IRAN: FROM THE SHAH'S DICTATORSHIP TO KHOMEINI'S DEMAGOGIC THEOCRACY
Arani, Sharif
"Not the 'republic of Iran,' nor the `democratic republic of Iran,' nor tilt 'democratic Islamic republic of Iran,' just tht `Islamic Republic of Iran,' the Ayatollal Khomeini told the nation...
...The upsurge of the literate public's interest in Islam was reflected in a dramatic rise in the number of religious publications...
...On November 4, nine students were killed in Teheran in a clash with the army...
...The contrast between the monotheistic Islamic order and the Shah's tyrannical regime was buttressed by sharply antithetical shibboleths whose crux was the emotive Koranic term taqut, a term denoting tyrannical earthly power arrogating to itself the absolute authority over the lives of men that is God's alone...
...In consistently following his policy of divide and rule, the Shah had succeeded in atomizing the middle classes to a far greater extent than was the case with the Bazaar and the related lower-middle class of retailers...
...Yes, it was the lack of initiative by the laity that permitted the takeover by the clergy...
...One may or may not take exception to the language, but the fundamental fact remains that the decisive person to withdraw his commitment to the state was the Shah 17 himself...
...By contrast, the Mullahs' domination over the masses of the Disinherited seems more firmly established than ever before...
...The Kurds made the same grave error as that committed by the middle-class intelligentsia: they underestimated Khomeini...
...In contrast to this group, however, a number of Islamic radicals, and probably an increasing number since the frontal attack of the Mullahs on the Mujahideen, have been gravitating toward the secular leftists...
...Everyone who mattered in Iran knew the Americans were dumping the Shah...
...But it is not at all clear that they intend to be flexible...
...Enter, after the revolution, Dr...
...With greater flexibility than they hitherto have shown, the Mullahs might co-opt the dedicated Islamic radicals...
...Let me make it clear that what is said applies equally to a totally disoriented and disorganized array of middle-class-based groups of intellectuals, including the Tudeh party and factionalized, leftist elements...
...Being totally unprepared, they demurred...
...In his inaugural message to the "Council of Constitutional Experts" Khomeini told his hand-picked Mullahs that he expected them to create "a 100 percent Islamic constitution...
...What about the younger generation...
...There were instances of desertion, the killing of 12 officers by 3 rebellious soldiers of the Imperial Guard, a mutiny in Tabriz in December, and a number of other minor incidents...
...Some 50 provincial towns witnessed similiar insurrections...
...December 3, 1979 26...
...The coalition of the Bazaar and the religious establishment and the organizational potential of the nascent 13 religious associations would have been impotent, as that coalition had been time and again over the past two decades, had it not been for the discontent of the Disinherited and the young, once that discontent was successfully tapped...
...But the military government failed to bring a solution to the crisis...
...More critical for the fate of the monarchy was the withdrawal of support by the middle and lower layers of the middle class, and of the 15 workers in the oil industry...
...Meanwhile, open support for Khomeini was being shown by the rank and file...
...The J-curve [of continuously rising expectations and sudden frustration]" the curvilinearly minded sociologist of revolution might exclaim...
...In addition, the Baluchis need to be mentioned...
...but none envisaged an abrupt end to the monarchy...
...The Bazaar has consistently opposed the monarchy in the postwar period...
...The more sycophantically the middle-class 11,f, I ; t r. 1 fort;,-”, Nationalism • With this issue, Dissent begins a series of articles on a major political-social problem of our time—the rise, or resurgence, of nationalism...
...Until August, the National Front, the Leftist Fedayeen, the Islamic Mujahideen, and, finally, the Tudeh (Communist) party, outdoing all others in servility, patiently continued to receive insults according to the degree of their opportunistic miscalculation, their thirst for humiliation, or the magnitude of their dashed hopes...
...The question Hobbes asked himself about Charles I of England is all the more puzzling as regards the Shah, who had not only a much greater quantity of ammunition and many more soldiers than Charles, but also all the money in the world with which to pay them...
...The answer is as follows: the Shah miscarried because he refused to use the army effectively to repress the revolutionary movement—hoping, in vain, to quell the mounting popular rage by the threat or semblance of its use...
...Though Khomeini's notion of the sovereignty of the religious jurists is almost diametrically opposed to Shari'ati's notion of a clergyless and egalitarian social order, to be born of an Islamic reformation, many Islamic radicals— especially those continuing their studies in such hated imperialist countries as the United States—remain satisifed with the charitable patriarchal measures taken by the Mullahs under Khomeini's orders to improve the social welfare of the Disinherited...
...By mid-August, the turbaned rulers felt secure enough to attack not only the "godless and atheistic" Fedayeen, but also the God-fearing and Islamic Mujahideen whose Islam, alas, was contaminated by modern radical political ideologies...
...Third, there is the group whose support crucially contributed to the success of the revolutionary movement, the young Islamic radicals: the Mujahideen and other radical followers of the late Shari'ati, whose Islamic modernism is now looked upon with great disapproval by the turbaned "Proofs of Islam...
...In the second half of July, three members of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council were appointed deputy ministers, augmenting the number of turbaned commissars in the high offices of the state...
...The Islamic reform movement gathered momentum in the '70s, and its chief method of communication—regular public gatherings— was soon imitated by a large number of "religious associations," some of them with strictly traditional rather than reformist intent...
...Second, there are the people who make up the active core of Khomeini's supporters and who dominate the "revolutionary" structure of power, with their younger members active in the armed Guardians of the Islamic Revolution...
...The employment prospects and the sense of relative deprivation for the one group and the atrocious living conditions in the shantytowns for the other provided ample grounds for dissatisfaction...
...Bakhtiar, whose outlook if not his courage is shared by a large section of Iran's educated middle class, would still consider it appropriate to remark that—unlike Lenin, Hitler, Nasser, and Castro—Khomeini did not know where he was leading the nation...
...Thus, the presumed juristic competence of the turbaned clerics, though making them the privileged stratum of the Islamic theocracy, has so far remained dormant even in the rare cases where its existence could be plausibly suspected...
...On December 7, Carter stated that he liked the Shah personally but that it was up to the Iranian people to make up their minds about him...
...Foruhar, the other National Front man who had turned up in France to pay his homage to Khomeini and had been rewarded with the portfolio of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, had been deprived of his portfolio despite agreeably resigning from the National Front...
...In August came the serious riots of Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Ahwaz, and Teheran—with banks, restaurants and cinemas being burned...
...The inglorious haute bourgeoisie followed its money...
...because he 10 was the deputy of the Prophet...
...More serious still, Bazargan subscribed to the erronious view that Khomeini's actions were erratic and impulsive, lacking an overall design and a long-term objective...
...The Imperial personage was the only entity that was giving focus to the anomic malaise and frustration of the middle class, thus integrating its members into an otherwise inchoate political movement...
...Furthermore, they similarly displayed a general lack of political acumen, their most serious miscalculation being their hope for support from the late Ayatollah Taleqani, and from the liberal and leftist parties...
...nor could they be credited with a single social or economic reform...
...But is this diverse middle-class group capable of concerted action...
...They simply seized the opportunity offered by history to fill the vacuum left by us...
...but the political importance of this point should not be exaggerated...
...During his trial, General Rabi'i, the last Commander of the Imperial Air Force, related his disillusionment when the American General Huyser came to Iran, took the Shah by the tail and threw him into exile like a rat...
...On the extent of clerical involvement in government, not all of them agree with Khomeini's views in detail, but it is hard to envision active opposition to his policies on their part...
...Yet it is impossible to understand the one phenomenon without the other...
