Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (10 page)

In 1963, the shah launched the White Revolution, his far-reaching plan to re-engineer Iranian society. He aimed to borrow the Left’s ideas about social justice and equality while implementing them without revolutionary violence or class warfare. The centerpiece of the White Revolution was a land-reform plan that broke up many of the big inherited landholdings and parceled them out to former tenant farmers. It also included a national literacy campaign, introduced suffrage for women, and nationalized forests, pasturelands, and water resources. Other legislation privatized state-owned enterprises and allowed workers to earn shares in the companies where they worked.

The White Revolution remains a source of huge controversy even today. Its supporters say that it essentially succeeded in its aim of breaking down some of the structural barriers that held Iran back and creating a base for modern economic development. Its critics—including many of those who hold power in today’s Islamic Republic—say that its reforms were primarily cosmetic and delivered on few of its promises. What is indisputable about the White Revolution is that it left hardly any aspect of political or economic life in the country untouched. It shook the social landscape. Traditional landholding families gave up farming and moved into finance and manufacturing, spurring industrialization. Peasants who received their own land aspired to new, middle-class lives. And millions of other rural Iranians began to head into the cities, which beckoned with jobs in factories and services. Urbanization, which utterly transformed the face of the twentieth century, was off to a roaring start in Iran. The impending oil boom of the 1970s would turbocharge it.

The shah himself was a contradictory figure. A playboy in his youth, he retained until the end of his days his fondness for beautiful women and flashy cars. Yet he was also intelligent, a hard worker with a strong sense of duty. Like his father, he spent considerable amounts of energy trying to check the power of the Shiite religious establishment, but he also harbored a personal brand of deep, almost mystical belief in Islam. At some moments he gave way to vacillation or crippling paranoia, while at others he displayed considerable political astuteness. He relentlessly pushed for greater economic performance, even as he indulged in the traditional prerogatives of a monarch who regarded the entire country as his personal property, amassing enormous wealth and tolerating highly visible corruption among his relatives and courtiers.

The shah continued to fear the power of Iran’s Communists, by now driven deep underground by wave after wave of SAVAK-engineered repression. He had launched the White Revolution in recognition of the urgent need to co-opt the
Left’s demands for radical reform. For years Iran was home to one of the Middle East’s most powerful Communist Parties, the Tudeh, and he and his courtiers were well aware of its ability to exploit social tensions. In 1949 the shah barely escaped an attempt on his life, and the young gunman was identified as a member of the Tudeh (though historians have since disputed the accuracy of this claim). The shah unleashed a huge police action against the Communists that did considerable damage. But he also knew that the party could be eliminated for good only by addressing the political conditions that sustained it. The White Revolution, as historians have sometimes said, was designed above all to head off a Red one.

In this, at least, it succeeded. But the costs were high. In reality, the reforms—almost always imposed from above with little feedback from below—were ill-conceived and erratically implemented. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński wrote a vivid account of the Iranian Revolution in which he observed: “Development is a treacherous river, as everyone who plunges into its currents knows.”
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He was right. The Iranian regime’s uncritical admirers overlooked the destructive effects of the shah’s reforms.

For one thing, he did not really trust private initiative. Instead, he followed the reigning economic orthodoxy laid down by the postwar theorists of “development economics” and reinforced by the lending policies of the World Bank. It was a model heavy on state intervention, which suited the shah’s centralizing proclivities just fine. He believed in planning rather than markets, protection rather than openness to trade. One of the core tenets of the approach was “import substitution.” Rather than pay for goods produced outside of the country, the Iranian government pushed the creation of indigenous manufacturing, in fields ranging from electronics to helicopters. While this created jobs and promoted the growth of a domestic technical class, these new industries—usually state monopolies that were protected from external competition by high tariffs—turned out to be inefficient. The hidden costs of this sort of development were high, and so these projects tended to become a drag on the economy in times of crisis.

One reform effort in 1972 offered a good illustration of the sorts of political disruptions that could result from breakneck modernization. The shah’s planners decided to introduce the Western-style mass production of bread. Iranian consumers generally preferred the traditional bread that was baked fresh each morning in the ovens of the local bazaar—but no one asked them. Some six thousand bakery workers lost their jobs (though the planners had assumed that the number would be even higher). Shoemakers were hit by a similar shift, almost overnight, to automated manufacturing. Such measures were part of the government’s broader effort
to encourage a rational economy of modern supermarkets and department stores, one in which the bazaars and long-established guilds no longer played the influential role to which they were accustomed. This eroded the shah’s support among the more tradition-minded members of the middle class—who expressed their growing opposition by building ties to the dissident clergy.
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If the shah had hoped that undermining these traditional estates would bolster his own rule, events soon showed that he was sadly mistaken. The speed and intensity of their country’s transformation left Iranians reeling. The displaced rural folk who crowded into the new suburban shantytowns found themselves in a strange new landscape filled with seductive distractions. Many lost their way. Social vices like prostitution, drug addiction, and alcoholism were rampant. Parental authority broke down, as children succumbed to delinquency or decadence. Others reacted by clinging even more defiantly to their Shiite faith, the one source of identity that tended to survive the move from village to city more or less intact. If you needed advice on how to find your way in this topsy-turvy world, the local mosque was often the best place to look. Urbanization thus had the paradoxical effect of fueling a revival of traditional religion. One scholar has compared this dynamic in the shah’s Iran with England’s Industrial Revolution, when members of the new urban middle class reinvented religious practice by turning to John Wesley and his socially activist Methodist movement.
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Even those who directly benefited from the opportunities afforded by the shah’s modernization program could not escape the feeling of alienation. Farman Farmaian, a pioneering social worker who received her degree in the United States, understood perfectly well that her likelihood of receiving an education would have been almost zero had she been born just a few years earlier than she was. Yet she could not help feeling dismay as she watched what was happening. In her book
Daughter of Persia
(1992) she supplies a vivid snapshot of the 1970s:

            
An almost delirious admiration for things Western had seized the country. Everywhere in North Teheran one saw liquor stores, fancy international hotels, and signs advertising Gucci clothes or Kentucky Fried Chicken, as well as Western movie theaters and discos where young people could dance and drink on Thursday nights until all hours. Everyone, especially the young, was avid for European or American clothes, films, music.

