The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

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  IN FEBRUARY 1978 Tabriz was a “somewhat dingy” city of eight hundred thousand, located in Iran’s northwestern frontier near the Turkish and Russian borders. Tabriz occupied a special place in Iranian history, having served several stints as the national capital, most recently in the 1500s, when the Safavid dynasty established Shiism as the state religion, and locals enjoyed a reputation as observant and proud defenders of the 1906 Constitution. The Islamic revival sweeping the region was evident in the market, where butchers had recently announced they would refuse to sell imported meat because the animals had not been slaughtered the halal way, according to Muslim tradition. The American consulate’s new visitors’ guide warned that “it is not comfortable for women to shop in the bazaar during certain seasons of religious activity. At all times they must expect and be prepared to deal with a certain amount of molestation. Conservative clothing should be worn at all times.” The economy was also behind the recent sharp rise in popular discontent. Shortages, inflation, corruption, red tape, and harsh government austerity measures hurt credit and consumer spending, which in turn angered the bazaaris.

  Tabrizis enjoyed close ties to Qom, where their favorite son, Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, reigned over the Shia hierarchy. His public criticism of the Shah’s handling of recent unrest had made an impact; for weeks the Tabriz bazaar had been “plastered with signs” announcing a citywide strike set for February 18. The security forces were already expecting trouble in the third week of February because it marked the end of the forty-day mourning period for those killed in the assault on the police station in Qom. Parviz Sabeti’s Third Directorate learned that Khomeini’s agents planned to exploit the funeral ceremonies to provoke further unrest. “People in charge of the movement made the decision to make use of [the mourning period] to try to request the marjas to issue announcements about it and try to request the people to demonstrate in different cities,” said Ali Hossein, the young revolutionary who had also grown up in Tabriz. The country had to be brought to a boil, which meant producing a fresh batch of martyrs every forty days. This remarkably cynical but effective strategy became known as “doing the forty-forty.”

  On the morning of February 18, extra police were stationed outside the university and around police stations, and officers with walkie-talkies were placed at most traffic intersections. The day began quietly enough with government offices, schools, stores, and banks open for business. Trouble broke out when enraged mourners discovered that the gates of the Masjed-e-Jomeh Mosque had been locked as a precautionary measure. Large crowds formed and started chanting anti-Shah slogans. They attacked stores that sold liquor and television sets and then set off for the center of town, setting fire to a traffic kiosk and police motorcycles. The windows of the Tabriz Justice Department were smashed. The crowd surged into Kourosh Square, chanting “Death to the Shah!” They attacked branches of the Saderat, Melli, Irano-British, and Shahyar Banks with crowbars, clubs, axes, and stones, and tossed Molotov cocktails into four other bank branches as well as cinemas, hotels, and electronic appliance stores. With the central city in the hands of rioters, police regrouped and mounted a charge, pushing the swelling crowds back to Shahrdari Square, where they splintered into four smaller groups and then rampaged along Pahlavi Avenue, the main shopping district, collecting support as they went and overwhelming the security forces. Tabrizis were stunned when local police abandoned their posts and fled the scene rather than obey orders to open fire.

  At midday the Tabriz fire department battled as many as 134 blazes in different parts of the city. Supermarkets, child-care and welfare centers, and even hospitals were attacked and set ablaze. A truck carrying Coca-Cola bottles was lit up. The local Youth Palace, the Rastakhiz Party headquarters, and commemorative panels celebrating the White Revolution were wrecked. The Iran-America Society building was put to the torch, and billboards advertising movies were pulled down. Women seen wearing jeans and skirts, or whose heads were uncovered, were chased down and assaulted. Outside the Aria Hotel, a woman “was dragged from her car and has disappeared, rumored to have been burned.” “Women in Western clothes were dragged out of taxies and beaten up,” confirmed an American eyewitness. Another witness to the mayhem, Henry Marchal, director of the French Cultural Center, stated that “more than twenty girls at the Parvin School, a somewhat progressive girls’ school, were severely beaten when they attempted to leave the school and that authorities called parents to come with automobiles and chadors to pick up the remainder.” Order was briefly restored in the early afternoon, when the police opened fire with live rounds. But at four o’clock, while police helicopters clattered overhead, mobs tried to force their way into the Shah-Ismail Guesthouse, where foreign workers lived, and set the twelve-floor structure on fire. Eyewitnesses reported seeing “people in the mob throw ‘ball-like things’ into places they intended to set on fire. Upon contact with the target, the device would explode into huge flames.” The long and bloody day ended only when army tanks rolled into the center of town to enforce martial law.