...Once again, fearing the wrath of the populace, they self-deceivingly rationalized their lack of preparation and courage as a heroic refusal to compromise, seeking additional solace in utopian revolutionary faith, and in the wishful thought that they would get the better of the Mullahs after the revolution...
...In January 1979, when the U.S...
...On the night of February 10 1979, one police station after another fel according to the following pattern: saturatiot of the surrounding area by the populace am well executed attacks by the guerrilla units...
...A massive flight of capital preceded the Shah's departure in early December...
...Khomeini's problem, Bazargan maintained, stemmed from the fact that he had never been a factory manager or a general...
...In fact, the Disinherited have repeatedly demonstrated their susceptibility to appeals by the more extremist Mullahs, such as the rabid Proof of Islam Khalkhali, by generating fasces of "Islamic Falangists" to intimidate and silence the seditious enemies of Islam...
...Meanwhile Beheshti and Kani, the other two members of Teheran's turbaned triumvirate, tightened their hold on the reins of power through the Islamic Republican party and the Revolutionary Committees...
...Their backs to the wall, and under heavy pressure from their persecuted and politicized theology students, the religious leaders' simmering opposition to the Shah's regime became increasingly vociferous...
...With the religious party's agitation firmly under way, the bourgeoisie and then the workers acquiesced in the demise of the monarchy...
...Two years of political turmoil is perhaps too short a time for an atomized class to organize itself...
...The mammoth edifice of the state became hollow...
...Their control of the state and of the remnants of its armed forces remains highly imperfect...
...In 1976, production remained stagnant or declined in all sectors of the economy except construction...
...But by and large the strain of confrontation with the people, and the opposition's attempts to fraternize with the soldiers, did not affect their morale and discipline until after the Shah's departure...
...The Shah stated in an interview from exile that he watched the top officials of his state run away like rats...
...The political acumen the Shah had shown in the '60s gave way to megalomaniacal daydreams of international prominence and regional superiority...
...These attacks were intensified in the '70s, and were coupled with attempts to make inroads into the religious sphere proper by creating a "Religion Corps" (modeled after the "Literacy Corps"), and a group of "Propagators of Religion...
...Some were seriously debating whether or not Khomeini was the Mandi (savior) or merely his precursor...
...The Tabriz demonstrations of February 18-19, in which some 40,000 persons took part, were of particular importance as they set the pattern for the violent demonstrations of the following fall with the burning of movie houses and banks...
...sent General Robert Huyser to Iran, his mission was to expedite the Shah's departure and to prevent a coup d'etat...
...but so what...
...The link between the two is ,upplied by Khomeini's direct reliance on the nasses until the dismantling of numerous nodern institutions allows for the creation of L true theocracy...
...This, alas, was but a wishful thought on the part of this representative of the educated middle classes, which by the end of the summer would unmistakably be identified as the losers...
...11 In 1978, this coalition against the monarch was reconstituted with fateful consequences...
...His educated audience pretended—or needed to pretend— that he was not serious...
...When the violence of 1977-78 became a nationwide epidemic in September 1978, the Grand Ayatollahs of Qum were the only opposition leaders to emerge as the spokesmen for the nation...
...In speech after speech, Khomeini has denounced the middle-class intellectuals as traitors and followers of Satan, while his Mullahs have been suppressing the press and other media by means 22 of which corruption is spread and the cultural enslavement to the West brought about...
...Whether or not the Second Coming of the Shi'ites' Lord of Time, the Hidden Imam, is at hand, the contemplation of Khomeini's demagogic rule on His behalf over a society on the verge of total chaos makes it distressingly clear that, indeed, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity...
...Then their discontent found a specific point of reference with the meteoric emergence of Khomeini as leader of the opposition to the Shah...
...It would hardly be an exaggeration to present the history of the social movements in modern Iran as instances of coalition between the religious elite and the merchants and craftsmen of the bazaars...
...The Shah's bowing to the American pressure on the issue of Human Rights and his promises of liberalization did create a good deal of expectation among lawyers, university professors, intellectuals, and artists...
...At any rate, it was obvious they would not lift a finger to save the regime when the crunch came...
...Slowdowns also paralyzed many of the none too vigorous government agencies and ministries...
...Nor were its negative politics: the refusal to go beyond the denunciation of oppressive rule, which had come to an end anyway, and the irresponsible intransigent posturing of the middle-class politicians whose immediate interest appeared to be served not by solving any of the concrete problems but by inflammatory rhetoric palatable to the outraged populace...
...In 1974, there were 12,300 religious associations in Teheran alone, mostly formed after 1965, of which over 1,800 had formal titles...
...On behalf o the nation, his Prime Minister Bazargan hac prostrated himself before Khomeini, the Imam, the Supreme Leader of the Revolu , tion: Islam was not to be denigrated by tilt adjective "democratic...
...Nevertheless, in their take-over of the state, Khomeini's clerics may well have overextended themselves while having had to agree to appreciable restrictions on their routine interference in affairs of the state...
...Late in May '79 prefacing what he considered his moss important speech since the February revolu...
...In the latter part of the '70s, with the massive influx of foreign civil and paramilitary technicians and the massive avalanche of European and American products, the antithetical opposition between religious authority and impious political power was amplified by Khomeini's personification of Iran's traditional identity as against the Shah's symbolization of the culture of imperialist worldly powers...
...3) the radical Islamic activists among the intelligentsia who advocated the reform of Islam...
...The army generals met in th , morning and drafted a declaration of neutrality, whirl was read out over the radio at 2PM, shortly before th , radio station was captured...
...to demolish the secularized judiciary system that, despite all its imperfections, constitutes arguably the greatest institutional achievement of the generation of Westernized intellectuals of the 1920s and '30s...
...Above all, ruling a country of 35 million people with 24 sizable rebellious ethnic minorities and massive unemployment is no easy task, even with a resplendent government treasury and with 10,000 zealous, armed Guardians of the Islamic Revolution...
...While the Shah was still in Iran, Huyser advised the Iranian army commanders to establish a dialogue with Khomeini's representatives...
...These religious associations and their organizers, together with the Islamic societies of the universities, provided the network and personnel for the mass mobilization of September '78-February '79...
...Both before and after the revolution, he had, with utmost clarity, stated his twin aims: the establishment of an Islamic theocracy, and the complete eradication of Occidentalism, or Western cultural influence that, according to him, had ravaged Iran for nearly a century...
...Toward the end of October, the oil workers joined the movement by striking and paralyzed the economy...
...The circumstances surrounding the referendum for the new constitution, however, reveal as much about the true political nature of Khomeini's regime as do the constitutional clauses that formally define it as a theocracy...
...He has used every bit of his tremendous influence upon the Disinherited to denigrate the intellectuals, the journalists, writers, and lawyers, as "corrupt" renegades who have betrayed Islam to ape the Westerners' ways of thinking and acting...
...However fantastic his program must have sounded to Westernized ears within or outside Iran, Khomeini knew full well, and had repeatedly said, where he was leading the nation...
...It sponsored public debates and publications on the social and political aspects of Islam...
...A friend told me how a group of professors at the University of Teheran decided to form a society for freedom of speech in November '78...
...The modernization of the Iranian state under the Pahlavis since the 1920s had entailed a very drastic curtailment of the power of the religious leaders...
...Islamic government was conceived as a utopia modeled after the four-year reign of the first Shi'ite Imam, Ali...
...The one discernible economic policy of the Islamic Provisional Government has been to allot a very large proportion of the massive oil revenue to food imports, thus taking care to feed the Disinherited...