                    
Such developments might not have seemed disturbing in the West, but in our country, propriety and filial obedience provided the glue that held families together, and hence society itself. Many people felt that we were
not only trying to catch up with the West, but to become the West, while an entire older generation of parents, even among Persians of my class, was shocked and outraged at what these Western ways were doing to their children, culture, and what Iranians considered moral behavior. . . . Even the poor immigrants in the Tehran shantytowns, who deeply disapproved of the garish billboards and—to us—risqué cinema posters displaying the faces and limbs of Western movie actresses, craved Pepsi-Cola and Levi’s.
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The most famous chronicler of this queasy sensibility was Jalal Al-i Ahmad, an Iranian writer who coined his own word for it. He called it
gharbzadegi
, usually translated as “westoxification” or “occidentosis.” His immensely influential book,
Occidentosis: A Plague from the West
(1962), portrayed Iran as a unique society under assault from the alienating “machine culture” of the industrialized West. As he saw it, his country was coming under the control of forces it could not really understand or command: “If we define occidentosis,” he wrote, “as the aggregate of events in the life, culture, civilization, and mode of thought of a people having no supporting tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation, but having only what the machine brings them, it is clear that we are such a people.”
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The shah’s Iran experienced all the contradictions of what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “crises of prosperity.”
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Perhaps the most fundamental paradox involved education. The enormous surge in university enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s meant that educational institutions were churning out graduates faster than the economy could generate jobs for them. Masses of underemployed young male intellectuals are a reservoir of instability for any society that is undergoing a tumultuous shift from one sort of social order to another. Needless to say, it was clear even to those who did not have the benefit of university degrees that they lived in a society plagued by profound inequality and social stratification. But it was the educated who tended to ruminate about the causes and felt challenged to come up with possible remedies.

The problem was that the shah had closed off every possible avenue for political expression. The crackdowns on the Communists continued. In 1951, as Mossadeq pressed for nationalization, the Tudeh, long since driven underground by the secret police, revealed astonishing resilience by organizing big public demonstrations in support of his government. This unnerved the shah and his entourage, reinforcing their paranoia about Communism’s hidden strength—and prompting SAVAK to keep its operations focused on the Tudeh for decades after the party became essentially moribund. After the 1953 coup, the shah also outlawed Mossadeq’s National
Front, choking off the option of moderate secular nationalism. The exile of Khomeini and the imprisonment of other recalcitrant clerics muzzled the religious establishment. By the 1960s, only two political parties remained—and both were fakes, staffed by the shah’s followers to provide a democratic facade.

Still, some young Iranians concluded that adopting leftist ideologies merely meant exchanging one brand of imported Western intellectual tyranny for a different one. So they set out in search of solutions closer to home. In this search they were gradually influenced by an array of thinkers who combined the old ideas of the Left with new ideas about anticolonialism and national self-awareness. The liberation struggle in Algeria, where Muslim socialists were fighting a war of independence against the French, was particularly resonant. Pan-Arabism and Baathism, which shaped political discourse throughout much of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, showed how socialist ideas could be melded with radical nationalism, but they held limited appeal for Iranians, who tended historically to define themselves in contrast to the mostly Sunni Arabs.

It was perhaps inevitable that many educated Iranians in search of a potent but distinctive alternative to the shah’s regime would turn to Islam. For centuries the Iranian religious establishment had served as a latent source of opposition to the overweening power of the state. In 1890, leaders of the Shiite ulama, the hierarchy of religious scholars, had instigated a highly effective protest against a tobacco concession that the shah had awarded to Great Britain. Desperate to thwart growing foreign control over the Iranian economy, the most important religious authority, Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issued a fatwa, a legal ruling, prohibiting the use of tobacco, which was a highly popular commodity at the time. Overnight Iranians ceased consuming it, rendering the British concession virtually worthless. Two years later the shah repealed the privileges he had granted the British, in the process acknowledging the power of the clergy to influence Iran’s political agenda.

That power was on display again in 1906, when the clergy and the rising middle class combined forces in a revolt based on demands for a constitutional order with an elected parliament at its heart. The Iranians got their parliament, but the revolt collapsed when key clerics decided that secular democrats were assuming too much power in the new system. The Constitutional Revolution then devolved into a long interregnum of anarchy that ended only with the rise to power of Reza Shah, the ruthless soldier who seized power and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Shah, highly focused in his dictatorial ambitions, understood the mobilizing potential of the Shia religious establishment all too well and saw undermining it as one of his major tasks.

Reza Shah’s secularizing tendencies worried many of the leading clerics. Yet the dominant religious authorities during the early years of his son’s rule—especially Grand Ayatollah Hossein Tabatabai Borujerdi, effectively the leader of Iran’s Muslims from 1947 to 1961—were quietists who preferred to maintain their distance from day-to-day politics. The younger generation respected his wishes while Borujerdi remained alive, but after his death one of them emerged into public view as a harsh critic of the shah’s policies, openly articulating the objections that many other clerics were unwilling to utter aloud.