royal prerogatives. In other circumstances they would have welcomed the Shah’s efforts to improve the lives of the rural and urban poor. But the opportunity to use an ayatollah as a battering ram against the king who had deposed their hero a decade earlier was too tempting an opportunity to pass up. The political class was mesmerized by Khomeini’s ability to fill the streets with supporters who displayed a fanatical level of devotion. “If you give the order we are prepared to attach bombs to ourselves and throw ourselves at the Shah’s car to blow him up,” one local merchant told the Ayatollah. “It won’t come to that,” Khomeini answered him. “[When] you come here, if there is something to be done, you will be asked to do it.” Out of this feverish atmosphere emerged the Coalition of Islamic Societies, an underground organization that formed the nucleus of a religious revolutionary movement. Established and led by a secret cell made up of Khomeini’s most devoted seminary students, the coalition raised money, spread propaganda, and organized other underground groups within the hawza, the network of seminaries in Qom. They endorsed assassination as a political tactic and collected money from the bazaaris (merchants).

  One of the coalition’s most aggressive strategies was to smear the Shah as an apostate or nonbeliever. The allegation appeared absurd on its face—the Custodian of the Faith’s piety was well known to his family and friends. He carried a miniature copy of the Quran in his suit jacket pocket and made frequent references to his faith in speeches and interviews. His childhood visions of the imams were a matter of public record. Each time he left the country to travel overseas, the senior Muslim cleric in Tehran joined him at the airport, put his hand on his shoulder, and recited a special verse of the Quran to wish him a safe journey. Yet as a prince educated in Switzerland and trained to think logically, the Shah followed the Enlightenment r
ule that called for strict separation between church and state. He refused to accept the supremacy of religious over secular law and dismissed out of hand the 1906 Constitution’s guarantee of a clerical veto over parliamentary legislation. Shyness and emotional reserve played their parts, too. The Shah was uncomfortable with public displays of piety, which he viewed as another sort of demagoguery. His reticence set him apart from his own people, who reveled in passionate and very public displays of faith. Shia mosques were at the very center of neighborhood life in most Iranian villages and towns. He did not attend Friday prayers, nor did he observe fasting during the month that marked observance of Ramadan. In his thirty-seven years on the throne, the only time the faithful saw their king make his devotions was during his highly publicized annual trip to the holy city of Mashad and his attendance at ceremonies in a Tehran mosque to mark the Ashura holiday. Niavaran was the first palace since Achaemenid times not to include its own house of worship.

  The Shah’s visible discomfort with public displays of piety and his disregard for Islamic symbolism stood in marked contrast to the behavior of the Arab world’s Sunni kings. The reigning monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia were not necessarily more religious than their Iranian brother, but they made a great show of attending the Friday prayers read out in their name. In so doing they retained a feel for the street and a connection to the mosque that their brother king in Iran did not have.

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  “EVEN IN THE womb I was a revolutionary,” Abolhassan Banisadr once said, beaming with pride. Thirty years earlier, in March 1933, Banisadr’s father, the prominent cleric Ayatollah Nasrollah Banisadr, had left the city of Hamadan with his pregnant wife to deliver a statement of political protest against Reza Shah. The Shah had recently renegotiated the terms of Britain’s monopoly of Iranian oil production and appealed to the ulama for support. But rather than send the obligatory telegram of congratulations, Banisadr chose to snub the King by making an excuse to leave his home in the city of Hamadan. Husband and wife reached a village on the outskirts in time for the Persian New Year, and it was there that their son Abolhassan, the future first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was born.

  The Banisadrs were well acquainted with two other prominent religious families, the Khomeinis and the Sadrs. In the 1930s Ruhollah Khomeini liked to visit Hamadan in the summer to take the cool. “I met Khomeini as a child,” Abolhassan recalled of his playdates with the cleric’s young sons Mostafa and Ahmad. As a teenager he might have been expected to follow his father into the seminary. Abolhassan’s great teenage passion was not religion but politics. “My last days of high school coincided with the Mossadeq era,” he remembered. “That led to activism at an early age. I was a nationalist. I was in favor of independence and liberty. I was a Mossadeqi.” It was a thrilling time for a young boy fired with dreams of nationalism, secularism, and Cold War neutrality. “As a student I saw many of my classmates sympathized [with the Communists],” he said. “But I was convinced the Tudeh were Russian stooges.” He sharpened his debating skills during hours of discussions and by eleventh grade was out in the streets circulating petitions in favor of oil nationalization. Whereas loyalists of Tudeh looked to Stalin for leadership, Banisadr favored the more nationalist and moderate left-wing National Front, and he idolized Mohammad Mossadeq.

