The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran
On 11 February 1979, the Iranian monarchy was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed. Iran thus became the first modern state to adopt an Islamic ideology and proved an inspiration to Islamist movements across the Middle East, Central and South-East Asia.
While American policy-makers were caught by surprise at the rapid descent of Iran into revolution, close analysis of the key events preceding the fall of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi shows that popular discontent had been festering below the surface for quite some time.The causes of the Iranian Revolution can be divided into long-term and shortterm factors. Key among the former are the modernizing reforms of the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza Khan, in the 1930s and 1940s, the 1953 coup, and the second set of reforms promoted by his son, Muhammad Reza, known as the 1963 White Revolution. The latter included the rapid industrialization and Westernization of Iran in the 1970s and the fact that the authoritarian and increasingly suppressive nature of the Shah's regime provided no avenues for voicing discontent.
ulama
Clerics or Islamic scholars who are learned in theology and the shari'a.
Reza Khan's programme of reforms and modernization aimed at making Iran self-sufficient. Inspired by Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he started by reorganizing the military, equipping it with modern weapons and improving its training. He then proceeded to curtail the power and the wealth of the clergy (the ulama), replaced shari’a with a Westernized judicial system and religious with secular schools, and imposed a ban on the wearing of the veil. The final set of reforms concerned Iran's economy. Reza Khan adopted an etatist policy, set up a comprehensive system of monopolies and pushed for rapid industrialization at a time when more than 75 per cent of the population was rural.
During the Second World War Reza Khan was succeeded by his son Muhammad Reza. Muhammad Reza followed in his father's reformist footsteps, but his hold on power was less secure. In addition to the disgruntled ulama and bazaar merchants who had been the main victims of the first reforms, communists and nationalists started to challenge the monarch in the 1940s and 1950s. Muhammad Reza outlawed the Communist Party in 1949 following an abortive attempt on his life, but the nationalists proved far more difficult to deal with. They were led by the prime minister, Muhammad Mussadiq, who had gained popularity by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Worried about the direction Iranian politics was taking, both Britain and the United States colluded with the shah to engineer the dismissal of Mussadiq. Not surprisingly, Mussadiq refused to accept his enforced resignation, upon which the shah panicked and fled the country. The fact that he was ultimately only restored to power in 1953 by the British and Americans meant that he lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Over the coming years this resulted in his heavy reliance upon repression domestically and upon assistance from his closest foreign ally, the United States. Both only served to alienate the population further.
It was in this context that the shah launched in 1963 a second set of comprehensive reforms known as the White Revolution which included land reform, the nationalization of forests, village education, voting rights for women, and further industrialization and modernization. This effort to modernize Iran was underscored by the vast oil revenue of the 1970s. It was further accompanied by an intensification of the shah's drive towards Westernization as well as his aim of transforming Iran into one of the five largest conventional military Powers at the time. From 1975 onwards the Shah's fortunes started to change when the GNP fell and the budget deficit rose dramatically. Iran had overreached itself through military purchases of more than $6 billion by 1977.
Industrialization had been accompanied by rural-urban migration with the result that the population of the capital, Teheran, swelled from one million to five million. By 1978 almost half the Iranian population was urban and most of them were poor. The education programme had pushed students into schools and universities but the number of graduates could not be absorbed into the economy. At the same time, the ruling elite continued to flaunt its wealth, the gap between rich and poor widened, social discontent and any form of criticism were heavily suppressed, and, rather than listening to the voices of the people, the shah was seen as listening only to the United States.Opposition to the shah, the ruling elite and the foreign community which was associated with them came from a variety of quarters: the middle class who had become impoverished, the ulama who resented the secularization, Westernization and consequent moral decline of society, the intellectuals who were suffocating in the oppressive environment, the bazaar merchants who had been pushed out of the market by the monopolies, students who had been assured good job opportunities after graduation but faced unemployment, and the increasing number of poor who had been promised everything and received nothing. In the absence of avenues to express the growing discontent, for the media were under heavy censorship, public meetings were controlled by the security services and all political parties with the exception of the regime's Rastakhiz Party had been dissolved, the mosque and Islam became the central means for mobilization.
