Introduction

The state had grown rich, but the people had grown poorer. There was rampant consumerism in the upper echelons of society, and corruption and deprivation among the petty bourgeoisie and the urban poor. After the oil price increase in 1973-74, there was tremendous inflation, owing to lack of investment opportunity for all but the very wealthy. A million people were unemployed, many of the smaller merchants had been ruined by the influx of foreign goods, and by 1977 inflation had even begun to affect the rich. In this climate of discontent and desperation, the two major guerrilla organizations became active, assassinating American military personnel and advisers.
There was much resentment of the American expatriates in Iran, who seemed to be profiting from the disastrous mess. During these years too, the shah’s regime became more tyrannical and autocratic than ever.
Many disaffected Iranians looked to the ulema, who responded to the crisis in different ways. In Qum, Ayatollah Shariatmadari, the most senior mujtahid, opposed any political confrontation with the regime, though he was anxious to see the 1906 constitution restored. Ayatollah Taleqani, who had been jailed many times for demanding a strict application of the constitution and protesting against the excesses of the regime, worked alongside such lay reformers as Mehdi Bazargan and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, who wanted to see an Islamic republic in Iran but not clerical rule.
Taleqani did not believe that the clergy should have any privileged role in government; he certainly did not agree with Khomeini’s vision of Velayat-e Faqih, government by a charismatic jurist. But Khomeini was still a symbol of steadfast and unbowed resistance to the regime.
In June 1975, the students of the Fayziyyah Madrasah staged a demonstration to mark the anniversary of Khomeini’s arrest there in 1963. The police invaded the building, using tear gas, and killed one of the students by throwing him off the roof. The government closed the madras ah and its silent, empty courtyards remained a potent symbol of the shah’s fundamental hostility to any murmur of protest and his opposition to religion. Increasingly, in the popular imagination, he was identified with Yazid, the enemy of the faith, the murderer of the martyr Husain, and the enemy of Khomeini, whom the people now called their Imam.
At the beginning of 1977, however, the regime relaxed somewhat and appeared to bow to public pressure. Jimmy Carter had been elected to the presidency of the United States the previous year, and his human rights campaign, plus a damning report from Amnesty International about the state of Iran’s courts and prisons, may have inclined the shah to make some concession to the prevailing discontent. There was little real change, but the censorship laws were eased and a flood of literature hit the market revealing frustration in nearly every sector of society. The students were angry about government interference in the universities; farmers protested about the agricultural imports, which had increased the poverty in the countryside;
businessmen were worried about inflation and corruption; lawyers protested against the decision to downgrade the Supreme Court. But there was still no call for revolution. Most of the ulema in Iran followed the lead of Shariatmadari and maintained the traditional quietist line. It was not the clergy but the writers of Iran who made the most eloquent protest against the government in 1977. From October 10 to 19, in the Goethe Institute in Tehran, about sixty leading Iranian poets and writers read their work to thousands of adults and students. SAVAK did not interrupt these poetry recitals, despite their outright hostility to the regime. It seemed as though the government was learning to accommodate peaceful protest.
But the new era did not last long. Not long after the poetry meetings, the shah clearly felt that matters were getting out of hand. A number of known dissidents were arrested and on November 3, 1977, Khomeini’s son Mustafa died mysteriously in Iraq, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents.
Yet again, the shah had cast himself in the role of Yazid. Khomeini was already surrounded by a Shii aura and had begun to seem a little like the Hidden Imam in his exile; now, like Imam Husain, his son had been killed by a tyrannical ruler. All over Iran, the people gathered to mourn Mustafa Khomeini, weeping and beating their breasts in the traditional manner. In Tehran, the police attacked the mourners, and there were more arrests and beatings during poetry readings held in Tehran on November 15,16, and 25.
But still there was no sign of a general uprising. In Najaf, Khomeini, who used to call Mustafa the “light of his eyes,” was silent.
