Introduction

The Constitutional Revolution was initially successful. The prime minister was dismissed at the end of July, and the first Majlis, which included a significant number of elected ulema, opened in Tehran in October. A year later, the new shah, Muhammad All, signed the Fundamental Law, which was modeled on the Belgian constitution. This required the monarch to ask the approval of the Majlis in all important matters; all citizens (including those who belonged to a different faith) enjoyed equality before the law, and the constitution guaranteed personal rights and freedoms. There was a flurry of liberal activity throughout Iran. The First Majlis gave new freedoms to the press, and immediately satirical and critical articles began to be published. New societies were formed, there were plans for a national bank, and new municipal councils were elected. The brilliant young deputy for Tabriz, Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, led a left-wing, democratic party in the Majlis, while the mujtahids, Ayatollah Tabatabai and Seyyed Abdallah Behbehani, led the Conservative party, which managed to include some clauses in the constitution to safeguard the status of the Shariah.
But despite this show of cooperation between the liberal clergy and the reformers, the First Majlis revealed deep divisions. Many of the lay deputies belonged to the dissident circles, associated with Mulkum Khan and Kirmani, who felt only contempt for the ulema. They were often members of the anjumans (“secret societies”) formed to disseminate revolutionary ideas, and even though some of the more radical clergy had links with these groups, the reformers were usually anticlerical and regarded the ulema as an obstacle to progress. If the ulema who had joined forces with the reformers had expected the constitution to make the Shariah the law of the land, they were disappointed. The First Majlis immediately took steps to curb clerical power in such matters as education, and, ironically, the Constitutional Revolution, which so many of the mullahs had supported, marked the beginning of the end of their enormous power in the country.
The Shii ulema had never taken such an active role in politics before.
Some scholars believe that they were motivated chiefly by the desire to protect their own prerogatives and interests, and to ward off the encroachment of the infidel West; others point out that in promoting a constitution that would limit the despotic power of the shahs, the more liberal ulema were fulfilling the ancient Shii duty of opposing tyranny. The lay reformers, mindful of the great power of the ulema, had been careful not to offend Muslim sensibilities during the revolution, but they had long been hostile to the clergy and, once in power, were determined to secularize the legal system and education.
One of the first to spot the dangers of this secularization was Shaykh Fadlullah Nuri (1843-1909), one of the three leading clerics of Tehran, who began to agitate against the constitution in 1907: he argued that since all government was illegitimate during the absence of the Hidden Imam, the new parliament was un-Islamic. The mujtahids, not the Majlis, were the Imam’s deputies and it was they who should make the laws and safeguard the rights of the people. Under this new system, however, the clergy would simply become one institution among others;
they would no longer be the chief spiritual guides of the people and religion would be jeopardized.
Nuri demanded that the Majlis should, at the very least, base its decisions on the Shariah. Because of his objections, the constitution was amended: a panel of five ulema, selected by the Majlis, was established with the power to veto legislation that contradicted the sacred law of Islam.
Yet Nuri expressed a minority view. Most of the mujtahids at Najaf supported the constitution, and would continue to do so. They rejected Nuri’s plea for a Shariah state on the grounds that it was not possible to implement law correctly without the direct guidance of the Hidden Imam. Yet again, the spiritual insights of the Shiah promoted a secularization of the polity, and still regarded state power as incompatible with religion. Many clergy had been disgusted by the growing corruption of the court and by the economic insecurity of the government which had led the Qajars to grant unacceptable financial concessions to foreigners and to take out expensive loans.
They had seen that this shortsighted behavior had led in Egypt to military occupation. It seemed clearly preferable to limit the oppressive policies of the Qajar state by means of the constitution.
This point of view was expressed forcibly by Shaykh Muhammad Husain Naini (1850--1936), in his Admonition to the Nation and Exposition to the People, which was published in Najaf in 1909. Naini argued that representative government was the next best thing to the Hidden Imam;
to set up an assembly capable of restraining a despotic ruler was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah. A tyrannical ruler was guilty of idolatry (shirk), the cardinal sin of Islam, because he arrogated to himself divine power and behaved as though he were God himself, lording it over his subjects. The prophet Moses had been sent to destroy the power of Pharaoh, who had oppressed and enslaved his people, and force him to obey the commands of Allah. In the same way, the new Majlis with its panel of religious experts must ensure that the shahs obey God’s laws.
The most lethal opposition to the new constitution, however, came not from the ulema but from the new shah, who, with the help of a Russian Cossack brigade, led a successful coup in June 1908 and closed the Majlis; the most radical Iranian reformers and ulema were executed.
