The 1979 Islamic Revolution

I spent the Eid weekend, revisiting the Islamic Revolution of Iran. Scott Anderson’s ‘King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran’ and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s ‘Shah of Shahs’ (which I’m revisting after 15 years) are good primers about the revolution. Over the last two years, seeing the protests of the women against the regime got me wondering on how the same country four decades earlier, had so resoundingly rallied behind a theocracy.

The roots of the revolution can be traced back to the usual suspects of the Middle East – oil, despotic dictators, Islam and American interference. The Pahlavi dynasty had only two Shahs. The Senior Shah took over through a military coup but soon lost favour with the Allies during WWII due to his alleged patronage of Germany. The junior Shah was asked to take over in 1941 and ruled Iran until his abdication in 1979. The Shah, soon after coming to power, institutionalized a series of radical reforms which included women suffrage, land reforms and expansion of health and education. (There are a whole legion of websites on the internet that document the modern, almost surreal vibrancy of of Pre-Revolutionary Iran). During this period, a relatively unknown cleric who went by the name of Ayatollah Khomeini, from the city of Qom, began sermonizing against the Shah. After vacillating for a few months, the Shah finally packed him off to Najaf, the holy Shiite city in Iraq. For the next 15 years, it was from Najaf and through the technology of audio cassettes, that Khomeini’s speeches and radical message of anti-America spread through the length and breadth of Iran.

Meanwhile, the discovery of oil and its nationalization sent Iran’s foreign exchange earnings soaring. But endemic corruption within the Shah’s inner circle, extravagant and often irrational spending on Western arms, and inadequate investment in public infrastructure and universities widened inequality to the point where the gap between the ultra-rich and the poor became almost impossible to bridge. This is Kapuscinski:

A Lufthansa airliner at Mehrabad airport in Teheran. It looks like an ad, but in this case no advertising is needed because all the seats are sold. This plane flies out of Teheran every day and lands at Munich at noon. Waiting limousines carry the passengers to elegant restaurants for lunch. After lunch they all fly back to Teheran in the same airplane and eat their suppers at home. Hardly an expensive entertainment, the jaunt costs only two thousand dollars a head. For people in the Shah’s favor, such a sum is nothing. In fact, it is the palace plebeians who only go to Munich for lunch. Those in somewhat higher positions don’t always feel like enduring the travails of such long journeys. For them an Air France plane brings lunch, complete with cooks and waiters, from Maxim’s of Paris. Even such fancies have nothing extraordinary about them. They cost hardly a penny when compared to a fairy-tale fortune like the one that Mohammed Reza and his people are amassing.

By the late 70s, the Shah, due to his inability to read the room, had singlehandedly caused widespread unrest across the country that abdication soon became the only viable option. During this period, Khomeini after unsuccessfully attempting to cross over from Iraq via Kuwait by road, ended up in Paris. (Iranians were exempt from a visa those days). For about four months, with access to the international press, Khomeini became the international face of the revolution.  Neighbours living next to Khomeini in the Neauphle-le-Château suburb of Paris were pissed with the sudden influx of black robed, bearded clerics who began to flock to meet the Khomeini from all over the world.

The Carter administration’s failure to read the mood on the ground was equally mind-boggling. In the entire run-up to the revolution, barring a handful, almost none in the embassy’s diplomatic corps spoke Farsi. Until the very end, they remained hopeful of a compromise that would allow the Shah to cling to power, albeit with clipped wings. What was at stake, after all, were thousands of jobs tied directly to Iran’s arms shopping list.

Here is Kapuscinski again on the low human capital of Iranians on the eve of the Revolution that was the main spark for the Revolution:

In general, revolutions would stop breaking out around the world if, for example, Ecuadorans built Paraguay and Indians built Saudi Arabia. Stir, mix together, relocate, disperse, and you will have peace. Tens of thousands of foreigners thus begin arriving. Airplane after airplane land at Teheran airport: domestic servants from the Philippines, hydraulic engineers from Greece, electricians from Norway, accountants from Pakistan, mechanics from Italy, military men from the United States. Let us look at the pictures of the Shah from this period: He’s talking to an engineer from Munich, a foreman from Milan, a crane operator from Boston, a technician from Kuznetsk. And who are the only Iranians in these pictures? Ministers and Savak agents guarding the monarch. Their countrymen, absent from the pictures, observe it all with ever-widening eyes. This army of foreigners, by the very strength of its technical expertise, its knowing which buttons to press, which levers to pull, which cables to connect, even if it bhave in the humbles way, begins to dominate and starts crowding the Iranians into an inferiority complex. The foreigner knows how, and I don’t. This is a proud people, extremely sensitive about its dignity. An Iranian will never admit he cant do something; to him, such an admission constitutes a great shame and a loss of face. He’ll suffer, grow depressed, and finally begin to hate. He understood quickly the concept that was guiding his ruler: All of you just sit there in the shadow of the mosque and tend your sheep, because it will take a century for you to be of any use! I on the other hand have to build a global empire in ten years with the help of foreigners. This is why the Great Civilization struck Iranians as above all a great humiliation.

Anderson also argues that the 70s were a period of soul-searching for the Americans. The Watergate scandal, the quagmire in Vietnam and Carter’s election plank of ‘setting things right’ ended up shaping American public opinion against the Shah and showcasing the growing Islamic undercurrent as legitimate protests. Despite America recognizing the Iranian theocracy, the Hostage Crisis upended everything. Since then, there has been no diplomatic ties between the two. And today, 47 years later, the wound is still festering.

PS: During the seventies, at the height of the street protests, Saddam Hussein had a practical solution to the Iranian crisis. ‘Why not liquidate the Khomeini?’, he quipped. The Shah politely refused mentioning ‘We are not in the business of killing clerics’.

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