The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The students of Damavand College believed the future belonged to them. In the 1960s and 1970s the legal and civil protections accorded Iranian women were the most progressive in the Muslim world. The Shah granted women the right to vote, enter politics, and own property. The age of marriage was raised and abortion was legalized. Divorces were now handled by the courts and not decided by husbands and the clergy. Laws were passed guaranteeing equal pay and opportunity in the workforce. The civil service allowed women with children under age three to work half days with full benefits. The Shah’s emphasis on promoting higher education paid off: in 1978 women made up a third of all university students and half of all medical school applicants. Women were moving into politics. Mahnaz Afkhami, a thirty-six-year-old graduate of the University of San Francisco, was Iran’s first minister of state for women’s affairs, and there were twenty female members of parliament and four hundred female city councillors. Women were entering corporate boardrooms and the performing arts. Iran Air appointed Minu Ahmadsartip as its deputy managing director, popular singer Aki Banai returned home in the New Year following a triumphant tour of American cities, and Anahid Moradian opened the country’s first hair salon to cater to a male and female clientele. Young women of the middle class dressed in skirts, jeans, and blouses and styled their hair after American celebrities Farrah Fawcett, star of the hit TV show Charlie’s Angels, and ice skater Dorothy Hamill. They studied abroad, drove around town unaccompanied by male relatives, and dated and danced the night away in discotheques in northern Tehran.

  Iran was changing. But even as the students at Damavand College celebrated four decades of progress, across town one hundred women marched for the return of the veil, strict segregation of men and women in public places, and the repeal of the 1963 emancipation proclamation. They protested in Isfahan and also in Mashad, where police moved in to arrest several women blocking traffic on Naderi Avenue. But police stood back in Qom when religious students poured from the seminaries to chant antiregime slogans. The voice of the political establishment, the newspaper Kayhan, chastised the protesters as deviants. “Their demonstration was in effect a call to return to the Stone Age, to negate achievements of modern Iranian society, and to deprive half the population of their basic human rights,” declared an editorial. “Had they looked around themselves while shouting their reactionary slogans they would have seen scorn and utter disgust in the eyes of the passersby.”

  The following day, when photographs of the event at Damavand appeared in the press, college administrators began receiving anonymous threatening phone calls. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” a school spokesman assured the students. “We cannot turn back to where we were a generation ago.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the students left for home on that chilly Saturday afternoon the fuse of revolt had been lit. Most Tehranis missed the January 7 evening edition of the newspaper Ettelaat, and fewer still bothered to read the mundane headline printed on page seven in small type: “IRAN AND RED-AND-BLACK COLONIALISM.” On closer inspection, however, the article, ostensibly a letter to the editor, consisted of a virulent attack against Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The anonymous author accused the Marja of treachery and fraud. “By his own admission, Ruhollah Khomeini had lived in India and there had relations with the centers of English imperialism. What is clear is that his fame as the chief instigator of the events of 1963 has persisted to this day. Opposed to the [White] Revolution in Iran, he was determined to install a red-and-black imperialism, and unleashed his agents against the land reform, women’s rights and nationalization of the forests, shed the blood of innocent people and showed that even today there are people ready loyally to put themselves at the disposal of conspirators and [foreign] national interests.… Millions of Iranian Muslims will ponder how Iran’s enemies choose their accomplices as need arises, even accomplices dressed in the sacred and honorable cloth of the clergyman.”

  The article in Ettelaat, the official response to Khomeini’s fatwa, was the brainchild of the special committee set up a month earlier to devise strategies to discredit the Marja. Asadollah Alam would never have allowed a newspaper to publicly attack a marja, let alone one with Khomeini’s track record of extremism. His replacement, Court Minister Hoveyda, however, saw an opportunity to cause trouble for his successor, Jamshid Amuzegar, whom he blamed for usurping the premiership. Amuzegar lacked experience in crisis management and had no background in dealing with the ulama. Hoveyda’s decision to hand the article to Savak’s General Nasiri with orders to publish was an act of spite more than anything else. “Hoveyda wrote the letter to prove his loyalty and then blamed it on Amuzegar,” said Ardeshir Zahedi. Parviz Sabeti felt sure the article would incite disturbances in Qom. “I told Nasiri,” he recalled, “do not do this unless we are ready to arrest them.”