  The government made no effort to cover up the extent of the disaster, with the official death toll standing at 12 dead and 125 seriously injured. A total of 73 bank branches had been gutted in addition to 22 shops; 4 hotels; the Institute of Technology; all major government buildings; 9 cinemas; and countless telephone booths, parking meters, and liquor stores. Tabriz’s banking system was devastated. The Central Bank of Iran evacuated all deposits from local banks as a safety precaution, and many branches reported the destruction of files and account books. “Banks and trading companies now face irreparable damage to their books,” a Tabrizi businessman told Kayhan. “This means the city’s economy is going to suffer, even though shops have reopened.” The extent of the unrest pointed to a social explosion fed by genuine social and political grievances. But the events of February 18 also suggested an unusual degree of planning and preparation. The crowds had been well armed and carefully selective in which businesses they attacked and which they spared. Government officials gathered evidence that proved the rioters had been equipped with “imported incendiary bombs.” Police also reported the arrests of several Lebanese and Libyans “who had passed through Palestinian training camps.” Even the dispersal of the main crowd into smaller groups suggested a degree of tactical coordination by men trained in the basics of crowd control. “The attacks seemed extraordinarily well planned,” recalled a foreigner in Tabriz at the time. “At one time a huge mob controlled all 7.5 miles from the university to the railroad station.”

  The Islamic underground had thrown down the gauntlet to the Shah. An attempt had been made to challenge political authority and collapse the economy of one of Iran’s most important municipalities, purge the city of Western influence, and intimidate secular Tabrizis into accepting Khomeini’s new religious order. They succeeded with stunning swiftness. “It is rare now to see a woman in Western dress,” reported a New York Times reporter who ventured into the city in the aftermath of the riots.

  Grand Ayatollah Khomeini issued a public statement applauding the “courageous and God-fearing” people of Tabriz “who with their great uprising have given a painful punch in the mouth to those babblers!” Referring to the Shah as “this wretch,” Khomeini pledged to “expunge every trace of this anti-Islamic regime that wishes to revive Zoroastrianism.… The slogan heard in every street and alley of every city and village is: ‘Death to the Shah!’”

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  NINE DAYS LATER, on Monday, February 27, the Shah addressed thousands of women gathered to attend the Grand Congress of Iranian Women at the giant Aryamehr indoor stadium. Flanked on either side by Queen Farah and Princess Ashraf, both passionate advocates for women’s rights, the Shah reassured the cheering delegates that he would not bow to pressure from religious extremists. The savagery of the attacks on young girls and women in Tabriz had caused widespread shock and alarm. “We shall continue with our liberalization policy because the fundamentals of
the state rest on it,” he declared. “But the unholy alliance of red and black forces continues to work toward dividing our population once again.”

  The Shah reminded his audience that until the advent of the Pahlavi Dynasty “little remained of Iran except in name; there was no one to stand up to foreign tyranny. In such an environment women were considered insane by the society.” He made specific reference to the assault four months earlier on the student cafeteria at the University of Tehran. “Does freedom mean that some people in the universities should say women are not allowed to use the self-service facilities?” he asked. “Apartheid is against Iranian policy, especially this apartheid, which is directed against a person of one’s own race.” He insisted that the recent wave of unrest, far from exposing weaknesses in the regime, represented “the death pangs” of fanatics on the left and right who acted out of a sense of frustration born of failure. The Shah wrapped up his remarks with an old Persian saying that brought the crowd to its feet. “The caravan passes and the dog barks!” he cried. He wanted there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he intended to move forward with his reforms and pay no heed to his critics.