...To explain how the call to Islam changed from an idiom of protest to an instrument of clerical domination, we must begin with a look at the revolution of February 1979...
...According to the theocratic constitution, Khomeini's extensive powers as the supreme leader of Iran derive from his competence as the authoritative interpreter of the Sacred Law...
...With the formal passage of the constitution, Khomeini has succeeded in creating the first Shi'ite theocracy in history during the first month of the fifteenth century of the Islamic era...
...The discrepancy between theory and practice, so tellingly exposed in Khomeini's action at such a crucial time, is equally observable in the case of the lesser clerics and points to the reality of demagogy and clerical fascism behind the facade of theocracy...
...Furthermore, most of the large private ,ndustrial concerns were abandoned by their 3wners before, during, or after the revolution, und now have been nationalized...
...Already in June '78, the Shah had disappeared from the public eye...
...It assured, perfectly in accord with Khomeini's design, the smooth passage of Iran's theocratic constitution in the referendum of December 2-3, which makes him, de jure, the ruler of Iran on behalf of the Hidden Imam.* Shortly before his fall, in a remarkable interview with Oriana Fallaci (New York Times Magazine, October 28, 1979), Bazargan stated: something unforeseen and unforeseeable happened after the revolution...
...Wild rumors on the number of martyrs and the tremendous echoing effects of the media notwithstanding, I wager that the number of persons killed between October 1, 1978 and January 15, '79—around 1,000—was no larger than the number of persons killed or unaccountably missing during a comparable period in, say, '75-'76...
...Not the 'republic of Iran,' nor the `democratic republic of Iran,' nor tilt 'democratic Islamic republic of Iran,' just tht `Islamic Republic of Iran,' the Ayatollal Khomeini told the nation imperiously before the referendum of March 1979...
...However, by far the most interesting and, as it turned out, momentous feature of Islam's entry into the public sphere during the decade preceding the revolution was the astonishing growth of the "religious associations," which met mostly during the religious months of Muharram and Ramadan but occasionally also at other times...
...Yet, the demise of his regime was only a matter of time...
...While the religious party had no difficulty in assimilating the tone and rhetoric of revolutionary politics, the scattered, unorganized, and disoriented secular opponents of the Shah were dumb...
...You will find several discussions of this subject in the current issue...
...LET US REVISIT Khomeini's supporters six months after the February '79 revolution...
...At the same time, Khomeini trengthened a parallel structure of power in he revolutionary tribunals, and in the 20 numerous revolutionary committees and local units born in the wake of the revolution, whose apex was the Revolutionary Council...
...Proof of Islam" is a literal translation of Hujjat al-Islam, one of the honorific title of Shi'ite clerics...
...Catering to the basic necessities of the recipients of the oil revenue distributed by the state, and benefiting from the ban on luxury imports, they may well be flourishing...
...Rat" seems to be the telling word...
...Meanwhile, after the Black Friday massacre, the Shah himself muffled the army, to the outrage of the hard-liners among the generals...
...FOUR DISTINCT GROUPS stand out among the religious revolutionaries: (1) the religious elite that quickly assumed leadership of the revolutionary movement...
...The parallel (clerical) structure of power generated by the revolution and kept in existence side by side with the state showed continuous signs of vigor for the five months following the February revolution, while their amorphousness was somewhat reduced...
...The relative vigor of these activities, and the relaxation of the repression by the Savak (the Shah's secret police), can be directly traced to Carter's Human Rights pronouncement on Iran early in 1977...
...Meanwhile, Sanjabi, the leader of the National Front, had capitulated to Khomeini...
...The Shah had painstakingly restructured the state machine around his person...
...The Grand Ayatollah was asked to comment on the rumors that groups of deviators from Islam were supporting him...
...The sense of impunit . resulting from the split in the armed force, emboldened the populace, releasing it political will and energy without, however, specific direction...
...More insidiously still, and of far greater long-term consequences if they succeed, are the designs to desecularize Iran's judiciary...
...In fact, however, Khomeini's massive power rests on his position not as the foremost religious jurist but as Iran's unrivaled demagogue...
...Both groups were products of Iran's modernizations: the one created by the expansion of education, the other by industrialization and excessively rapid urbanization against the background of a stagnant and then declining agriculture...
...In my judgment, with more determination and alertness, or with better luck, the Shah could have survived the crisis of '78-'79...
...tion with "0 God, witness that I gave you, message," Khomeini reaffirmed that Iran wa...
...Nevertheless, by fall the situation was no longer as fluid as it was in March or July, and the trend I have tried to depict had become unmistakably predominant...
...From January 8, 1978 onward and at 40-day intervals, a number of demonstrations led by Mullahs and theology students, to which university students and irregularly employed bystanders readily flocked, took place in Qum, Tabriz, and Teheran...
...While the intelligentsia and middle-class liberals wishfully continued to support him, Khomeini, in the consistent pursuit of his twin aims, dealt with them pitilessly and with utmost disdain...
...As one would expect, the Bazaar reaffirmed its coalition with the religious elite in opposition to the Shah, and it gave crucial financial support to those striking in the private sector, especially to the journalists whose strike in October activated the general wave...
...On November 5, the decisive day of Teheran's worst riot, the army was present in the streets but, on the Shah's orders, did not shoot or otherwise intervene...
...It was the conspicuous presence of the Shah as the embodiment of impious earthly power, setting itself up against God's majesty, that permitted this unambiguously politicized interpretation of Islam...
...The answer depends on the actions of the other social groups, and the capabilities of the Islamic party...
...Immediately after the ebruary revolution,the Grand Ayatollah ;ntrusted the paralzyed state to Bazargan and ns team, who in the past had shared the ;eneral middle-class outlook but had disinguished themselves as good Muslims by tiscussing Islam rather than decadent Western culture in their clubs while studying Lbroad...
...The Shah's massive purchases of sophisticated weaponry brought a large number of highly paid American paramilitary technicians to the country, while his capital-intensive growth strategy pulled in a large number of foreign skilled technicians, chiefly Europeans, some of whom received higher salaries than their Iranian counterparts...
...Sabbaghian and Chamran are the only two laymen who have shown determination in government...
...These aims determine the twin policies he has followed since February: the increasing enhancement of clerical domination, and a Kulturkampf against the Westernized middle classes...
...Through this network the cassettes and directives of Khomeini and other religious leaders were distributed...
...The troups enforcing martial law fired on religious demonstrators as they were leaving a mosque killing between 200 (the government's figure) and 4,00C (opposition's figure) people...
...Ibrahim Yazdi, Khomeini's foreign minister until November '79, was formerly a medical researcher at Baylor University in Texas and the organizer of Islamic associations in the U.S...
...After occupying the highest offices of the state for over six months, these physicians and engineers had not given the slightest indication of self-assertion against the Mullahs...
...This number is unlikely to increase in the foreseeable future...
...The axis of the Iranian economy shifted from production to distribution (of the oil revenue), and economically unproductive activities mushroomed...
...What happened was that the clergy supplanted us and succeeded in taking over the *The Shi'ites believe that their Twelfth Imam, in "Occultation" since the year 874, is the living (Hidden) Imam of the Age "Irnam-e Zaman", and will reappear as the Mandi (Savior) at the End of Time to redeem the world...
...It was not so much the sudden frustration as the constant disorientation resulting from a decade of rapid change that finally—after a period in which the bourgeois nouveaux riches had sought to allay their insecurity by conspicuous consumption of the gaudiest kind—made the members of the middle class ask themselves the most philosophical of all questions: "who am I?" Furthermore, an important catalyst was at work to put the middle class into this philosophical frame of mind: resident foreigners...