But the popular guard in Tabriz held out against the shah’s forces and, with the help of the Bakhtiari tribe, staged a counter coup the following month, unseated the shah, and put his minor son, Ahmad, on the throne with a liberal regent. A Second Majlis was elected, but, as in Egypt, this fledgling parliamentary democracy was cut down to size by the European powers. When the Majlis tried to break the stranglehold that Britain and Russia had long had on Iranian affairs by appointing a young American financier, Morgan Shuster, to help them reform Iran’s ailing economy, Russian troops advanced on Tehran and closed the Majlis in December 1911. It was three years before the Majlis was permitted to reconvene, and by that time, many had become embittered and disillusioned. The constitution had not been the panacea they had hoped for, but had simply thrown the fundamental impotence of Iran into cruel and clear relief.
The First World War was very disruptive for Iran and left many Iranians longing for strong government. In 1917, British and Russian troops overran the country. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians withdrew, but the British moved into the areas they had vacated in the north of the country, while holding on to their own bases in the south.
Britain was now eager to make Iran a protectorate. Oil had been discovered in the country in 1908, and the concession had been granted to a British subject, William Knox DArcy; in 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed, and Iranian oil fueled the British navy. Iran was now a rich prize. But the Majlis held out against British control.
There were anti-British demonstrations throughout the country in 1920, the Majlis appealed for help from Soviet Russia and the United States, and Britain was forced to abandon this plan. But Iranians were miserably aware that they had managed to retain their independence only by appealing to other great powers, who had their own designs on Iranian oil. Iran now had a constitution and representative government, but this was useless, since the Majlis had no real power.
Even the Americans noted that the British constantly rigged the elections and that Iranians were “prevented from public expression of opinion or giving vent to feelings in any manner by the existing martial law and controlled press.
The prevailing mood of dissatisfaction made it relatively easy for a small group, under the leadership of Seyyid Zia ad-Din Tabatabai, a civilian, and Reza Khan (1877--1944), the commander of the shah’s Cossack brigade, to overthrow the government. In February 1921, Zia ad-Din became prime minister, with Reza Khan as his minister of war.
The British acquiesced because Zia ad-Din was known to be pro-British, and they hoped that his election would further their plans for a protectorate, which they had not abandoned entirely. But Reza Khan was the stronger of the two leaders, and he was soon able to force Zia ad-Din into exile, form a new cabinet, and become sole ruler. Reza at once began to modernize the country, and, because the people were so frustrated and ready for any change, he was able to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Reza had no interest in social reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy, and make Iran function more effectively. Any opposition was ruthlessly cut down.
From the very beginning, Reza courted Soviet Russia and the United States in order to rid the country of the British, granting an oil concession to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in return for American technical advice and investment.
In 1925, Reza was in a strong enough position to force the last Qajar shah to abdicate. His original intention was to establish a republic, but the ulema objected. In the Majlis, Ayatollah Muddaris declared that a republic was un-Islamic. It was tainted by its association with Atatiirk, and the clergy had no wish to see Iran go the same way as Turkey. Reza had no objection to becoming shah, and was still anxious to court the clergy.
He promised them that his government would honor Islam and that its legislation would not conflict with the Shariah. That done, a packed Majlis endorsed the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty. But it would not be long before Shah Reza Pahlavi would feel able to break his promise to the ulema and not only equal but even surpass Atatiirk’s ruthless secularization.
By the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, secularism seemed to be winning the day. There was plenty of religious activity, though the more radical movements had been cut down to size and posed no threat to the secularist leadership. But the seeds that had been sown during these years would take root when some of the limitations of this modern secularist experiment became apparent. 7. Counterculture (1925-1960) Ever since Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God, modern people had, in various ways, become aware of a void at the heart of their culture.
The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905--80) called it the Godshaped hole in human consciousness, where the divine had always been but had disappeared, leaving an emptiness behind. The astonishing achievements of scientific rationalism had made the very idea of God incredible and impossible for many Westernized people, since it had gone hand-in-hand with a suppression of the old mythical consciousness.
Without a cult to evoke a sense of sacredness, the symbol of God had become attenuated and meaningless. But most modern people did not repine. The world was in many ways a much better place, and they were evolving new secularist spiritualities, seeking in literature, art, sexuality, psychoanalysis, drugs, or even in sport, a sense of transcendent meaning that gave their lives value and put them in touch with the deeper currents of existence hitherto revealed by the confessional religions. By the middle of the twentieth century, most Western people assumed that religion would never again play a major part in world events. It had been relegated firmly to the private sphere and, again, for many of the secularists who occupied positions of power or who controlled the media and the public discourse, this seemed right. In Western Christendom, religion had often been cruel and coercive; the needs of the modern state demanded that society be tolerant. There could be no going back to the age of crusade or inquisition. Secularism was there to stay. But at the same time, by the mid-twentieth century, the world also had to come to terms with the fact that the “void” was no longer merely a psychic vacuum, but had been given graphic and terrifying embodiment.
Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the Soviet Union had died violent deaths. Some of the worst atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans, who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. It was no longer possible to assume that a rational education would eliminate barbarism, since the Nazi Holocaust revealed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide or the Soviet Gulag reveals their modern origins. No previous society could have dreamed of implementing such grandiose schemes of extermination. The horrors of the Second World War (1939--45) only ended with the explosion of the first atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, again, was a horrifying vision of the power of modern science and the germ of nihilism in modern culture. For decades, men and women had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, it appeared, human beings no longer needed a supernatural deity to end the world. They had used their prodigious skill and learning to find the means of doing this very efficiently for themselves. As they contemplated these new facts of life, people became aware as never before of the limitations of the rationalistic ethos. Faced with catastrophe on such a scale, reason is silent; there is--literally--nothing that it can say.
The Holocaust would become an icon of evil for modern times. It was a by-product of modernity, which, from the very beginning, had often involved acts of ethnic cleansing. The Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age to deadly effect. The death camps were a fearful parody of the factory, right down to the industrial chimney itself.
They made full use of the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and efficient bureaucracy and management. The Holocaust was an example of scientific and rational planning, in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and clearly defined objective. Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the “garden” culture of the twentieth century.
Science itself was also deeply implicated in the death camps and the eugenic experiments carried out there. At the very least, the Holocaust showed that a secularist ideology could be just as lethal as any religious crusade.
The Holocaust was also a reminder of the dangers that can accrue from the death of God in human consciousness. In Christian theology, hell had been defined as the absence of God. The camps seemed an uncannily accurate reproduction of the imagery of the inferno, which had haunted Europeans for centuries. The flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking, the deformed, distorted bodies, the flames, and the stinking air all recalled the Christian hell depicted by the poets, painters, sculptors, and dramatists of Europe. Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, giving human beings a glimpse of what life could be like once all sense of sacredness has been lost. At its best (and only at its best), religion had helped people to cultivate an appreciation of the holiness of humanity in its myths, rituals, and cultic and ethical practices. By the mid-twentieth century, it seemed that an unfettered rationalism could feel impelled to create a hell upon earth, an objective correlative of God’s absence. There was a nihilistic impulse that could draw human beings who had more power than they had ever had before to expend enormous creativity in mass destruction. The symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential and, in the conservative period, had imposed a constraint upon what men and women could do. The commandments of the Law had reminded them that the world was not theirs to do with as they chose. Modern human beings now prized autonomy and freedom so greatly that the idea of an omnipotent divine legislator was abhorrent to them, and this development marked a great advance in human dignity. But the Holocaust and the Gulag show what can happen when people cast off all such restraint or make the nation or polity the supreme value. New ways of teaching human beings to respect the sacredness of life and the world would have to be found that would not compromise modern integrity with inadequate symbols of the “supernatural.”
The death camp and the mushroom cloud are icons that we must contemplate and take to heart so that we do not become chauvinistic about the modern scientific culture that so many of us in the developed world enjoy. But these icons can also give us an insight into the way that some religious people regard modern secular society, in which they also experience the absence of God. Some fundamentalists see modernity as equally hubris tic evil, and demonic; their vision of the modern city or the secular ideology fills them with something of the same dread and helpless rage as overtakes the liberal secularist who gazes into the darkness of Auschwitz. During the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths were beginning to retreat from the mainstream society to create countercultures that reflected the way they thought things ought to be.
They were not simply withdrawing out of pique, but were often impelled to do so by horror and fear. It is important that we understand the dread and anxiety that lie at the heart of the fundamentalist vision, because only then will we begin to comprehend its passionate rage, its frantic desire to fill the void with certainty, and its conviction of ever-encroaching evil.
Some Jews had begun to see the modern world as demonic long before the Holocaust. Indeed, the Nazi atrocity only confirmed them in their conviction that not only was the gentile world irredeemably evil, but most modern Jews were horribly culpable too. Until the 1930s, most Orthodox Jews who wanted nothing to do with modern culture could immerse themselves in the life of the yeshiva or the Hasidic court.
They had neither the desire nor the need to migrate to the United States or Palestine. But the convulsions of the 1930s and 1940s meant that survivors had no choice but to flee from Europe and the Soviet Union. Some of the Haredim went to Palestine and came face-to-face with the Zionists, who were now engaged in a desperate struggle to create a state that would save Jews from the coming catastrophe.
The Edah Haredis, the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, had been vehemently opposed to Zionism long before the Balfour Declaration.