The fact that Shi’a Islam had been born out of opposition shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and had since been the voice of the disinherited minority lent itself well to express the popular grievances against the shah and stoke the fire of revolution. The charisma and leadership of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a cleric and philosophy teacher who had been forced into exile, first in Iraq and then in Paris, brought together the different strands of opposition.
It ultimately placed Khomeini in a position to transform the revolution from what began as a coalition to overthrow the shah into an Islamic revolution aimed at the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran.Shi'a Islam
Muslim sect which emerged out of the struggle over the succession following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from Shi'a Ali (the Party of Ali) or those who supported the Prophet's sonin-law Ali's accession to the Caliphate. An estimated 15 per cent of Muslims are Shi'a. They are concentrated in the areas of Iran, Iraq and southern Lebanon, with smaller communities scattered throughout the Muslim world.
The new government was based on the concept of velayet e-faqih, meaning the rule of the jurist. Khomeini's notion of an Islamic republic was twofold. On the one hand, it stressed Islamic government as the rule of divine law over the people where the sovereignty lies not with the people but with God. On the other, it called for a republic based on democratic structures. Thus an Islamic republic, according to Khomeini, was a democratic state in its real meaning as it was based on a religion which was grounded in equality and justice.
The Shi'a discourse on government, however, was far from monolithic and evolved around the ideas of not only Khomeini, who is sometimes described as a fundamentalist Islamic republican, but also Ali Shariati, who died before the revolution, as well as Mehdi Barzagan and Abolhassan Banisadr, who were in the liberal Islamic republican camp. For instance, Shariati saw Shi'a Islam as a religion of protest, struggle and revolution, not of surrender and dogmatism. The main point of contention with respect to his fellow Islamists was that Shariati rejected both democracy, which he did not believe the people were ready for, and theocracy. Instead, he advocated an Islamic state led by a vanguard of progressive intelligentsia, not clergy. Barzagan, who became the first prime minister of the provisional government but was forced to resign nine months later when students occupied the American embassy, advocated a democratic and humanist Islam based on the system of governance through shura (consultation) in the days of the Prophet.
Finally, Banisadr, despite the fact that he was a member of the revolutionary leadership, was critical of the whole notion of Islamic government from the outset. It was this position that ultimately led to his forced resignation in 1981. His ideas, however, remained within the public domain, especially those which sought to diminish the centrality of violence in the struggle for freedom and those on Islamic economics. With respect to the latter he maintained that any scarcity of resources was a social rather than natural phenomenon as God had created enough of everything.The internal Iranian debate was to a large degree overshadowed by Khomeini’s charisma, but was also cut short by the Iran-Iraq War which broke out a year into the revolution in September 1980. The end of the war in 1988 and the death of Khomeini in 1989 ushered in a post-revolutionary ‘second republic’ in which internal debate re-emerged. The struggle between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, extremists and moderates, conservatives and liberals, or totalitarians and democrats within the Islamic camp led to a gradual opening up of Iran towards the outside world. It resulted in a change in foreign policy from emphasizing the ‘export of the revolution’, which had led Iran to support a number of Islamic resistance movements in the Middle East in the 1980s, to mainstream government-to- government relations. This change coincided with the emergence of the newly independent Muslim states in Central Asia from the 1990s. Economic pragmatism, which was Iran’s way out of isolation, also allowed for political moderation. At the same time, however, Iran remained wary of the forces it saw as furthering Western cultural imperialism, and the fear of losing the younger generation in any liberalization process shifted the tide back in favour of the revolutionaries. This was exemplified by the election of the former mayor of Teheran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as Iran’s new president in August 2005. He reversed Iran’s pragmatism and moderation, instead pursuing confrontational foreign and more isolationist domestic policies.