Iran in World History

Mohammad Mossadegh, prime minister of Iran’s first democratically elected 
government which nationalized Iran’s oil industry, met with US President 
Harry S. Truman in Washington, DC, in October 1951. Although Mossadegh 
initially hoped the United States would support his democratically elected 
regime, he was toppled by a CIA-led coup in 1953, an act that has continued 
to symbolize Western hypocrisy in the minds of many Iranians. 
National Park 
Service photo by Abbie Rowe, courtesy Harry S. Truman Presidential Library 
and Museum, accession number 73-3803

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to vote. At the same time, fearing threats to the shah’s power, the CIA 
created a secret police force, called the SAVAK, which would terrorize 
the Iranian population for the next two decades.
The equation of “modernity” with “Westernness” had been criti-
cized as early as the second half of the nineteenth century by Jamal 
od-din “Afghani” and others. By the 1950s the rapid pace of change, 
especially in major cities such as Tehran, seemed to many Iranians 
to represent an unquestioning capitulation to Western superiority. 
Perhaps the most vocal critic of elite Iranians’ infatuation with the 
West was the writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, author of the groundbreaking 
1962 book 
Gharbzadegi
(West-struckness). Al-e Ahmad saw Western 
culture as a disease that was ravaging Iranians from within: “I could 
say that 
gharbzadegi
is like cholera. If this seems distasteful I could 
say it’s like heatstroke or frostbite. But no. It is at least as bad as saw-
flies in the wheat fields. Have you ever seen how they infest wheat? 
From within. There is a healthy skin in place, but it is only a skin, 
just like the shell of a cicada on a tree. In any case, we’re talking 
about a disease.”
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Al-e Ahmad’s style was demagogical and not particularly literary, 
but it resonated with many Iranians. He was better at offering criticisms 
than solutions, however. In seeking to identify “authentic” Iranianness 
he settled on Shi‘ism, but his own Shi‘ite identity ultimately eluded him. 
This frustration is evident in the account he wrote of his pilgrimage to 
Mecca, tellingly entitled 
Lost in the Crowd
.
In 1963, the shah launched a series of reforms he called the “White 
Revolution.” Perhaps the most significant of these reforms was a land 
redistribution scheme whereby the government bought up land from 
wealthy landlords and resold it at a discount to the peasants who 
farmed it. As a vehicle for redistributing wealth, this program failed, 
since the resulting plots of land were so small that the peasants often 
ended up simply selling them back to the former owners. The landed 
aristocracy, for their part, complained bitterly, even as they benefited 
from opportunities to buy factories in or near major cities and to mech-
anize agricultural production in the countryside. Peasants whose labor 
was no longer needed on the farms flocked to the cities in search of 
factory work; most wound up unemployed, uprooted, and living in 
urban slums.
A more openly controversial aspect of the shah’s reforms was the 
establishment of women’s suffrage in 1963. This controversy was largely 
symbolic since Iran’s elections were not particularly democratic, but 

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religious conservatives saw it as an unacceptable precedent and raised 
an outcry. Many of the protesters were students in the seminary city of 
Ghom. The shah’s strong-armed response to these protests was roundly 
condemned by a fearless cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini.
The clergy as a whole were not happy with the changes brought 
about by the shah—many of them came from landowning families 
that resented the breaking up of estates—but traditional Shi‘ite quiet-
ism, which resignedly held that all governments until the return of 
the Twelfth Imam are illegitimate, combined with fear of the secret 
police, prevented them from speaking up. “Ayatollah” Khomeini, 
meanwhile—the title, accorded to high-ranking clerics, means “Sign 
of God”—won the admiration of many rank-and-file Iranians for his 
willingness to speak out against the shah. Not surprisingly, in June 
1963 he was arrested, sparking demonstrations during which govern-
ment forces killed several hundred protestors. In what was likely a 
protective move, Khomeini’s colleagues quickly elevated him to the 
supreme clerical rank of