Meanwhile, on November 13, 1977, the shah had flown to the United States for talks with President Carter. Each day, crowds of Iranian students who were attending American universities poured into Washington to shout anti-shah slogans outside the White House. At a ceremonial dinner, Carter delivered a moving address about the importance of the special relationship between Iran and the United States, calling Iran an “island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.” On December 31, Carter interrupted a journey to India by making a flying visit to Tehran, where, again, he expressed his warm support for the regime. Right up to the very end. Carter continued to express his confidence in the shah. His visit to Tehran coincided with the sacred month of Muharram, when the Kerbala tragedy was uppermost in everybody’s minds; this year, everybody was also thinking about Khomeini: the shah had just forbidden the traditional mourning ceremonies, which are usually held forty days after a death, for Mustafa Khomeini.
When, at this crucial juncture, Carter made a special trip to endorse the shah’s rule, he stepped neatly into the role of the Great Satan.
Americans were shocked to hear their nation described as satanic during and after the Revolution. Even those who were aware of the resentment that so many of the Iranian people had felt for the United States since the 1953 CIA coup, were repelled by this demonic imagery. However mistaken American policy may have been, it did not deserve to be condemned in this way. It confirmed the prevailing belief that the Iranian revolutionaries were all fanatical, hysterical, and unbalanced.
But most Western people misunderstood the image of the Great Satan. In Christianity, Satan is a figure of overpowering evil, but in Islam he is a much more manageable figure. The Koran even hints that Satan will be forgiven on the Last Day, such is its confidence in the all-conquering goodness of God. Those Iranians who called America “the Great Satan” were not saying that the United States was diabolically wicked but something more precise. In popular Shiism, the Shaitan, the Tempter, is a rather ludicrous creature, chronically incapable of appreciating the spiritual values of the unseen world. In one story, he is said to have complained to God about the privileges given to humans, but was easily fobbed off with inferior gifts. Instead of prophets, the Shaitan was quite happy with fortune-tellers, his mosque was the bazaar, he was most at home in the public baths, and instead of seeking God, his quest was for wine and women. He was, in fact, incurably trivial, trapped forever in the realm of the exterior (^ahir) world and unable to see that there was a deeper and more important dimension of existence. For many Iranians, America, the Great Shaitan, was “the Great Trivializer.” The bars, casinos, and secularist ethos of West-toxicated North Tehran typified the American ethos, which seemed deliberately to ignore the hidden (batin) realities that alone gave life meaning. Furthermore, America, the Shaitan, had tempted the shah away from the true values of Islam to a life of superficial secularism.
Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb). Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough.
Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin deep Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that his her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.” Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality.
He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students.
The Iranian Revolution was not merely political. Certainly, the cruel and autocratic regime of the shah and the economic crisis were crucial:
there would have been no uprising without them. Many secularist Iranians who did not experience this spiritual malaise would eventually join the ulema simply to get rid of the shah, and without their support, the Revolution would not have succeeded. But it was also a rebellion against the secularist ethos which excluded religion and which many ordinary Iranians felt was being imposed upon them against their will. This was most graphically expressed in the depiction of the United States as the Great Satan.
Rightly or wrongly, many believed that if he had not been so warmly supported by the United States, the shah would not have behaved as he did. They knew that Americans were proud of their secular polity, which deliberately separated religion from the state; they had learned that many Westerners thought it praiseworthy and necessary to focus exclusively on the yhir. The result, as far as they could see, was the empty, hedonistic nightlife of North Tehran.
Iranians were aware that many Americans were religious, but their faith seemed to make no sense. The “inside” and “outside” of Jimmy Carter were not “the same.” They could not understand how the President could continue to support a ruler who by 1978 had started to murder his own people.
“We didn’t expect Carter to defend the shah, for he is a religious man who has raised the slogan of defending human rights,” Ayatollah Husain Montazeri told an interviewer after the Revolution.
“How can Carter, the devout Christian, defend the shah?”
