Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (26 page)

The shah’s relations with previous administrations had been straightforward. Richard Nixon had viewed Iran as America’s proxy in the Persian Gulf and had shown little inclination to involve himself in the country’s internal affairs. Gerald Ford had followed suit. But Carter’s arrival in the White House, and his disapproving rhetoric about the limits of freedom in Iran, disconcerted the shah. The Iranian ruler was highly sensitive to the slightest shifts in US policy; it was the Americans, after all, who had helped to put him back on his throne in 1953 when all had seemed lost. So he was quick to offer concessions.

He released some political prisoners and made it known that human rights organizations would thenceforth be allowed to operate (within limits). Activists quickly took advantage of the chink of freedom to establish high-profile campaigns. New political groups formed, and lawyers and writers signed declarations criticizing the government. A series of poetry readings late in 1977 sponsored by the West German cultural institute in Tehran sparked a series of public demonstrations that showcased the dissatisfaction of the middle-class intellectuals.
¹
For the moment, most of the religious establishment held its fire. The main exceptions were Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, a politically active cleric who forged contacts with the moderate Islamist opposition groups, and Ayatollah Taleqani, a co-founder of the Iran Freedom Movement of Mehdi Bazargan. Shariatmadari, a cleric who had built up a powerful political organization among his followers, had grown critical of the White Revolution’s program of secularization and its encroachments on clerical power. Taleqani, who was strongly influenced by leftist thinking on economic justice, had lent his voice to Bazargan’s program of a “progressive” nationalism with a strong admixture of Islamic values. Yet most of the main clerics, still strongly influenced by quietism, were reluctant to enter the political fray.

This changed in October 1977. That month Khomeini’s eldest son died of an apparent heart attack, and thousands of the ayatollah’s supporters took to the streets to denounce the shah and his minions, whom they blamed for the death. Forty days later, when Islamic ritual dictated an additional mourning ceremony, they demonstrated again. Suddenly, Khomeini, largely forgotten until then, was back in the public eye. The shah vacillated, searching for a proper response. Then, in January 1978, one of Iran’s leading newspapers,
Ettalat
, published a long commentary denouncing Khomeini as a British agent, a sexual deviant, and a leader of the “black reaction,” the obscurantists who opposed the shah’s “progressive” reforms. (The shah’s camp always referred to the Communists as the “red reaction.”) By now Khomeini, still ensconced in his Iraqi exile, was a full-fledged
marja-e taqlid
,“a source of emulation” for millions of Shiites around the world. So this kind of insult could not go unanswered. The day after the article’s appearance, students in the seminary at Qom, the center of Iran’s spiritual life, told local merchants to shut down the bazaar. Then they filled the streets, their chants mocking the king who had dared to defame their hero. “We demand the return of Ayatollah Khomeini,” they chanted.
²
The security forces opened fire. Dozens of students were killed. The next day Khomeini published a statement calling for more demonstrations and congratulating the “progressive clergy” for finally standing up to the shah and the American infidels. (This was, in part, a calculated nudge aimed at the quietists; Khomeini was trying to urge the fence-sitters among the senior clergy to join the cause.)

Forty days later, on February 18, the deaths of the students in Qom were commemorated with more demonstrations. Bazaars and universities shut down. Protesters attacked police stations and hotels, anything that evoked the shah’s authority or foreign cultural contamination. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tabriz. More demonstrators were shot, their deaths marked in another forty days. The traditional rhythms of Shiite mourning had become an accelerant of modern revolution.
³
Violence surged again on March 29.