  The Shah’s confidence was informed by decades of past experience. Fifteen years earlier his most trusted advisers had urged him not to proceed with the White Revolution, arguing that Iranian society was not ready for land reform and women’s emancipation. He had overruled them anyway and in so doing built the foundations for middle-class prosperity and created the moderate center in Iranian politics. He was not about to start listening to the naysayers now. He believed that the unrest in Qom and Tabriz served at least two useful purposes. First, the riots were a classic case of “letting off steam.” Social unrest was to be expected as restrictions were loosened after so many years of rule from the top down. Second, the carnage showed Iranians the choice they faced between chaos and order. Eight weeks earlier, the Shah had explained to Amir Taheri, the editor of Kayhan, that the Iranian people would soon have to choose between two competing visions of the future, between their King with his jet-age vision and a bearded fanatic with a seventh-century mind-set. He never doubted their final decision. He, not Khomeini, held the farr. He, not Khomeini, had dedicated his life to modernizing the country and restoring it to the level of an international power. No sane person would ever choose that to this. As if to show his people that he would not be provoked into a crackdown, the day after his speech at the Aryamehr stadium the Shah recalled the governor of Eastern Azerbaijan Province and appointed the most moderate of three candidates. He sacked senior police commanders in Tabriz and ordered an inquiry into the origins of the unrest. Newspapers and members of parliament were encouraged to criticize the decision to close the doors of the Masjed-e-Jomeh Mosque and to use live rounds against demonstrators. Several hundred rioters were tried in civilian courts, charged with minor offenses, and then released back onto the streets.

  The Shah’s handling of dissent was applauded in foreign capitals as convincing proof that the maestro of Persian politics knew exactly which corrective measures were required to defuse tensions. “I am not going to change my policy of liberalizing to the maximum,” the Shah told the Washington Post in early March. “Yes, you can say that this [violence] is related completely to this liberalization program, but this is the price we have got to pay.” At the same time, he described opposition groups as “obviously illegal” and warned, “obviously, we will not let [violence] get out of hand.” But he downplayed the possibility of more serious unrest. “If I have to defend my country, I could be the toughest guy, but when it is not necessary why should I be? I think we are strong enough, the basis of our society and state are strong enough to allow at least this limit and even more.” He expressed disappointment that Savak had failed “to uncover plans for the demonstrations which degenerated into a violent rampage in Tabriz.” But he was confident that he knew what his opponents were up to. “We are not babies, we know what contacts they have with all the foreign correspondents here. We know when they go to Qom. We know they try to excite the clergy.” The Post’s conclusions reflected the assessment of most foreign observers that the Shah had matters firmly in hand.

  The autocratic 58-year-old Shah’s new tactics not only have reduced tensions caused by the Tabriz events but also are thought by analysts to stand a good chance of limiting damage to the government’s prestige, which he has worked so tirelessly to promote.… The Shah is credited with understanding the traditional Muslim leadership’s latest disruptive power in this fundamentally religious country and its potential ability to channel discontent arising from an exodus from rural areas, scarce and expensive urban housing, inflation and other ills.

  The Shah was satisfied that liberalization and the open space met middle-class demands for reform. But he underestimated the extent to which televised images of burned-out cars, smashed windows, and torched banks shook public confidence in his ability to protect their interests. They questioned his belief that the violence signaled the “death pangs” of extremism. What if liberalization actually fed the unrest? Tabriz had also shown that the security forces were capable of losing control of a major urban center. For the past six months middle-class Iranians had comforted themselves with tall tales and conspiracy theories that the Shah was orchestrating unrest as part of a diabolical plan to justify an army crackdown; Tabriz raised the even more chilling prospect that power was slipping from his hands. Now the same liberals who only a few weeks earlier had complained about the lack of democracy clamored for law and order.