When Carter visited the shah on New Year’s Eve, during the sacred month of Muharram, to boost his regime, he could not, if he had tried, have cast himself more perfectly as the villain. During the next turbulent year, the United States came to seem the ultimate cause of Iran’s spiritual, economic, and political problems. Street graffiti identified Carter with Yazid, and the shah with Shimr, the general dispatched by Yazid to massacre Husain and his little army. In one series of street drawings, Khomeini was depicted as Moses, the shah as Pharaoh, while Carter was the idol adored by the Pharaoh (slash) shah.
America, it was thought, had corrupted the shah and Khomeini, now increasingly bathed in a Shii light, came to stand as an Islamic alternative to the present unholy dictatorship.
At the end of Muharram 1978, the shah yet again cast himself as the enemy of the Shiah. On January 8, the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a slanderous article about Khomeini, calling him “an adventurer, without faith, and tied to the centers of colonialism.” He had led a dissolute life, the article averred, had been a British spy, and was even now in the pay of the British, who wanted to undermine the White Revolution. This scurrilous and preposterous attack was a fatal mistake on the part of the shah.
The next day four thousand students turned out onto the streets of Qum:
they demanded a return to the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, the reopening of the Fayziyyah Madrasah, and that Khomeini be permitted to return to Iran. What they got was a massacre.
The police opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, and, according to the ulema, seventy students were killed (though the regime claimed that only ten had died). It was the bloodiest day in Iran since the 1963 riots, and for the shah it was the beginning of the end. William Beeman points out that Iranians will put up with a great deal, but that a single act of bad faith can cause an irrevocable breach in personal, business, and political relationships.
Once this line has been crossed, there can be no going back. For millions of ordinary religious Iranians, the shah crossed that line when he ordered SAVAK- to shoot the demonstrators in Qum. They responded to the massacre with raw outrage, and the Revolution began.
In recent months, the intellectuals, writers, lawyers, and businessmen had led the opposition to the shah’s regime. In January, however, after this blatant attack on the Shiah, the leadership passed to the ulema. The massacre had been so shocking that it even moved Ayatollah Shariatmadari to abandon his usual quietism and he condemned the shooting in the strongest terms. This passed a signal to the ulema throughout the country. Nothing was planned or prearranged. Khomeini issued no strategic orders from Najaf, but from the moment the Enelaat article appeared, he was the unseen instigator and inspiration of the uprising. The struggle centered on the traditional mourning ceremonies held on the fortieth day after a death. These turned into demonstrations against the government, during which there were more killings; and, forty days later, a new series of rallies were held to commemorate the latest martyrs. The Revolution acquired an unstoppable momentum. The forty-day period between each demonstration gave the leaders time to spread the word, and, at the appointed time, the crowd would know exactly when to assemble, without any need for elaborate planning or advertising.
Thus on February 18, forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds of mourners, led by the ulema and bazaar is swarmed onto the streets of major Iranian cities to weep for the dead. Women students, many of whom wore the veil to dissociate themselves from the regime, and chadored women from the bazaar often led the processions, as if to challenge the police to fire directly at them. The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted. Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd. The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people.
This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading
“Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.” The word for martyr, shaheed, meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology.
In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multi party system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Westerneducated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah!
Burn him!” Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored.
But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died. On September 4, the last day of Ramadan, there was a massive peaceful demonstration in Tehran. The crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, and handed out flowers to the soldiers. For the first time, the army and the police did not open fire, and on this occasion--a highly significant development-the middle classes began to join in. A small group of marchers processed through the streets of some of the residential districts, shouting: “Independence!
Freedom! and Islamic Government!” On September 7, a huge parade marched from North Tehran down to the Parliament building, carrying large pictures of Khomeini and Shariati, and calling for an end to Pahlavi rule and for an Islamic government. Lay thinkers such as Shariati, Bazargan, and Bani Sadr had prepared the Western-educated elite for the possibility of modern Islamic rule. Even though their views were different from those of Khomeini, the middle-class liberals could see that he had grassroots support that they could never command, and were willing to join forces with him to get rid of the shah. Secularist rule had been a disaster in Iran, and they were ready to try something different.