...I interviewed some 30 of the highranking Mullahs, including four of the Grand Ayatollahs, mostly in the year preceding the revolution, and was startled by the remarkable identity of outlook and staunch traditionalism of these venerable old men...
...In fact, by decreeing large wage ncreases and forbidding the discharge of corkers, the Islamic government has succeed:Id in securing the acquiescence, if not the 'ervid loyalty, of the workers...
...What motivated the tenacious general strike of 1978-79, which lasted some five months and put an end to 25 centuries of monarchic rule in Iran, was a condensation of social and political reality in the "social myth" of "Islamic government...
...Signs of strain in the army came to the surface immediately after the Shah's departure...
...But the popular rage did not subside...
...On October 29, the Amol Commune sprung up in such a provincial town and lasted for 48 hours, with 16-yearolds forming their own police force...
...Casual observers must have been astounded by the behavior of Iran's sizable middle class, the class that could be expected to assume the nation's political leadership by virtue of its educational and economic resources...
...He appointed Sharif-Emami, whom, however, he apparently did not trust and would allow very little latitude in dealing with the crisis...
...So does the clerics' control of the press (they have had to allow some of the newspapers closed down in August to resume publication...
...How could casual observers comprehend the fact that this unprepared middle class could not think beyond the instant gratification of regicidal vengefulness and could not rise to the most elementary of the long-term political calculations...
...Bazargan's naive assessment of Khomeini seems just as mistaken as the earlier one by Bakhtiar...
...More fundamentally, neither will have an industrial working class to mobilize: despite un annual industrial growth rate of 15 percent between 1965 and 1975, according to the best available statistics the number of workers in industrial units employing over 10 persons foes not exceed 750,000 or about 7 percent of the total active labor force...
...Once the Shah had lost the will to fight, the state crumbled from within and out of its own momentum...
...Beyond that, the group does not speak a political language...
...They kissed his hand because he vas the deputy of the Holy Imams...
...Tears were streaming down her face because, as she explained to the French reporters covering the event, Khomeini was making her rediscover her "Iranianness...
...Some of the new programs, such as the desecularization of the judiciary, are likely to meet with obstinate resistance from the relatively vocal lawyers and judges...
...How could he then miscarry, having . . . so many trained soldiers . . . and the diverse magazines of ammunitions in places fortified...
...Many of them transferred their bank balances and, by the end of 1976, about 20,000 Iranians had bought houses in or near London, not to mention California...
...Exit, before the month is out, Shayegan into immediate oblivion, with a frustrated remark that the reactionary Mullahs should stick to their prayer rugs...
...The consolidation of a theocratic regime in a sizable country fully integrated into the world system appears so astonishing as to make us forget how surprising a phenomenon the revolution was that preceded it, both in its suddenness and in the rapid collapse of the monarchy...
...But such an ex post facto adjustment did not enable Teheran's professors, any more than the liberal or socialist intellectuals in general, to establish a grip on the popular avalanche that had gathered momentum under the direction of the religious party...
...The Shah, however, did not order the Savak to clamp down on the opposition...
...For these groups living mostly on fixed incomes, the massive inflow of oil revenue from 1975 onward meani more inflation than additional income...
...Thus was the mass of the Disinherited, novices to modern Iran's political society, forging an idiom of political protest from their religious mother tongue...
...Much of Khomeini's energy since February '79 has gone into his passionate Kulturkampf against the Westernized middle classes...
...Signals to this effect were transmitted from various quarters in late November and early December...
...In the short and the medium run, Khomeini has alienated the disinherited masses from the excommunicated liberal and leftist intellectuals...
...Of these other groups, by far the most important are the ethnic minorities who saw the revolution as the long-awaited opportunity to achieve regional autonomy...
...Foreign journalists and domestic daydreamers alike greatly exaggerate the significance of disagreements among the religious leaders...
...Nazih, the only member of this group to act with determination and integrity, had been contemptuously dismissed from his post as the director of the National Iranian Oil Company and summoned to trial for daring to criticize Khomeini in the mildest and most respectful terms, and for not displaying the requisite obsequiousness toward the Mullahs...
...This last group should be placed alongside the Disinherited as providing a massive reservoir of discontent set loose by the Islamic party's agitations...
...At the same time, he became increasingly reliant on the repressive branches of the state, especially the Savak, while failing to build a solid social power base where he could, notably among the prosperous peasantry...
...Our sociologist may also be alarmed by both the sheer size of this group and the security of its base...
...Regardless of their efficiency in reducing illiteracy, the political consequences of the penetration of these young graduates into the torpid rural and semi-rural periphery of Iranian society were momentous...
...First, we see the Islamic parlor modernists he placed in the visible offices of the state as those who absorb the blame and who are by now widely accused in Iran of a variety of delicts ranging from utter incompetence to being CIA agents...
...Meanwhile, the Shah's chief ally abroad, the United States, was abandoning him...
...Ali Shayegan, another senile politician of the Mosaddeq period, immediately acclaimed as the first prospective president of the Iranian republic...
...The Bazaar and the traditional sector of the economy have not suffered much from the postrevolutionary disruptions...
...and (4) the mass of vagrant workers, recent migrants from rural areas (a lumpenproletariat that inhabits the slums and shantytowns around the cities), who, since the revolution, have acquired a specific designation as the "Disinherited...
...Khomeini suddenly was seen as the embodiment of Iranian tradition, totally uncontaminated by that strange condition of cultural alienation that so devastatingly afflicted the Westernized bourgeoisie...
...If, instead of being distracted, we had behaved like a party then this mess wouldn't have occurred...
...Like so much else, the significance o1 Khomeini's insistence on the categorica exclusion of any reference to democracy way still lost on Iran's timorous middle classes, especially on its illusion-prone intelligentsia, which—as students, bank clerks, government functionaries, and junior army or air force officers —was still heady with the unprecedented freedom of expression and engrossed in a prodigious torrent of discussions...
...eluding those in commerce and industry August thus came to a close with the consolidation of the clerical hegemony . setting the stage for the attainment, it September, of the destiny Khomeini had chosen for Iran in his Sovereignty of the Religious Jurists (as the interpreter of the Sacred Law...
...It contains the same rigid juxtaposition between absolutist political power and God-ordained religious authority depicted in so many other current slogans: the Pharaoh versus Moses, the Prophet of God...
...The sudden increase in the price of oil 14 generated a boom for the following three years while seriously distorting the path of economic development...
...The dichotomy could be neatly compounded and became doubly effective...
...As Durkheim pointed out in his classic study of suicide, "crises of prosperity" generate disorientation and anomie by disturbing the collective order...
...While the Imam lives, the turbaned ruling class may rely on the disinherited masses without fear of competition from the excommunicated left...
...A day later on August 25, he resumed his fulmination...
...The official establishment of theocracy in those first days of December '79 has sealed the fate of the Iranian revolution, or at least of its first phase...
...Psychological insecurity usually underlies the politics of identity, and Iran's parvenu middle class was no exception...
...Real estate prices ark construction costs soared similarly...
...On February 6, the pledge of loyalty to the Shah was omitted from the oath administered to the cadets of Teheran's military academy at their graduation ceremony...
...The tw( guerrilla groups ideologically committed t( revolutionary armed struggle, the leftis Fedayeen and the Islamic radical Mujahi deen, joined the defenders of the mutinous Ai Force barracks...
...If nothing else, we may safely assume that the feminist lady's nose is by now close enough to the mud for her to be cured of this nostalgia...