In May, however, Ayatollah Shariatmadari called for calm—and this time the protesters listened to him rather than Khomeini. Many observers concluded that the shah was regaining the upper hand. The government had tried to placate the religious opposition by cracking down on some of the most offensive manifestations of un-Islamic behavior, such as erotic cinemas and liquor stores. The shah’s officials tried to initiate talks with the largest of the myriad opposition groups that were now emerging into the open. Most of them were demanding a return to the constitutional framework defined in 1906. None of the major parties was calling for the
overthrow of the monarchy—much less the establishment of an Islamic Republic.
⁴
In early June, Prime Minister Jamshid Amouzegar declared, “The crisis is over.”
⁵

Some of the revolutionaries were not ready to give up. In July 1978, Mehdi Bazargan sent Khomeini a memorandum on tactics. Bazargan, a bearded, bespectacled intellectual who had served as oil minister under Mossadeq and had written extensively on the theory of “Islamic economics,” was an experienced political professional. The shah was promising free elections to placate the opposition, and Bazargan advised accepting the offer. While agreeing that the shah should go, Bazargan suggested that it might be worth allowing the institution of the monarchy to continue. He stressed playing by the rules of the still-extant constitution, which—at least on paper—limited the authority of the sovereign and provided for expansive democratic representation. He proposed that Khomeini moderate his attacks on American “imperialism,” since the new Iran would still be reliant on help from the United States and the other Western countries. And he also counseled against “a clerical monopoly of the leadership of the movement,” since the ulama lacked adequate political experience.
⁶

Khomeini, still in his Iraqi exile, did not take the advice. He maintained his attacks on the shah and the Americans and continued to stress that Islam was the guiding force of the revolution. “The whole nation, throughout Iran, cries out: ‘We want an Islamic Republic,’” he wrote. The monarchy needed to be eliminated, and the constitution for the new state should be “the law of Islam,” which he described, in a characteristic nod to leftist jargon, as “the most progressive of laws.”
⁷
Yet when he was asked to explain what he meant by the evocative phrase
Islamic Republic
, he refused to be drawn, saying merely that the details would be provided in the future.

The relative respite of the summer proved deceptive. Near the end of August, a movie theater in the hardscrabble oil town of Abadan, the Cinema Rex, went up in flames. More than four hundred people died. Who was behind the attack has never been conclusively established. It is possible that hard-line Islamists, some of whom denounced movies for religious reasons, were behind the arson. The film being shown in the theater at the time, however, assailed the regime, and that prompted many Iranians to believe that SAVAK had started the fire as a way of intimidating the opposition. The fire proved an extraordinarily polarizing event. Many members of the middle class—their loyalty to the shah already dented by his erratic economic policies and contempt for individual rights—parted ways with him for good. This marked the point when the movement against the shah began to spread from Khomeinist and Marxist militants to a broader revolt that had its roots in the shah’s harsh authoritarian politics.

The Pahlavi dynasty now entered its death spiral. Under American pressure, the shah swung back to a harder line, empowering the military to crack down on the protests. In early September, as a religious holiday began, crowds chanting pro-Khomeini slogans filled the streets of Iran. The government declared martial law—but many Iranians were unaware of the announcement. The next day, on September 8, a crowd of up to twenty thousand gathered in Jaleh Square in the center of Tehran, in unintentional defiance of the state of emergency. Troops opened fire on the massed demonstrators; helicopter gunships machine-gunned the stragglers. The streets ran red with blood. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed. After “Black Friday,” as it came to be known, there was no way for the monarchy to redeem itself.

By now the shah had prevailed upon the Iraqi government to expel Khomeini, but this proved a Pyrrhic victory. Khomeini’s arrival in Paris quickly revealed its advantages as a headquarters. He was now even better positioned to propagate the revolution’s message. He gave hundreds of interviews to reporters from around the world. Iranians from all walks of life made pilgrimages to Neauphle-le-Château, and a cross-section of illustrious visitors paid their obeisance to the man whose portrait was now replacing the shah’s as the most ubiquitous in Iran. A crowd of well-wishers from the homeland gathered outside the police barricades, and whenever Khomeini appeared, they broke into ecstatic cries, hailing him as “the imam.” Sometimes the faintest hint of a smile played over his face, but aside from that, he maintained his distinctive air of otherworldliness, never betraying a sign of his emotions.