Once he had been deserted by the middle classes, it was all up for the shah, and he must have realized the danger. At 6:00 a.m. on Friday, September 8, martial law was declared and all large gatherings were banned. But the twenty thousand demonstrators who had already started to gather in Jaleh Square that morning for another peaceful rally did not know about this.
When they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire and as many as nine hundred people may have died. After this massacre, the crowds raged through the streets, erecting barricades and burning buildings, while soldiers fired at them from their tanks. At 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 10, President Carter called the shah from Camp David to assure him of his support, and a few hours later, the White House confirmed that this telephone conversation had taken place, reaffirmed the special relationship between the United States and Iran, and reported that though the President regretted the loss of life in Jaleh Square, he hoped that the political liberalization which the shah had just begun would continue.
But after the Jaleh Square massacre, not even the support of the Great Satan could save the shah. The oil workers now came out on strike, and by late October, production had dropped to 28 percent of its former level. The guerrilla groups, who had been quieter in recent years, began once again to attack military leaders and government ministers.
On November 4, students pulled down the statue of the shah at the gates of Tehran University: on November 5, the bazaar closed, and students attacked the British embassy, the offices of various United States airlines, cinemas, and liquor stores.
This time, the army did not intervene.
By this date, the Iraqi government, responding to pressure from Tehran, had expelled Khomeini from Najaf and he had taken up residence in Paris. Here he was visited by a delegation from the recently revived National Front, who issued a statement that both they and Khomeini were committed to restoring the 1906 constitution. On December 2, as Muharram approached, Khomeini gave orders that instead of holding the usual passion plays, rawdahs, and processions in honor of the martyrdom of Husain, the people should demonstrate against the regime. The radical potential of these pious ceremonies had reached its apotheosis.
On the first three nights of Muharram, men put on white shrouds to symbolize their readiness for martyrdom, and ran through the streets, defying the government curfew. Others shouted anti-shah slogans through loudspeakers from the rooftops. The BBC claimed that seven hundred people were killed by the police and army in these few days alone.76 On December 8, six thousand people gathered at the Behest-e Zahra cemetery in south Tehran, where many of the revolutionary martyrs were buried, crying “Death to the shah!” In Isfahan, twenty thousand people marched through the streets, and then attacked banks, cinemas, and a block of flats inhabited by American technicians. On December 9, on the eve of Ashura, Ayatollah Taleqani, who had just been released from prison, led a magnificent peaceful march, which wound through the streets of Tehran for six hours; between 300,000 and a million and a half people took part, walking quietly, four abreast. There were other peaceful demonstrations in Tabriz, Qum, Isfahan, and Mashhad.
On Ashura itself, there was an even bigger march in Tehran, lasting eight hours, in which almost two million people participated. The demonstrators carried green, red, and black flags (symbolizing, respectively, Islam, martyrdom, and the Shiah) interspersed with banners reading “We will kill Iran’s dictator!” and “We will destroy Yankee power in Iran!” There was growing confidence that, united as never before, the people of Iran would really manage to get rid of the Pahlavi state. Many felt as though Imam Husain himself was leading them into battle that Ashura, and that Khomeini was directing them from afar, like the Hidden Imam. At the end of the demonstration, a resolution was passed: Khomeini was invited to become the new leader of Iran, and Iranians were urged to band together until the shah was overthrown.
Three days later, the army tried to organize pro-shah demonstrations, and clashes between the revolutionaries and the military became more violent.
The shah made a last effort at appeasement, appointing Shahpour Bakhtiar, a known liberal, to form a constitutional government; the shah promised that he would dismantle SAVAK, release political prisoners, and make fundamental changes in his economic and foreign policy. But this came a year too late; the people had heard too many promises made under duress to give these latest offers credence.
Khomeini declared December 30 (which, according to the Islamic calendar, was the first anniversary of the Qum massacre) to be a day of mourning. There were more deaths in Mashhad, Tehran, and Qazrin;
pictures of these latest martyrs were displayed alongside portraits of Khomeini. On December 23, when soldiers tore up pictures of Khomeini in Mashhad, there was a skirmish, and twelve civilians were killed.