When Daoud tried to turn Afghanistan into a one-party state in 1975, he was not doing anything original. He was following advice given to him by a neighboring ruler who had achieved remarkable success in his efforts to wrench another deeply traditional and underdeveloped Islamic country into the modern age. This was the Head of the Warriors, the Light of the Aryans, the King of Kings, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran.
Iran, in 1977, was one of the world’s great economic success stories. When the shah ascended the throne back in 1941, at age twenty-one, his country had been an economic and political dwarf. Indeed, the shah owed his crown to the two outside powers, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, that had invaded the country and deposed his father, Reza Pahlavi, for what they deemed to be his friendliness toward Nazi Germany.
In the 1940s, Iran was a feudal backwater where the central government could barely collect taxes. Three decades later, it was an industrial powerhouse with a strong, centralized state. Its growth rates—averaging 9 to 10 percent for the decade between 1963 and 1973—were astonishing. It boasted modern communications networks and health care systems, car factories, and hydropower dams. Literacy was expanding. Iranian universities were filled with upwardly mobile youth—almost as many women as men—and thousands of others were studying overseas, all aspiring to join the ranks of the ever-expanding middle class. Iran’s military was the envy of the Middle East, well trained and armed with the latest weaponry. And it was all the achievement—or so you thought if you were an aspiring despot like Afghanistan’s Mohammed Daoud—of a single wise leader.
The shah’s rule had started off in uncertainty. The Allied invasion plunged Iran into chaos—but also freed up its political development. The departure of the shah’s domineering father, who had been known to administer personal beatings to his political opponents, ushered in an era of ferment. Political parties came out into the open to fight parliamentary elections; opinions proliferated in the media.
The end of the 1940s saw the rise of Mohammed Mossadeq, the reformist prime minister who rode to power on a wave of populist demands. Mossadeq fused moderate socialism and anticolonial nationalism into a program with broad electoral appeal. He made himself immensely popular by nationalizing the British-dominated oil industry in 1951. The British, who had built the Iranian oil industry, were accustomed to keeping the lion’s share of the revenues to themselves—a fact well known to the impoverished Iranian citizens who were left to suffer the consequences of their country’s underdevelopment. Because the shah was so dependent on outside powers, Mossadeq’s move undermined the very foundations of the Iranian monarchy. In 1953, prodded by the British, the US Central Intelligence Agency collaborated with a camarilla of royalist schemers and disaffected generals to topple Mossadeq’s government. From now on, firm in the knowledge that he enjoyed the patronage of the world’s most powerful country, the shah managed to reassert his control over the political system, rolling back the constitutional limits to his rule and establishing a ruthlessly effective secret police, the SAVAK (which received training from the United States and Israel).
After the fall of Mossadeq, the Americans and the British agreed with the Iranian government on a more equitable sharing of revenues from the sale of Iranian oil. The shah’s authoritarian instincts coexisted with a strong desire to modernize his country, and now he had the resources to make it happen. The shah’s father had instilled in him a great admiration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who created the new Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I. Atatürk was a ruthless modernizer, a secularist and a fan of all things Western who forced Turks to wear Western clothes, embraced European-style educational and political institutions, and imposed the Latin alphabet on the Turkish language (written until then in Perso-Arabic script). The young Mohammad Reza Shah wanted to follow suit, but he wanted to do it in a way that would respond to Iran’s unique conditions and at the same time cement his reputation as a monarch in step with modern times. He also wanted to steal some thunder from Iran’s powerful Communist Party, the Tudeh, as well as respond to insistent demands for reform from the new Kennedy administration in Washington.
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.”1 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.2
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.3
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.4
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.”5
The shah’s Iran experienced all the contradictions of what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “crises of prosperity.”6 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.
This was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, in March 1963, “publicly accused the Shah of violating his oath to defend Islam and the Constitution.”7 Khomeini assailed the White Revolution for what he saw as its cavalier regard for established mores. By extending the franchise to women, Khomeini said, the shah’s reforms were promoting the “spread of prostitution.” He also objected strongly to measures that would make it possible for non-Muslims to hold appointments as judges.
But what he objected to most of all was the shah’s dependence on the United States and his willingness to pursue close relations with Israel. In one of his speeches, alluding to the fact that Iran had formally recognized the government of Israel, Khomeini wondered aloud whether the shah was actually a “Jew” and an “infidel.” The shah’s secret police, the infamous SAVAK, arrested Khomeini. The security forces had already cracked down on religious students in the seminary town of Qom a few weeks earlier when they gathered to protest government approval for the opening of liquor stores there. Now the students rioted again. Dozens were killed.