It was a small group, which had attracted only 9000 out of the 175,000 Jewish residents of Palestine by the 192os. Immersed in their sacred texts, the community had no idea how to organize themselves politically, but they would soon be joined by members of Agudat Israel, who had learned to play the modern political game. Agudat was still ideologically opposed to Zionism, but members had tried to balance the influence of the secularists by founding their own religious settlements in the Holy Land, where young people studied modern subjects along with Torah and Talmud. This concession appalled the more rigorous of the ultra-Orthodox, who believed that Agudat had gone over to the “Other Side.” From this intra-Orthodox conflict, a fundamentalist movement was born, inspired in the first instance, as so often, by a quarrel between co religionists
The chief spokesman of this rejectionist Orthodoxy was Rabbi Hayyim Eleazer Shapira of Munkacs (1872--1937), one of the most eminent Hasidic leaders of Hungarian Jewry, who began a vehement campaign against Agudat in 1922. In his view, Agudat members were collaborating with the Zionists and infecting the minds of innocent schoolchildren with the poison weed and wormwood” of the goyische Enlightenment, as well as “songs that speak of the settlement of the Land, and the fields and the vineyards of Eretz Israel--just like the Zionist poets.” They were defiling the Holy Land, which was intended only for prayer and sacred study, by tilling its sacred soil. At a meeting in Slovakia, the most radical of the Haredim agreed with the Munkaczer rebbe, and signed a ban on any association with Agudat. Their view of Agudat, which had come into existence precisely to oppose Zionism, was inaccurate; the group was also aware that they were at odds with the vast majority of the Orthodox in eastern and western Europe, who disapproved of Zionism but regarded Shapira’s ban on Agudat as too extreme. Nevertheless, they felt justified in this separatist policy by their instinctive horror of Zionism. One of the first of the Haredim to sign the ban was the young Rabbi Joel Moshe Teitelbaum (1888-1979), who would later become the leader of the Hasidim of Satmar, Hungary, and the most vigorous of all the Haredi opponents of Zionism and the State of Israel.
When Shapira and Teitelbaum contemplated the Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine, they felt the same outrage and dread as, later, people felt when they heard about the Nazi death camps. This is not an exaggeration. Teitelbaum, who narrowly escaped extermination by migrating with his people to America, put the entire blame for the Holocaust on the great sin of the Zionists, who had “lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the like of which has not been seen since the world was created.... And so it is no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger.” These rejectionists could see nothing positive in the agricultural achievements of the Zionists, who were making the desert bloom, or the political acumen of their leaders, who were striving to save Jewish lives. This was an “outrage,” a “defilement,” and the final eruption of the forces of evil. The Zionists were atheists and unbelievers; even if they had been the most strictly observant of Jews, their enterprise would still be evil because it was a rebellion against God, who had decreed that Jews must endure the punishment of the Exile and must take no initiative to save themselves.
For Shapira, the Land was too holy to be settled by any ordinary Jew, let alone by self-confessed Zionist rebels. Only the religious zealot who devoted his entire life to study and prayer could live there safely. Wherever there is a holy object, like Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), evil forces gather to attack it. The Zionists, Shapira explained, were simply the external manifestation of these demonic influences. The Holy Land itself, therefore, was teeming with wicked forces “which excite God’s anger and fury.” Instead of God, it was Satan that now dwelt in Jerusalem. The Zionists who “pretend to ‘ascend’ to the Land, are in fact, descending to the depths of hell.”
The Holy Land was empty of God and had become an inferno. Eretz Israel was not a homeland, as the Zionists maintained, but a battlefield. The only people who could safely dwell there in these terrible times were not householders and farmers, but holy warriors, “zealous fearers of God,”
“valiant men of war” who set out “to fight the just war for the residue of God’s heritage in the holy mountain of Jerusalem.” The whole Zionist enterprise imbued Shapira with existential terror. Teitelbaum saw the Zionists as the latest manifestation of the evil hubris that had consistently brought disasters upon the Jewish people: the Tower of Babel, the idolatry of the Golden Calf, the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century ce which had cost thousands of Jewish lives, and the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco. But Zionism was the heresy par excellence; this was brazen arrogance which shook the very foundations of the world. It was no wonder that God had sent the Holocaust!
Hence the faithful must separate themselves absolutely from this evil.
Rabbi Yeshayahu Margolis, one of the most zealous of the Hasidim in Jerusalem, who wrote during the 1920s and 1930S, was a great admirer of both Shapira and Teitelbaum, and wanted Teitelbaum to become the leader of Edah Haredis. Margolis created a counter history of Israel which stressed the existence of an embattled minority that had consistently over the centuries felt obliged to rise up and fight other Jews in the name of God.