  The two officials were still debating what to do when Minister of Information Dariush Homayoun, in attendance at the Rastakhiz Party’s January 4 plenary, handed a copy of the letter to a reporter from the newspaper Ettelaat. “Homayoun was leaving the conference hall when he gave our reporter the envelope,” said Farhad Massoudi, Ettelaat’s young publisher. “When he saw that the flip of the envelope contained the Court’s seal he took it back, tore off the seal, then handed it back to the reporter.” Massoudi read the letter and decided not to publish. “It was personal and vitriolic, in very poor taste. It accused Khomeini of not being Iranian and implied he was homosexual.” Massoudi had a poor relationship with Homayoun, whom he regarded as arrogant and conceited, and asked his senior editor, Ahmad Shahidy, to make the call to the Ministry of Information. Shahidy told Homayoun the letter was ill-advised and put them all at risk: “If we print this letter they might burn us down.” “If Ettelaat has to burn down, it’s better it be so,” Homayoun retorted and hung up. Massoudi telephoned the prime minister’s office out of desperation. “He was most kind but he knew nothing of the letter. He said: ‘Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you.’” Homayoun called later in the day to inform Shahidy that “though Mr. Massoudi is concerned, the letter must be published.” Fearing trouble from religious fanatics, the staff at Ettelaat tried to minimize the impact by printing the letter in small type beside a large advertisement for machinery.

  By the dinner hour on January 7, 1978, copies of the newspaper had been rushed to Qom. No one could remember such a slanderous attack against a marja. “Writing such an article about a brave, pious marja was a strategic mistake,” said religious revolutionary Ali Hossein, who read the paper in Tehran. “No one can degrade a marja. Even the Shah couldn’t do so.” Within two hours, Khomeini’s agents were on the streets of Qom, setting fire to Ettelaat’s newsstands. The next day they marched to the homes of the town’s three most prominent grand ayatollahs—the men responsible for Khomeini’s elevation fifteen years earlier—to demand that they issue public statements condemning the regime and declaring their support for their fellow marja.

  * * *

  ON THE AFTERNOON of Monday, January 9, while the Shah was in Aswan for talks with President Sadat of Egypt, Queen Farah was en route to Paris for a two-day trip, and the Crown Prince was in Australia, police officers in Qom were set upon by several thousand rioters. The mob tore through the downtown district and attacked and set alight “banks, government offices, girls’ schools, bookshops selling non-religious publications, the homes of officials and the city’s only two restaurants where men and women could dine under the same roof.” By nightfall a crowd of twenty thousand had taken over the streets and for the first time the cry of “Death to the Shah!” was heard in what was to become a familiar chilling refrain over the next year. Khomeini supporters besieged Police Station Number One, set cars alight, and tried to force their way inside. The officers retreated to the rooftop and opened fire on the crowd, killing six people and wounding a dozen others. A thirteen-year-old boy was crushed underfoot in the stampede to escape the gunfire. Order was restored only with the help of army units rushed to the
stricken town. Though none knew it at the time, the first shots of revolution had been fired.

  The Shah returned to Tehran on Tuesday, January 10. He betrayed no outward signs of anxiety and appeared relaxed at an evening reception for six visiting American senators. He had spent the morning with President Sadat in Aswan, where the two old friends had driven through the streets in an open car basking in the adoration of cheering crowds. His remarks to his guests focused exclusively on the Egypt-Israel peace negotiations. While the senators circulated, Court Minister Hoveyda took aside U.S. embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Jack Miklos for a private chat. Rumors were circulating in Tehran that the army had massacred seventy religious students and dumped their bodies in a salt lake on the edge of Qom. Hoveyda assured Miklos there were only six confirmed casualties and that they had been rioters armed with “stones, iron bars, and wooden staves” who had rampaged through the streets of Qom “smashing windows of shops and destroying premises of [the] Rastakhiz Party headquarters.”