Other leading clerics, though not quite as aggressive as Khomeini, shared his disapproval of the White Revolution; Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, before his death, had issued several fatwas condemning aspects of the shah’s reform program. After the riots in Qom, leading clerics worried that the shah was preparing to have Khomeini executed, and one of their most prestigious members, Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Kazem Shariatmadari, moved to have the title of “Grand Ayatollah” given to Khomeini as a preemptive measure. (Their reasoning was that the shah would never dare to end the life of one of the country’s highest-ranking clerics.) The shah backed down and released Khomeini. In 1964, Khomeini delivered another scorching reproach of the shah over a planned agreement for the stationing of US forces in Iran, which many Iranians regarded as a violation of their country’s sovereignty. Khomeini was arrested again.
By now his religious colleagues had tired of their tug-of-war with the shah, and there was little protest when the government sent Khomeini into exile. Most of the religious scholars saw their primary role as helping the faithful to navigate the tremendous moral and social confusion generated by the shah’s program. They did what they could to push back against plans to create a state-approved “Religion Corps” that would push an officially sanctioned view of Islam, and they resisted, to the extent that they could, the steady erosion of their moral authority. The shah was just as determined to keep them in their place. For the time being, the overwhelming majority of religious scholars saw no reason to engage in outright opposition.
The oil money was flooding in. The economy was booming. Few challengers dared to speak openly against the monarchy. And so, in 1971, the shah decided it was time to celebrate. Given the scale of his presumptive success, he saw no reason to stint. Years earlier his advisers had brought up the idea of organizing a public ceremony to showcase Mohammad Reza Shah’s achievements. Now the revenue from Iran’s energy windfall made it possible for those plans to be realized in the most lavish possible fashion. The festivities needed a suitably grandiose occasion, and so the shah decided that they should commemorate the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Persian monarchy, staring with the rule of King Cyrus the Great. The event began in October 1971, when the shah formally paid his respects at the tomb of Cyrus. The religious establishment of the country noted that their secularizing monarch was choosing to portray Iran’s pagan past as the real source of national glory. It was a vision that left little space for the role of Shiite Islam.
Most of the celebration took place nearby on the grounds of the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, where the organizers had erected a city of lavishly appointed tents to house the six hundred invited guests, who included sixty heads of royalty and heads of state. For the chief designer the shah hired the man who had redecorated the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy. The visitors, who were ferried between the site and the airport by a fleet of Mercedes-Benz limousines, watched a lavish son et lumière show against the backdrop of the ruins that included a procession by seventeen hundred Iranian army soldiers dressed in period costumes. Then the partygoers indulged in a six-hour feast catered by Maxim’s of Paris. The guests included Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Soviet president Nikolay Podgorny, US vice president Spiro Agnew, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, the Duke of Edinburgh and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, Spain’s Prince Juan Carlos and the Congolese president, Joseph Mobutu. It was, arguably, the jet-set event of the century—notwithstanding the abject poverty on display in villages just a few miles away from the site of the festivities. And no one paid much attention when that radical cleric, Khomeini, issued his own jeremiad against the event from his exile in Iraq.
The New York Times estimated that the total bill for the event came to around $100 million, though that probably involves a considerable amount of guesswork.8 Aware of the sensitivity of the subject, the shah forbade any discussion of the costs. He was, however, undoubtedly in a position to pay the bill. Oil revenues hit $885 million the year of the Persepolis celebration. The next year they doubled. In 1974 they reached $4.6 billion—and then soared to $17.8 billion in 1975. With little apparent consideration of the effects, government officials doubled the amount allocated to the shah’s Fifth Development Plan, raising it to $63 billion.9 Iranian growth went up by 30.3 percent in 1973–1974 and 42 percent in 1974–1975.10 Unsurprisingly, inflation shot up. The economy overheated. Lines of ships formed outside Iranian port facilities that did not have the capacity to unload all the goods that had been purchased.
Nineteen seventy-five was also the year that the shah decided to complete his country’s political transformation. Though he was ostensibly an ally of the United States, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi often expressed his contempt for what he saw as the indiscipline and moral laxity of the liberal democracies. Though a staunch anti-Communist, he believed in central planning and the Soviet Union’s apparent success in mobilizing resources for the common good. Having spent decades curtailing the opportunities for political expression of his subjects, he now moved to bring that process to its logical culmination by declaring Iran to be a one-party state. From now on, everyone had to be a dues-paying member of his Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. “Those who believe in the Iranian Constitution, the Monarchical regime, and the principles of the White Revolution, must join the new party,” he announced. “Those who do not believe in these principles are traitors who must either go to prison or leave the country.”11 It was precisely this brand of centralizing arrogance that Mohammed Daoud and many other leaders found so worthy of emulation.
They were mistaken. Politically and economically, the shah’s regime had attained the apogee of hubris. From here the initiative would pass to others.