In Iran itself the demonstrations continued, growing larger by the week. Strikes rippled out across the country. In September the oil workers stopped work—a final crippling shock to the economy, which ground to a halt as oil revenues tapered off. Collective emotions ratcheted up again in December with the start of the holy month of Moharram, when Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. Iranian sociologist Sattareh Farmaian, who wrote one of the most vivid memoirs of the revolution, recalled how Khomeini urged Iranians to emulate Hossein by sacrificing their lives:

            
Crowds large and small filled the streets, angry men and black-veiled women with waving fists and bulging eyes. Neighborhood organizers and the “beards” [pro-Khomeini activists] kept the protestors disciplined, but it was impossible to near a crowd without fearing that it might turn into a lynch mob. To set foot in the city was like getting caught in a slow-moving cyclone. A million people would move along Shahreza Avenue, the main artery across
the city, stretching from one side of Tehran to the other, carrying banners and shouting slogans, a thick, black, living river. On every street one saw shuttered, empty, burned-out stores, broken pavements, flashing police lights, overturned cars and trucks. The smells of burning buildings and rubber tires, billowing smoke, and tear gas pervaded the chilly air.
⁸

On Ashura, the climactic day of Moharram, Ayatollah Taleqani and National Front leader Karim Sanjabi led a demonstration of 2 million people through Tehran. By now the most effective slogan in the protesters’ repertoire was this one: “Brothers in the army: Why are you killing your brothers?” When young conscripts heard it, they often broke into tears, threw away their guns, and joined the demonstrators.

Iranians now faced a winter of political uncertainty, rampant violence, and shortages of food and fuel. The exiles in Neauphle-le-Château were feeling the cold, too. The ayatollah stuck to his rigorous schedule of prayer despite the complexities involved in remote-controlling a revolution. Throughout the year Khomeini had remained in constant contact with his network of supporters inside Iran. The state-of-the-art telephone switching system recently installed in Iran by the Americans was a major source of logistical support, enabling easy long-distance calls from Paris to anywhere inside the country. His speeches and statements, duplicated with the help of Xerox copiers, were smuggled in by the thousands. The cassette tape—cheap and portable—carried his sermons into the most remote corners of Iran.

The backbone of Khomeini’s network consisted of his former students, united by their teacher’s activist vision of Islam, and leaders from the firmly traditional caste of bazaar merchants (
bazaari
), who tended to be both deeply pious and profoundly skeptical of the culture of technocratic capitalism promoted by the shah’s reforms. The network financed its work both with donations from the
bazaaris
as well as with the traditional religious tax that Khomeini’s followers were duty bound to contribute to him. He had empowered one of his favorite students, Morteza Motahhari, to collect these funds and disburse them in accordance with the needs of the movement. Khomeini had already designated a group of other young clerics, including Motahhari, to act on his behalf in Tehran.

When he met with Bazargan in late October 1978, Khomeini asked him and his colleague Ebrahim Yazdi—the man who had asked Mohsen Sazegara to come to Paris from Chicago—to draw up a list of people who could advise him, acting as a sort of shadow government. The final group of eighteen that Bazargan and Yazdi came up with included members of Khomeini’s band of young activists as well as a cadre from Bazargan’s moderate Islamist Party, plus a sprinkling of bazaar merchants
and ex-security officials who had fallen out with the shah’s regime. They formed the core of what came to be known as the Revolutionary Council, which would become one of the most important institutions in Iran after the fall of the monarchy.
⁹

The formation of the Revolutionary Council was a clear indicator that the religious opposition to the shah was planning to take power. But Khomeini and his entourage chose not to advertise the fact. In public Khomeini was still careful with his views. He took every occasion to express his respect for democratic institutions, the vote, and freedom of the press. When asked what he meant by the enticing phrase
Islamic Republic
, he responded that it would be “a republic as you have in France.” Khomeini continued to make reassuring signals to the leftist groups, who, with their guns and radical ideas, still formed an important part of the militant resistance to the government. He made a point of saying that the new state would allow even Communists all the freedoms they wished as long as they pledged to stay within the law. Once he returned to Iran, he said, he would settle back down in Qom, hinting that he would leave the governing of the country to the politicians.