...Rather, it is fluent in the prepolitical—or suprapolitical, as some would have it—religious idiom of which the Imam is the undisputed oracle...
...In those last years of the Shah's reign, the cultural (religious-national) identity mystique— as a force that could crystallize the middle class's sense of disorientation into a definite political attitude—was at best secondary to the palpable presence of the Shah, even in the remotest corners of his realm...
...Early in th afternoon of Sunday, February 11, Ayatollah Mofattah speaking for Khomeini, reiterated the statement, addin, that no order for Holy War but only for preparation hal been issued by the Imam...
...Meanwhile, the American government would obligingly continue to rouse the populace to fury by their public statements of support...
...In fact, to achieve these ends at the very time of his sanctification as the supreme Shi'ite religious jurist, the Grand Ayatollah recklessly exploited the taking of American hostages in total disregard of the dusty provisions of Sacred Law regarding the immunity of diplomatic envoys...
...They must have been very pleased when the Shah brought in the military government of General Azhari, thus giving them a breathing space and allowing them to hide their lack of preparation and complete bankruptcy as regards a political program...
...The intellectuals had been kept under close surveillance by the Savak...
...The dialogue between Bazargan and Chief of Staff General Qarabaghi continued while scores of retired or purged officers were declaring their willingness to serve under Khomeini...
...That direction was supplier by the Mujahideen and the Fedayeen...
...When I was in Iran last July and August, I was astonished at the utter lack of any moral commitment to the Shah's regime among those who had a stake in it: the top civil servants and the well-to-do entrepreneurs...
...In September 1978, Khomeini still was relatively inconspicuous in his residence in Iraq and, at the Shah's instigation, had not been pushed into the limelight by the Iraqi government...
...One could even maintain that in a fundamental way the Shah had been digging his own grave for nearly two decades...
...The rents in the major cities increased by over 10( percent annually...
...The coalition between the "Bazaar" and the religious establishment could bear fruit only by drawing on undercurrents of popular rage...
...With their moral indignation over the corruption of the sinful modern world satisfied by the atavistic forms of punishment summarily administered by the Mullahs, many of the Islamic radicals tend to collate, indiscriminately, Shari'ati's vision of a reformed Islamic order and the rigidly traditionalist world view of the Shi'ite clergy...
...The religious leaders, especially Khomeini, perceived the creation of these entities as the culmination of government repression...
...On Saturda), February 10, while condemning the attack on the Ai Force barracks as unbearable savagery, Khomeir affirmed that he would still like to finish the matter in "peaceful and legal [a word rarely encountered in th Grand Ayatollah's vocabulary] way...
...IT IS NOW TIME to turn to the most important pillar of the state, the one on which the survival of the regime most crucially depended: the army...
...In that respect, all the political parties .. . went to sleep after the revolution...
...He incurred the odium of bringing in a military government but installed one headed by an ineffectual parlor general, Azhari, who soon earned himself the rhyming 18 sobriquet "the Diarrhea-ridden" and, in December, physically broke down in his conciliatory bendings backward...
...Better still, consider the feminist, in one of the massive December demonstrations, who was chanting, "Death to Shah, Long Live Khomeini...
...I have no knowledge of this," was his reply...
...to remain an Islamic republic...
...Ibrahim Yazdi,* were replaced by the carefully recruited and untrained, and subsequently disciplined 10,000-strong Guardians of the Revolution under Qum-educated Ayatollah Lahuti...
...It was his enemies and erstwhile idolizers who chose not to notice...
...In his first press conference, Dr...
...others will follow in the Tv:a frau/ ice' me • 9 revolution, the more scornfully he pushed them aside...
...and so far the apparatus of the state has shown every indication that it will serve its new masters with as much docility and inefficiency as it has served its previous master...
...Last and by no means least, we have the advocates of "Islamic modernism," a movement for religious reform begun in the early '60s by a group of lay and clerical writers on Islam (including Prime Minister Bazargan), which reached a climax with the work of the late Ali Shari'ati...
...LET US BEGIN our analysis of the reaction of the middle class to the sudden explosion on the psychological level...
...By contrast to the first of that season's demonstrations the one of September 4, which the middle class could regard as the inauguration of Iran's Prague Spring, the victims of the massacre largely belonged to the religious party...
...This was reflected in the relatively small number of casualties for an upheaval of major proportions...
...Neither the servile Tudeh (Communist) party nor the persecuted Fedayeen developed or will be allowed to develop the requisite organizational capacity...
...revolution, for Iran possesses neither stronl *On February 4, 1979, a spokesman for Khomeini ha, said that the transfer of power could be carried out withi the framework of the 1906 constitution...
...The cadre of these religious associations, wearing green armbands, carried out the remarkable feat of organizing the massive marches, and of maintaining discipline during the largest demonstrations...
...In 1975, for instance, the Shah launched an "Anti-Profiteering campaign," and in its course over 7,000 merchants were arrested and fined...
...It is true that the renewed political activities of the writers and intellectuals—chiefly in the form of open letters addressed to the Shah and, later, in politicized poetry readings predated the crisis by at least a year...
...The other social group on whose potential reaction the continuation of clerical domination and totalitarian populism in part depends are the nontraditional middle classes...
...If the clerical regime in Iran is to collapse, its collapse will most probably be a result not of organized opposition but of ineptitude and internal dystrophy—as was, in the last analysis, the collapse of the regime of Shah...
...With the auge oil revenue at its disposal, the Islamic ;overnment will be at least as successful as as the Shah in quieting the industrial labor 'orce by granting it wages far in excess of its productivity...
...Once the crisis came, he could not veer the unwieldy apparatus of the state in a single direction...
...On August 27, Prime Minister Amuzegar resigned after complaining about the existence of "a government within the government," a remark taken to refer to the activities of the Savak's agents provocateurs and designed to persuade the Shah to reinstate repression by fanning the unrest...
...Iran plunged into the anarchy of the closing months of 1978...
...The Shah then did the most inept thing he could have done...
...Thus they readily accepted the religious party's portrayal of the Shah as the "Anti-Christ" and concomitantly took refuge in the comforting discovery of Khomeini as his messianic counterimage (and, we may add, the only available one...
...Throughout August, September, and October 1978, unrest rocked the hitherto stagnant peripheral towns...
...The army did act on Khomeini's order to crush the Kurds...
...True, in sheer numbers and military potential—the guerrillas have hidden arms caches, and the army, though in an advanced state of decomposition, commands a large number of young officers and huge amounts of ammunition—the nontraditional sections of the middle class match Khomeini's activists, if not the combination of his activist core and their support among the Disinherited...
...Totally oblivious to the fact that, as the champion of Shi'ite traditionalism in the 1940s, Khomeini delivered the most vehement attack on one of their cultural heroes, Shari'at Sangelaji—commentator on the Koran and the precursor of Shari'ati in Islamic modernism—they have chosen to remain loyal to Khomeini and have opted for his version of Islam without contamination by modern ideas...
...The purely economic grounds for dissatisfaction (a more drastic turn of the J curve as out social scientists would have it) were by nc means lacking, but these did not automatically generate political action...
...Once again, the Shah begged the representatives of the middle class to take over...
...Severe bottlenecks created by the shortage of skilled manpower and the inadequacy of the infrastructure halted the process of economic growth...
...The Shah thus kept the middle class divided and emasculated...
...In return, this latter group has faithfully learned that the problems afflicting Iran have been, are, and will be the result of plots by Imperialists and Zionists who are tirelessly busy sowing the seeds of disunity and corruption in Iran...
