Amid all of the media and blogging attention the past two weeks on the political unrest following the June 12 Iranian elections, one recurring theme has continually resurfaced: the revolution. More specifically, a desire to parallel current events with the events of the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution that ended the Pahlavi dynasty. But how does today really compare to thirty years ago?
In order to examine this question, I've decided to post some selected quotations from the first-hand account recorded by Sattareh Farman Farmaian in her 1992 book Daughter of Persia. It is a chronicle of both personal and Iranian history, captured through the eyes of a member of the educated, liberal class. I've chosen these passages not only because I enjoy Sattareh's perspective and her style of writing, but also because they provide a background with which to compare today's events to those of a generation ago. There are both striking parallels and distinct differences.
The diary is long, but intended to outline with some detail the events of 1978 and 1979. If you are interested, follow me over the fold. All comments, criticisms, and thoughts are welcome.
The passages I have selected are taken from chapters 13, 14, and 17 of Daughter of Persia, by Sattareh Farman Farmaian. If you want to learn more about the history of 20th-century Iran and Iranians, it is an excellent starting point.
We begin in the closing days of 1977:
I believe it is safe to say that, in the fall of 1977, not a single person in Iran thought that the Shah’s overthrow was even a remote possibility. He had an army of more than half a million men run by dozens of highly paid, loyal generals, and spearheaded by thousands of elite "Immortals," the Imperial Guard, who had sworn to fight for him to the death. While we knew that our government continually bombarded us with propaganda and lies about the greatness of our military and its commander-in-chief, nevertheless it was hard not to think that at least some of the propaganda must be true, especially when we were always learning from the American and other foreign media what a strong military power we were. Mohammed Reza Shah seemed as invincible as any god-king who ever sat on the throne of Cyrus.
That year was marked by the visit of the Shah and the Queen to Washington, DC, and a reciprocal visit by President Carter to Tehran:
...many Iranians, including me, were hoping and expecting that when the Carters came to Tehran at the end of December for the Western New Year, the Shah and the President would use the occasion to announce at last the beginning of a new political era, with a free press and an open system of government...On December 31, 1977, millions of people turned on their radios to hear the live broadcast of the dinner speeches being made by the two heads of state. But we heard no announcement of a new era. President Carter simply praised the Shah for his "great leadership," which, he said, had won our monarch the love and admiration of his people and had made our country "an island of stability" in our troubled region of the world.
Iranians were at first incredulous, then contemptuous and outraged. How could the United States, everyone asked, be so ignorant, so utterly unaware of the truth? Didn’t the Americans know?
I reminded myself that nations saw other nations only through the blinding light of their own interests. But my God, I thought, if this is "an island of stability," what are the other places like?
Although the Carter Administration had originally made efforts to get the Shah to allow for more freedom of the press and of speech, this visit was read by the Shah as a green light from Washington to continue his policies of repression.
A week after Mr. and Mrs. Carter’s departure, on January 7, 1978, an article supposed to have been written by the Shah’s minister of information appeared in a Tehran newspaper. It accused the clergy of working with international communism to destroy the White Revolution. It also grossly slandered Ayatollah Khomeini, accusing him of immorality and of being a British agent. The next day, a large crowd of religious leaders, students, and citizens in Qom marched in protest. The government, no longer concerned about American pressure, ordered the police to break up the demonstration with gunfire. Dozens of people were killed and many more were wounded; many of the victims were mullahs and seminarians. For the first time since 1963, rioting took place not on the university campuses but in the streets of an Iranian city.
Violence begats violence:
That winter and spring, a cycle of violence, mourning, and renewed violence began such as our country had never known in modern times. As with any deaths, our Moslem religion required that the January killings be commemorated after forty days, and in February there were massive memorial protests in a dozen towns, protests in which even women and children took part. In Tabriz, rioting broke out, and when local police refused to fire on the rioters, the government summoned troops and tanks, injuring and killing many. These dead were mourned and memorialized in their turn by further protests forty days later, in March, and these demonstrations became large-scale riots in which protestors fought with police and religious fanatics attacked or set fire to every symbol of "Westernization" that they could find: foreign banks, luxury hotels, liquor stores, Western movie houses. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured, and every death not only furnished a reason for another demonstration forty days later, but drove the families of the dead and thousands of sympathizers into the arms of the religious opposition.
Although originally working at cross-purposes, the liberal opposition and the hardline Islamic leaders were driven together into a single block by the Shah's repression. The economic woes of the late 1970s would add another: the labor unions and leftists.