  Over the next two weeks scattered outbreaks of violence at universities and strikes in the bazaars were reported in several cities. In Tehran, religious zealots attacked the Arya Cinema on Zahedi Avenue, while further south in Shiraz congregants poured out of a mosque and hurled rocks at police. Undergraduates rioted at Aryamehr University, Aryamehr Technical College, and Tehran University. At Narmak College, six hundred students overwhelmed security guards, broke into the chancellor’s office, and “virtually destroyed the administration building”; over seventy percent of windows on campus were smashed. At Isfahan University, a “volley of rocks broke 60 percent of windows in the faculty of foreign languages. There were no casualties and no class disruption, but university authorities were disconcerted by the level of organization shown and by [the] fact that this is the first time that this faculty has been hit this school year.” The cycle of unrest accelerated sharply over the weekend of January 14–15 with protest marches reported in Mashad, Abadan, Ahwaz, Dezful, and Khorramshahr. Prime Minister Amuzegar’s clumsy response was to stage a large progovernment demonstration of loyalty to the throne on the outskirts of Qom, a highly provocative gesture at a time when city residents were in deep mourning for those killed earlier in the month.

  Princess Ashraf Pahlavi watched events unfold with a gnawing sense of anxiety. On the eve of the pro-government rally in Qom she received a call from Mahnaz Afkhami to say that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs was having trouble rounding up volunteers to make the trip—Qom was regarded by liberated Iranian women as a no-go area. The Princess phoned Parviz Sabeti to seek reinforcements. “I can provide more,” he assured her. While she was on the phone, Ashraf asked Sabeti his thoughts on the security situation.

  “What is going on?” she asked. “[General] Nasiri is stupid. But you are intelligent. What is happening?”

  “You had better ask your brother,” answered Sabeti. “He was the one who tied the dog to the stone and set it free.” Sabeti’s point was that the Shah’s policy was doomed to fail: he could not on the one hand expect the security forces to maintain order while insisting they avoid violence. “The way His Majesty is going, Fifteen Khordad will be a picnic. We will have to bring machine guns and tanks into the streets.”

  “You dare talk like this!” snapped the Princess, her brother’s most fervent defender. “You people only think of force. To you, killing people is as easy as drinking water.”

  “Who wants to kill people?” replied Sabeti. “I don’t want to see us get to a point where we are faced with exactly that situation.”

  * * *

  IN THE EMBASSY on Roosevelt Avenue, Ambassador Sullivan and his political advisers huddled. They understood that the events of the past week signaled a major escalation of unrest. “I counted the crisis as starting from January 1978,” recalled George Lambrakis. “In the embassy we always counted that as the beginning. We were pretty sure the Shah had ordered the publication of the article in Ettelaat attacking Khomeini. Our best guess was that he was preparing to turn over to his son. Then the question was why. He was getting older, his son was growing up, and maybe at that point someone mentioned an illness. We didn’t know he had cancer. But the French head of intelligence in their embassy believed the Shah was finished.” On January 11, Sullivan cabled Washington that “in most serious incident of this sort for years” five demonstrators had been killed and nine wounded when a crowd attempted to storm a police station “in the religious city of Qom.” There was still confusion as to which clerical faction had been involved in the protests. According to Sullivan, police sources blamed “conservative religious opposition elements (though not specifically to followers of Khomeini or to Islamic Marxists as such).” Ten days later, Sullivan warned there was a very real danger that the regime would lose control and find itself in a confrontation with “fundamentalist religious leaders,” as had happened in 1963.