  The unsettled mood on the streets of Tehran was heightened by the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, Mehdi Pournik, the nine-year-old son of a wealthy Tehran businessman, snatched on his way home from school. Violent crimes involving children were a rarity in Iran and the brutality of this one struck terror in the hearts of parents, who began walking their children to and from school each day. “Those with younger children are especially worried,” reported Kayhan. “Almost every child in Tehran has by now heard the warning: do not talk to strangers and do not under any circumstances accept offers of rides from anyone.” The crime, motivated by greed and avarice, was seen as yet another curse of modernization and a sign of innocence lost. The sour public mood was aptly summed up by Googoosh, the country’s most celebrated female singer, actress, and femme fatale, whose rags-to-riches success story made her a middle-class heroine. In March 1978 Googoosh’s new movie During the Night opened to packed houses and told the story of “a young couple who fall in love but are finally forced to succumb to the conventions of traditional society.” The film suggested that the personal freedoms of the Pahlavi era were illusions and that no one, not even the most beautiful star-crossed lovers, could outrun their fate and that in the end, rather than struggle and make their own way in the world, young Iranians would submit to tradition, history, and religion. In her promotional appearances Googoosh sounded exhausted, brittle, and disillusioned with the phenomenal success that had brought her fame and fortune. “If only I could have a simple, normal life,” she said with a sigh. “I’d be quite happy to do without a big house, travel and the money. But somehow, the ‘devil you know’ keeps its grip on my life and I stay.” She freely admitted singing commercial songs that meant nothing to her but everything to the “leeches” who surrounded her.

  The malaise did not stop middle-class Tehranis from planning their annual spring vacations in Europe and North America. London had recently fallen out of favor with northern Tehran’s bright young things. “But I am pretty certain I shall not be visiting London this year, but seek new places in Europe,” remarked a young government employee on a quest to find the perfect pair of panties. “At any rate, I only buy most of my underwear from London since the city lacks highly fashionable clothing and shoes. Most of the underwear I usually buy in London is now sold at various stores in Iran and at prices pretty much the same as those sold in London.” Another young Iranian, an engineer, complained how terribly difficult it was to obtain decent
theater tickets in London “since foreign tourists, particularly from the oil producing countries, crowded the theaters and lengthy queues formed.” He said he visited the West End now only “on condition that my friends can reserve seats in cinemas and theaters well in advance.” He added that he felt sorry for “the ordinary Britons who had to suffer and compromise for the sake of more income for the government.”

  The young Iranian’s striking lack of self-awareness—he seemed not to realize that he was a foreign tourist from an oil-producing country—would have been laughable but for the fact that the Shah expected the new middle class to defend the gains of the White Revolution from the likes of religious extremists trying to overthrow the state.

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  AROUND THE COUNTRY, hundreds of thousands of cars, buses, and trucks set out on the eve of the Nowruz spring holidays with traffic jams starting at four in the afternoon in southern Tehran and lasting well into the evening. In the back streets of the southern suburbs, soothsayers pulled out their astrological almanacs. For Iranians, too, the Year of the Snake had changed to the Year of the Horse. “Hang in there,” advised one astrologer, “it will not all be smooth sailing. It will be a year of variable weather and sometimes cloudy skies. All the people who bought studded snow tires and chains for the slopes of upper Tehran and the mountain passes, and had no opportunity to use them last year, will have their full share of hazards and landslides.”

  Merchants relied on the Nowruz holiday to boost their retail earnings for the year. But March 1978 was one of the worst seasons on record with the popular shopping districts of Kouche Berlin, Valihad Circle, Lalezar, and Naderi Avenue reporting “no increase in sales.” The Tehran bazaar was full of new products but few shoppers. Travel, however, was a different story, with the national passport office reporting “its busiest period so far, dealing with a greater number of requests for exit every day.” An estimated twenty thousand Iranians planned to travel abroad. At home, families appeared to be making an extra effort to get together. The authorities in Shiraz reported that all two hundred thousand hotel rooms were booked up, while Isfahan expected a full holiday season and warned visitors they risked fines if they pitched tents in public spaces. Otherwise, life in the capital continued as normal. Audiences at the Rudaki Hall thrilled to performances by the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the Leningrad Ballet, and Swedish opera diva Birgit Nilsson. The trial was under way of Maryam, a love-struck fan who threw acid in the face of pop singer Darioush in the middle of a concert. Broadway star Pearl Bailey arrived to perform two concerts in aid of Queen Farah’s National Leprosy Fund. Now on her third visit to Iran, Bailey was warmly received at Niavaran by the Queen and Crown Prince Reza. “I am always moved by the warm response and hospitality of Iranians,” the singer and actress told reporters. Downtown, Sullivan’s embassy announced plans to build a large new facility to handle the escalating volume of visa applications to enter the United States.