  The events of August 1953—Operation Ajax and the Shah’s brief exile followed by his triumphal return to power—proved turning points. Bitterly disillusioned with U.S. policy toward Iran, a generation of left-wing students such as Banisadr saw the Americans as the latest in a long line of imperialist occupiers dating back to antiquity. “The monarchy was against independence. We were convinced it was used as a staging ground for the foreign powers. I personally became a republican the day after the 1953 coup d’état.” In the late fifties he joined the underground National Resistance Movement and spent two short spells in jail for political offenses. “We would write tracts, do anything to show our resistance to the coup d’état.”

  Though he identified as a socialist, Banisadr never renounced religion and admired Shiism’s sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed. In 1963 he watched in fascination as his father’s old friend Khomeini began openly criticizing the Shah’s social and economic reforms. Many students and intellectuals supported Khomeini not because they opposed women’s rights or land reform but because they envied his ability to bring many common people out into the streets to demonstrate against the Shah, whom they blamed for the ouster of their hero Mossadeq. “It was not known then that Khomeini played a role in 1953 against Mossadeq,” Banisadr later grimly conceded. “We [only] understood afterward that he stood with those who supported the coup.… At the time [in 1963] we had no real knowledge of his views.”

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  THE WHITE REVOLUTION referendum passed with 99 percent support, providing the Shah with a clear-cut victory and earning him a laudatory telegram of congratulations from the White House. But the results were clouded by reports of voting irregularities and the decision by the marjas to call for a boycott. Nor were Khomeini’s hard-liners about to concede defeat. They smarted from the Shah’s ill-tempered denunciation of them as a “stupid and reactionary bunch whose brains have not moved.… They think life is about getting something for nothing, eating and sleeping … sponging on others and a parasitic existence.” In a second venomous speech, he denounced rebel ulama as “sordid and vile elements … a numb and dispiriting snake and lice who float in their own dirt … the fist of justice, like thunder, will be struck at their head in whatever cloth they are, perhaps to terminate their filthy and shameful life.”

  Throughout the spring and early summer of 1963 sporadic clashes occurred in Qom between pro-Khomeini seminarians and the security forces. The Shah’s public attacks against his religious opponents made it all but impossible for the moderate clerical majority to stand up to Khomeini, and momentum quickly shifted to his extremists, who spoiled for a showdown. Tensions ratcheted up still further when paratroopers stormed through the Feiziyah, the seminary attached to the Holy Shrine of Fatima, one of the most sacred sites in all of Islam. They assaulted the young seminarians and wrecked their rooms. At least one student fell to his death from a high rooftop. Then the troops lit a bonfire in the courtyard and fed the flames with turbans, books, and furniture. All of Qom was traumatized by the raid. “With this crime the regime has revealed itself as the successor to Genghiz Khan and has made its defeat and destruction inevitable,” declared Khomeini. “The son of Reza Khan has dug his own grave and disgraced himself.” He issued a defiant call to arms: “I can summon a million martyrs to any cause.”

  The Shah and his government had good reason to believe they could maintain order and forestall a religious revolt. Khomeini was not a marja but a lowly ayatollah. His supporters were fervent but still few in number. Middle-class Iranians, the workers, and the farmers were excited by the White Revolution and the promise of prosperity, education, and medical care. They showed no sign of turning against the one man who stood for progress and reform. “We did consider the possibility of violence,” recalled Parviz Sabeti, who in 1963 was a young Savak analyst responsible for monitoring religious dissent. “But we didn’t anticipate it spreading among the people.” The problem, he said, was that although the Shah “spoke in a very tough way [against the ulama] he didn’t follow through with actions. He should have crushed them.”

  Ayatollah Khomeini made his move on June 3, 1963, which in the lunar calendar fell on Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram and the fateful anniversary of the death of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680. The security forces had discovered that Khomeini planned to deliver a speech critical of the Shah on the grounds of the martyred Feiziyah school. They surrounded Qom with six thousand paratroopers and dispatched an emissary, Colonel Nasser Moghadam, who tried and failed to persuade the Ayatollah not to proceed. By the time Khomeini arrived at the Feiziyah in the afternoon to address the crowd, the streets surrounding
the shrine were thronged with thousands of admirers. “Let me give you some advice, Mr. Shah!” Khomeini declared, addressing the King much as a headmaster might scold an errant schoolboy. “Dear Mr. Shah, I advise you to desist this policy and acts like this. I don’t want the people to offer thanks if your masters should decide one day that you must leave. I don’t want you to become like your father.” Khomeini warned that the Americans were fickle allies, “friends of the dollar; they have no religion, no loyalty. They are hanging responsibility for everything around your miserable neck!… I feel anxiety and sorrow at the state of Iran, at the state of our ruined country, at the state of this cabinet, at the state of those running our government.”