  On February 1, Sullivan sent a follow-up airgram to Washington with the first detailed description of the men orchestrating the unrest. Crucially, he already understood that moderate and extremist groups in Iran were in contact and coordinating a joint strategy. The lull in guerrilla activity over the past year had little to do with Savak’s counterinsurgency techniques and everything to do with a secret deal reached between the National Front and Liberation Movement and the Mujahedin and Fedayeen. The moderates had persuaded the men with guns to pause their operations to give the Americans time to pressure the Shah to cede his powers. Attacks would resume if Carter showed that he was either unable or unwilling to force the Shah to make political concessions. Sullivan also explained that senior religious leaders enjoyed separate ties to the Mujahedin terror group. “At the present time, we do not know how these connections take place, but they have been hinted at second and third hand by a number of individuals who have dealt with the oppositionist movement.” Religious hard-liners favored launching a frontal assault against the Shah’s regime, which they felt sure could be toppled. Their strategy was to provoke a crackdown by the security forces and publicize civilian casualties as a way of stoking public anger. “The loose and fluid religious structure of Iran offers perhaps the only country-wide network for an oppositionist group,” Sullivan advised. “Embassy sources suggest religious groups are talking about joining together for certain demonstrations similar to those which eventually led to confrontation in 1963. Circumstances would appear to be important—if additional incidents involving the religious community, such as firing upon marchers, either occurs or can be generated, religious fervor could be activated to provide the mob manpower for demonstrations.”

  But Sullivan’s assessment contained a single devastating flaw when he described Khomeini as “the true leader of the Shia faithful,” a statement that was not only factually incorrect but also theologically impossible. Shiism’s paramount marja was Grand Ayatollah Khoi, who enjoyed the biggest popular following and who resolutely opposed clerical involvement in politics. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari shared Khoi’s dim view of Khomeini’s activism. American ignorance of Shia Islam and Iran’s Shiite hierarchy led Sullivan and his political officers to prematurely confer political legitimacy on the most radical of the marjas and overlook the two men who represented the great moderate center of Shiism.

  * * *

  IN QOM, GRAND Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari faced a dilemma.

  The Marja’s silence in response to the Ettelaat article had provoked charges of cowardice from Khomeini sympathizers who paraded outside his home in drag, waving female undergarments and demanding that he condemn the regime’s use of force to put down the riots. Shariatmadari understood that by staying silent he risked creating a leadership vacuum that Khomeini would be all too ready to fill. The Marja also wanted to send the Shah a message. He believed the Shah had not done enough to curb his relatives’ financial dealings, clamp down on corruption, and restrict foreign cultural influence. He wanted the Shah to declare that he would abide within the strictures of the 1906 constitutional settlement that guaran
teed the ulama a role in approving government laws. Clerical frustration extended to more temporal matters and in particular Amuzegar’s austerity budget, which had ended his predecessor Hoveyda’s practice of paying “subsidies” to thousands of mullahs around the country. If the money did not ensure their loyalty to the regime it at least kept them off the streets and in the mosques. The amount involved, an estimated $35 million annually, was hardly worth the political price. “Austerity during liberalization was a disaster,” said Parviz Sabeti. “Cutting the deficit was a disaster. Amuzegar cut the subsidies but the amount [for each mullah] was never much, around 300 tomens. He also cut credit and loans to the bazaaris.” These policies meant that the mullahs and their friends in the bazaars had a shared grievance. “The sudden cut meant that a large number of mullahs no longer had any reason to support the regime,” said journalist Amir Taheri.

  With these concerns in mind, Shariatmadari issued a rare public letter condemning the bloodshed in Qom as “un-Islamic and inhumane.” Though he did not mention the Shah by name—the Marja preferred to spare the monarch embarrassment and cast blame instead on his government—his anger was palpable. He invited three foreign correspondents to his home in Qom and explained his position. “The government says we are reactionaries and backward,” he said. “Well, if being backward means we want the constitutional laws to be respected, then we accept that definition.” Shariatmadari warned that if he wanted “he could have ordered all the bazaars and mosques in Iran closed, sending thousands of people into the streets, but that this would only risk more shootings.” His decision to speak out electrified the ulama and shocked public opinion. Many Iranians who until now had ignored the unrest in Qom were suddenly made aware of a looming confrontation between crown and clergy.