...Far more important was the fact that the oil bonanza had played havoc with the mentality of the moneyed middle class...
...2) the "Bazaar"— the merchants and artisans who sustained and financed the general strike...
...fear God...
...anyone wishirq Iran to be just a republic, or a democratic republic, or a democratic Islamic republic wa...
...The split within the army became evident 19 immediately before the "Three Gloriou Days" of the revolution (February 9-11, Significantly, the trouble began with the Ai Force cadets, the noncommissioned techni cians, and the maintenance workers, many o whom were sympathetic to Islamic moder nism as advocated by Bazargan and Shari'ati Their mutinous demonstrations of suppor for Khomeini provoked a punitive attack b: some 50-200 Imperial Guards...
...In due course, the educational system, presently well in the process of being purged at all levels under the supervision of the Revolutionary Council, will also be scheduled for systematic desecularization...
...The sad truth of the matter was that because of 25 years of systematic political sterilization, the middle and working classes had produced no notable figures with a sense of political vocation and the requisite political experience...
...Each group had a set of major grievances...
...This left the religious leaders alone in command, on the crest of a gigantic wave of popular rage...
...Of equal importance, though not given much emphasis, are the close ties between the religious elite and the traditional sector of the urban economy...
...Here the reader is immediately reminded of the Kurds, whose unsuccessful rebellion has received extensive coverage, and of the Arab minority in the oil province of Khuzistan...
...founded by the suddenness of the crisis...
...Had it not been for the dejection, bungling, and indecisiveness of the Shah, and for his sheer bad luck, the collapse of the monarchic regime would not have happened so soon...
...For this group, all else paled before the craving for (revolutionary) action per se, and all rational justifications of its necessity, Islamic or otherwise, were at best secondary and residual...
...In 1977, despite the recent expansion of universities, only 60,000 out of 290,000 applicants were accepted...
...There can be no doubt that the collapse of the man preceded the collapse of the machine...
...nor could he overnight create a constituency among any section of the population...
...I may have exaggerated the element of foresight and design on the part of the leaders of the religious party, and my picture of clerical domination of the polity may be overdrawn in that it leaves out the fairly anarchic state of the country, the persistence of numerous modern institutions and local baronies...
...When finally Bakhtiar did courageously step forward from their ranks they disowned him, disguising their pusillanimity as a refusal to collaborate with the tyrannical dictator...
...But it was not so much this utopia per se as its stark juxtaposition to the Shah's regime that primarily accounted for its effectiveness...
...but the need for such measures had not arisen either...
...country...
...A self-fulfilling prophecy, as it turned out...
...It is true that just before the consolidation of clerical domination in August, the most liberal of the Grand Ayatollahs, Shari'at-madari, did voice his disagreement with Khomeini...
...For my part, I prefer to stick with the old-fashioned Durkheim...
...Then came the economic debacle, despite the massive oil revenue...
...No less significant is Khomeini's Kulturkampf against the nontraditional middle and uppermiddle classes...
...It is true that the Shah had alienated the industrialists and businessmen by his Anti-Profiteering campaign of 1975, and by his various profit-sharing schemes on behalf of the workers...
...And after the Shah's departure, having accomplished his mission, General Huyser quietly departed...
...This "revolutionary" structure, flourishing in contemptuous independence from the structure of the state, was manned by Khomeini's pharisaical enthusiasts and dominated by the Mullahs who, in part through the default of the secular middle-class politicians, unmistakably emerged by mid-August as Iran's turbaned ruling class...
...With the exception 16 of the Bar Association, which had acquired a charter under Mosaddeq (nationalist prime minister of Iran, 1951-53), no significant professional associations and, needless to say, no real political parties were tolerated...
...Whatever the theoretical cogency of the hastily concocted and disseminated arguments of the "Council of Constitutional Experts," Khomeini's juristic authority could not, in practice, be used to revive the flagging zeal of his supporters, or to silence his secular opponents...
...These uprooted people knew no sophisticated political ideology, but they knew something about their religion...
...By the end of August, however, the losing parties' illusions about a unity of purpose with the true victors of the February revolution were finally dispelled...
...Nevertheless, Bazargan refused to acknowledge that there had been a premeditated clerical coup d'état in August: In fact, it cannot even be said that they had it in mind to monopolize the country...
...AT THIS POINT THE SHAH begged tne middle class to inherit the state and the country...
...Many would chant: 12 Three were the idol-breakers Abraham, Mohammed, and Ruhollah [Khomeini...
...The traditional sector of Iran's urban economy has long sustained a class of merchants, retailers, and artisans, collectively referred to as the Bazaar...
...As in the first clerical coup d'état of August, the second, in November, unfolded amidst mass mobilization and hysteria, both masterfully engineered by Khomeini...
...Khomeini knew full well how to place Bazargan and Yazdi in positions where they would unavoidably be "compromised" and used as prime targets of mass discontent—while Khomeini himself would remain immune from all criticism, in selfrighteous Olympian aloofness...
...Once he felt secure on his throne, Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlavi continued his father's anticlerical policies, and aggressively attacked the religious institutions...
...The person they were talking about bore no resemblance to this description...
...Within two weeks they realized they were so overtaken by events that they changed the formal purpose of their society to the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of a republic...
...During the first massive peaceful demonstration in September, Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the National Front who was soon to discover his "Islamic identity," was moved to remark that during the march "there was no longer an I but only a We...
...If he can assume that, in the absence of unions and working-class political parties, workers employed in the workshops of the wealthier Bazaar craftsmen (employing less than 10 persons) can remain under patriarchal control of their employers, he arrives at the figure of about 2.5 million for 1977—or about threeanda-half times the size of the industrial labor force...
...The self-deception that is necessary to make a surrender to the religious party psychologically acceptable was concocted overnight by the politicization of cultural identity...
...Unlike the Czar's army in 1917, the Shah's remained intact and loyal until he departed on January 16, 1979...
...Meanwhile, his Kulturkampf against Occidentalism has totally paralyzed the already weakened middle-class intellectuals...
...Tht revolution in the name of God triumphed...
...Late in June 1979, a delegation of the Bazaar, worried about a 'possible rapprochement between Shari'atmadari and the secular opposition, met with him to obtain assurances to the contrary...
...Though distressing, it is hardly surprising that Iran's middle class proved incapable of concerted political action, and was in no way ready to assume political leadership of the nation...
...The .elationship between this populist fascism and he formal instauration of Islamic theocracy with which our exposition began requires larification...
...Thus a whole gamut of associations— serving craftsmen, retail merchants, specific neighborhoods and city quarters—fitted, very loosely, under the movement's umbrella...
...cadres of would-be Bolsheviks nor a sizable industrial working class...
...After the occupation of the American embassy and the taking of hostages, Khomeini, more skillfully than any general, placed Bani-sadr and Ghotbzadeh, the most ambitious of the surviving "modernist" laymen in his camp, in the most "compromising" positions in the front line of the battlefield, and so shielded his favored clerics...
...At the last resort, the army could certainly have been used much more effectively then it was to obtain a lease on life for the monarchy...
...The Mullahs' institutional capabilities at present are not such as to make theocracy, however conceived, a viable reality in Iran...
...Meanwhile, unrest among the ethnic minorites has required the extensive deployment of the Guardians to these provinces, perhaps making fewer of them available to new Minister of Defense Chamran for terrorizing the officers at army headquarters...
...Under these circumstances its political immaturity and total lack of responsibility were hardly surprising...
...In the fall of 1978, the release of politica' prisoners and a new freedom of the press were among the Shah's first liberalizing measures Day after day, following the end of censorship, the newspapers came out with harrowing reports of the Savak's torture chambers, related by released political prisoners...
...We have already described the new regime's deliberate weakening of the state, especially the army, and the fierce political struggle to weaken and discredit an already disabled opposition—both undertakings aimed to enhance the clerical hegemony...
...Unnoticed by other groups enraptured in daydreams, teach-ins and sit-ins, Khomeini's traditionalist religious party launched its bid for political domination under the leadership of the Mullahs...
...Finally, we must mention an additional, important sub-group whose rage fueled the revolutionary movement—who joined the religious party but did not necessarily speak a religious language...
...Remember the massive oil revenue, to be funneled out of the state treasury at the discretion of the former into the pockets of the latter...
...Following Khomeini's speeches, Public Prosecutor of the Islamic Revolutionar) Tribunals Ayatollah Azari Qumi announces the .expansion of the Tribunals' jurisdiction tc all "counterrevolutionary activities," in...
...He was not the megalomaniac of 1975, but the shaken dejected prisoner of Niavaran palace who was only insisting on a respectable exit...
...Its adherents consisted of the religiously inclined intelligentsia university students, engineers and physicians—whose number greatly increased in the last decades with the opening of educational opportunities to the middle and lower-middle classes of provincial towns...
...Though not their legal knowledge, the Mullahs' preaching and oratorical skills have been, and will doubtless continue to be, put to very efficient use in mobilizing the Disinherited to achieve Khomeini's reactionary goals...
...The daily functioning of the judiciary still escapes the Mullahs' control almost entirely...
...were 28 truckloads of riot police with carnations in their rifle muzzles and several truckloads of Air Force personnel carrying photographs of Khomeini and shouting, "Death to the Shah...
...The caption Shah raft, Imam amad (the Shah went, the Imam came) pithily captures the outcome of the Islamic revolutionary struggle in Iran...
...October saw no sequel to the Februar...
...Undoubtedly on Khomeini's orders, the Mullahs broke their alleged prior agreement with Bazargan, for whom he had throughout shown nothing but haughty contempt, and incorporated into the proposed constitution the sovereignty of the Imam as the supreme leader of the community of believers and the supreme religious jurist...
...In his clamp-down on the secular opposition Khomeini masterfully exploited the anti-Kurdish hysteria of his lower-middle-class and Disinherited supporters, unveiling the pattern of mass mobilization, which has become characteristic of his mob-dominated regime...
...Thanks to the advantages of a conspicuous exile and his intransigence, and probably to the chagrin of his more moderate colleagues in Qum, Ayatollah Khomeini quickly assumed supreme leadership of the revolutionary movement...
...Group after group agitated in harmony with the rhythm set by Khomeini and went excitedly on strike: the journalists and bank clerks in the private sector, the Iran Ait employees, engineers and technicians of the power plants, the employees of the National Iranian Oil Company, and employees of the Central Bank in the public sector...
...Not only were the educational and judiciary systems wrenched from their control, but the scope of their purely religious functions was restricted and their cultural influence combated...
...Except for the Ministry of Defense, we had not yet seen the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in the corridors of the Ministries, enforcing the orders of the turbaned Deputy Ministers...
...The mass mobilization in November was all the more effective because the anti-American resentment, coupled with the cry for vengeance against the dying tyrant, lent itself far better to Khomeini's demagogic manipulation than had the anti-Kurdish sentiment in August...
...The direct invasion of the debilitated state had begun...
...These tales of horror, coming at the wake of the seemingly avoidable Black Friday massacre of September 8, 1978,* only hours after the imposition of martial law, intensified the moral indignation of the middle-class groups against the Shah and his regime, while the weakness shown by the Shah in handling the crisis emboldened them to join his foes...
...During the military parade of February 1, following the Imperial Guards chanting "Long Live the Shah...
...We have already met the senescent Sanjabi who was the first to distinguish himself by his act of prostration at the threshold of the Grand Ayatollah near Versailles...
...Exit, in April, Sanjabi from his post as foreign minister after being slighted and humiliated by Khomeini's protege Ibrahim Yazdi (who then succeded him in that post...
...Last September, Revolutionary Prosecutor General Ayatollah Qoddusi issued an order forbidding the Guardians and the Revolutionary Committees to arrest government functionaries and interfere in government affairs...
...Furthermore, if we follow Maxim Rodinson in characterizing the Islamic radical outlook as a 21 mixture of social archaism and political radicalism, we may say that our young radicals tend to overlook the Islamic regime's shortcoming as regards political radicalism, and consider themselves completely compensated by the regime's social archaism in the form of rigorous eradication of "corrruption" and puritanical enforcement of the Islamic ethic—execution of adultresses, prostitutes, pornographers, homosexuals, and procurors, the forcible rehabilitation of prostitutes and drug addicts, and the like...
...A sociologist looking at their social background will be alarmed to discover their identity with the social base of the European fascist movements...
...The GNP went up by 30.3 percent in 1973-74 and 42 percent in 1974-75...
...Petrodollars had sapped the last drop of public spirit, which could occasionally be detected in modest measures during the early years of the decade...
...It seems very likely that the Kurdish rebellion forced Khomeini to put down his cards and launch an undisguised bid for the creation of a complete Islamic theocracy earlier than he had intended...
...In the decade preceding the OPEC price rise of 1973, Iran's record of industrialization and economic growth was very respectable, with GNP increasing by 9 to 10 percent annually...
...Unrest among the Baluchis, living in the remote corners of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, all of which are now politically unstable, has been unabated for a number of years and is likely to intensify in view of the discovery of substantial oil reserves in Baluchistan...
...And that included the parties of the left, which have never been able to attract the masses in Iran and have always remained on the fringes of reality...
...Bani Sadr, a member of the Revolutionary Council who was with Khomeini in France, confirmed that the possibility of a coup d'etat was discounted by Khomeini and his entourage after assurances given them by certain Iranian generals in France and confirmed after their return to Iran...
...Many reports on the revolution have correctly emphasized the financial and institutional autonomy of the religious elite...
...Furthermore, neither Ayatollah Khalkhali's bloody purges nor the unquestionable brutality of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution have succeeded in stemming the tide of unrest and sabotage in Kurdistan, Khuzistan, or Baluchistan...
...On the basis of my interviews, I feel certain that they are virtually unanimous in their sympathy for Khomeini's Kulturkampf against Occidentalism (and here I am supported by the rare public statement issued on the occasion of the referendum for the Islamic Republic by the Grand Ayatollahs Mar'ashi Najaf-1 and Golpayegani...
...Nevertheless, in the long run, Khomeini's victory over the Kurds may well turn out to have been a Pyrrhic victory because, to attain it, he was forced to use the army—the army whose disintegration the Mullahs had taken great care to perpetuate...
...Immediately after the effective clamp-down on the press and the National Democratic party, the Fedayeen, the Mujahideen, and the *Dr...
...They were soon joined by the unemployed high-school graduates of the previous years, and by their friends who had not yet graduated, once the schools went on strike...
...Between 1963 and 1971, a total of 62,730 persons served in the Literacy Corps in small towns and villages...
...The ceremony was rebroadcast by the National Radio and Television Network the next day...
...Will this trend toward increasing clerical hegemony based on Islamic populism continue...
...The religious elite was in fact the only notable social group, and the religious institutions were the only important organizational network, to escape the control of the centipedal state...
...No wonder Khomeini's puppet government has not shown the slightest interest in industrialization...
...The Shah's one fear, that of being taken prisoner by his generals, did not come true...
...HE SPECTER THAT HAUNTS IRAN and that was o become a reality by October '79 was not orrimunism but fascism, albeit of the populist variety and without the corporate state...
...All this was brought to the immediate attention of the entire nation by the mass media, raising the nation's political temperature to the level of delirium...
...Despite their control over one of the most lavish and self-replenishing government treasuries in the world, the Islamic modernists who manned Bazargan's team showed the same timorous spirit as their Westernized counterparts during the last year of the Shah's reign, and their plight was exacerbated by inexperience in rule and fear of offending anyone by decisive action...
...He did obtain the respectable exit he was seeking, after finding an inheritor, Shahpur Bakhtiar...
...in 1976-77 these exceeded all secular fields combined...
...The Bazaar-religious alliance could still have been foiled, the popular discontent stemmed before becoming an avalanche...
...Though it benefited from the general prosperity created by economic growth in the last two decades, one is hard put to think of any governmental policies designed to further its particular interests...
...q Postscript Since these pages were written, the Bazargan government has fallen, and the second clerical coup d'état in the form of the direct take-over of the state by Khomeini's clerically dominated Revolutionary Council has taken place...
...Th( religious party did not lead the uprising, am the army did not react.* On the afternoon of February 11, 1979, th( Bakhtiar government fell against the massivt avalanche, and the slow-motion collapse o the monarchical edifice was complete 26 day: after the departure of the monarch...
...Nostalgie de la boue, no doubt...
...They articulated a set of demands, which were immediately met by the Shah's government...
...The latter were thus allowed unrestricted freedom in winning the fervent support of the roused masses with their irresponsible and virulent anti-American rhetoric...
...It was only then that the process of disintegration of the army under political pressure set in...
...Throughout September and October of 1978, this group contemplated the prospect of making the constitutional monarchy a viable reality...
...LET US LOOK more closely at the upper layer of the middle class...
...Be that as it may, the middle classes took leave of their political senses, wished away their differences with the religious party, and abdicated their crucial political responsibility...
...HAVING REVIEWED the solid social and economic basis of support for Khomeini's regime, we can now look at the way in which he has consistently used this support to achieve the twin aims of the establishment of theocracy and the eradication of Occidentalism...
...Following the assassination of Ayatollah Motahhari in May, the armed Islamic bands, under very loose control of the Texan Islamic modernist Dr...
...Teheran burned...
...In a situation of increasing polarization of the secular and the Islamic groups, the possibility that the army will act on someone else's orders in the future can no longer be discounted with complete confidence...
...But, personal rivalry aside, it is more plausible to interpret his action as a precaution to assure the continuation of clerical influence in case of a failure of Khomeini's direct take-over of the governing apparatus...
...How could they account for the abject surrender to the Islamic party of one after another of the feeble middle-class based political factions: liberals, nationalists, (Stalinist) Communists, Trotskyists, and Maoists alike...
...They are drawn from the lower-middle-class small propertyowners and shopkeepers, and from those merchants and craftsmen engaged in the traditional sector of the economy—the Bazaar—which is the sector most threatened by large-scale industrialization...
...Bazargan, the ablest septuagenerian of the Mosaddeq era, held out the longest, but at the cost of capitulating to the Mullahs...
...We have 800,000 university graduates," Bakhtiar ruefully reminded himself and his audience in the above-mentioned interview...
...While the latter could be among the Islamic modernists, the former is undoubtedly the most rigid and least "modernistic" in his Islamic outlook...
...When he 25 judged he could dispense with their services, Khomeini used the occasion of their handshakes with Brzezinski to get rid of them both...
...Tudeh party, Khomeini ominously an nounced that having allowed the opposition six months to show their true faces, the religious party would now break their poisonous pens and crush their conspiracies together with those of the Kurds...
...Reacting to the imitative modernity of the upper strata, this largely provincial group with deep traditional attachments sought to interpret the alienating modern world in reassuringly parochial terms, and did so by discovering the relevance of Islam...
...Let me cite just one example: Oh brave soldier, do not kill Moses for the sake of the Pharaoh For Yazid's sake, do not kill the son of the Prophet...
...The rest, awaiting conscription, tended to take to the streets and swell the ranks of the unemployed...
...and they did not...
...According to the clause finally ratified on October 14, 1979, the supreme leader was invested with extensive authority not only over the judiciary but over all branches of the ;tate, thus formally making Iran a theocracy...
...the enemy of Islam and of God...
...Meanwhile, Khomeini himself seized the opportunity offered by Ayatollah Taleqani's leath to propagate the good tidings of the instauration of the rule of the clergy on behalf of God: did the people kiss Taleqani's hand oecause he was a democrat, or because he was I liberal...
...Instead, they were busy muffling the domestic press and expelling foreign correspondents to prevent indecent exposures, as they would have their wives cover their legs from the unchaste eyes of the stranger...
...the corrupt and tyrannical Omayyad Caliph Yazid (from the Shi'ite point of view) versus the martyred Imam Husayn, the grandson of Mohammed and the third Shi'ite Imam...
...Nevertheless, so far, to paraphrase Marx, the classinitself that failed to become a class-for-itself, let alone to assume political leadership of the nation, has been the middle class, including the university graduates referred to by Bakhtiar...
...The seedy old politicians of the Mosaddeq era had to be pulled out of the closet...
...Finally, we come to the human mass of Khomeini's less active supporters, the Disinherited...
...The fact that the idiom is religious rather than specifically political does not mean that Khomeini and the religious party cannot use it to tremendous political advantage...
...And here we must not forget the pressure that can be exerted by the Bazaar, on which the religious establishment is financially dependent...
...Nevertheless, a few lessons can be drawn from the Kurdish rebellion, which reached its height in the days immediately preceding what may be called the clerical coup d'etat of late August, and was suppressed in the early days of September...
...Both groups were filling their pockets as fast as they could, expecting the whole thing to collapse...
...For these groups it was even easier to take flight from the uncongenial aspects of political reality into the naive eschatological glorification of "revolution...
...and they could do so all the more easily because the latter, once in power, are more likely to forgo their insistence on political radicalism and settle for the social archaism of the Mullahs...
...In the unrest in Kerman, 40 persons died...
...The scarcity of reliable information makes it extremely difficult to assess the situation in 23 any of these provinces...
...This cream of the religiously minded middle class had valiantly opposed the Shah from abroad and, in the eyes of Bazargan, qualified for cooptation by a decade or so of idle talk on the "progressive spirit of Islam" in their Islamic societies' meetings at American universities...
...The liberal and leftist parties were all suppressed at the time of the onslaught on Kurdistan...
...They prostrated themselves before the contemptuous Khomeini and passed on the gift the Shah was begging them to inherit to the Grand Ayatollah and his Mullahs...
...These defiant religious demonstrations, all of which ended in violent clashes with the Shah's army and police, precipitated the crisis of 1978-79...
...In fact, the government often pursued economic policies that were detrimental to the Bazaar...
...The uprising of these last days wa, decidedly spontaneous...
...As a new basis of support for the Islamic regime, these falangist offshoots of the Disinherited more than compensate for the defection of a wing of the Mujahideen...
...not only against the Kurdish Democratic party, but also against the National Front secular liberals and intellectuals, "lackeys of the West," and journalists whom he would not allow "to drown the people in corruption anc prostitution in the name of freedom...
...The human mass of the "Disinherited," created by rapid urbanization and rural exodus, constituted a chief source of enrages...
...The massive migration into the large cities, the integration of villages and small towns into the national economy—and hence into the national political society—all this had repercussions that kept accumulating...
Vol. 27 • January 1980 • No. 1