To stem inflation and thus remove some of the incentives for unrest, the Shah had allowed Premier Amouzegar to cut back on government spending. Unfortunately, as also happens in more stable and highly developed countries than mine, slashing the budget produced massive layoffs and hence more discontent. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands if not millions of workers and transplanted villagers who depended on the government’s urban development and construction projects for their daily bread found that jobs and money were scarce. During the summer, strikes and work stoppages began in electrical plants, waterworks, textile factories, auto assembly plants, and other industries. Workers and laborers in Tehran and the major towns rioted, leftist and Islamic guerilla groups attacked and set fire to Western cinemas and other hated symbols of Pahlavi rule, and police and army troops shot into the crowds, killed demonstrators, and imposed martial law.
The extreme anti-Westernism is not a factor in the 2009 protests. Although the hardliners continue to go back to the well-worn talking point of American, British, and Israeli interference, it is not something driving the resistance today.
On September 4, in observance of a religious holiday, a series of peaceful demonstrations began in the capital, larger than any in the past. The crowds were gigantic, composed of men and women from every class and political viewpoint, with tens of thousands of people chanting in unison the best-known slogan of the opposition movement: "Allahu akbar, Khomeini rahbar": "God is great, Khomeini is our leader." Over the next three days, despite the calls of the National Front and the moderate religious opposition for restraint, these peaceful demonstrations became larger and more radical-sounding, until over half a million people were shouting slogans calling for the downfall of the Shah, an end to America’s presence in our country, the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile – and, for the first time, an Islamic republic.
It is important to note that the calls for an Islamic Republic were not the source of the revolutionary movement - they were the product of the Shah's repression and steadily grew with each and every martyr.
On Friday, September 8, unaware that on the previous evening the Shah had forced the cabinet to declare martial law, an enormous crowd estimated to be somewhere between five and twenty thousand people staged a sit-down protest in Jaleh Square in South Tehran. Ordered to leave by the troops of the general who had just been appointed governor of the capital – the same man who had ordered the shooting of protestors in June 1963 – they refused, and with that the soldiers began pumping round after round of bullets into the defenseless crowd. Soon Jaleh Square looked like a slaughterhouse, with blood running on the pavement and prone bodies piled up one on top of the other, wherever they had been sitting or standing. The killing went on all day. Army helicopter gunships hunted down demonstrators who fled. Not even the riots of 1963 had seen such deliberate and dreadful slaughter. September 8 became known to Iranians as "Black Friday."
This horrible event shattered any hope of gradual political progress, or even a return to normal life. The government had destroyed all possibility of compromise between itself and the moderate opposition...Strikes spread through the country to oilfields and refineries, chemical works, and other important industries. The mass demonstrations continued without interruption.
Whatever hope for political compromise that would leave the Shah in power was undermined by his own tactics. Every crackdown only served to radicalize the movement further.
Near the end of October the attacks on cinemas, liquor stores, and other signs of Pahlavi and "imperialist" corruption spread to the smaller towns. Many more oil workers went on strike, and oil production dropped well below what the country would need for fuel that winter.
Political demonstrations may have fueled the movement, but it was labor strikes which actually damaged the regime.
On November fourth, the worst violence Tehran had seen yet began when the army fired into a crowd of students at the University who, to mark the fourteenth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s exile to Iraq, were trying to pull down a statue of the Shah. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the center of the city, and smoke rose from the European shops on the Avenue Lalezar and every other business associated with the West, luxury, and imperialism. Foreign banks and the British Embassy were set ablaze and barricades of tires, rubble from construction sites, and abandoned cars were erected to block the way of the tanks that ground along the streets, and from which soldiers fired on unarmed demonstrators.
By this point in time, every political force in Iranian society outside of the military was aligning itself against the Shah (and against the West). The crisis was at a point of no return: either the Shah would fall or he would drive the military into a frightful civil war against its own people.
On December 2, 1978, Moharram arrived and during its ten days the violence increased again. Ayatollah Khomeini exhorted everyone to unite and sacrifice themselves in blood like Imam Hossein, until the soldiers threw away their arms to join the people’s cause. Crowds large and small filled the streets, angry men and black-veiled women with waving fists and bulging eyes. Neighborhood organizers and the "beards" 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.
The nightly calls of Allahu Akbar are probably the most eerie parallel between the revolution and the current protests. But a key difference was the presence of a charismatic religious figure in the person of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was able to inspire millions of people to keep up the struggle in the face of the fiercest opposition:
There were terrible street battles. At night, hundreds of thousands of people, even in Tajrish, stood in the cold on their roofs crying, "God is great!" Thousands more, dressed in white shrouds, defied the curfew the military government had imposed and, in emulation of Imam Hossein and his family, marched through the streets, offering themselves for slaughter as martyrs for the Khomeini revolution. On Ashura, the last day of Moharram, Karim Sanjabi and Ayatollah Taleqani led a march of two million people through the city, proclaiming Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership and demanding the abolition of the monarchy, an Islamic government, and social justice.
Against such an awesome array of "people power," the final crack began to break:
The sound of gunfire had become commonplace everywhere as the army fired into the churning crowds. But whenever the tanks and infantry approached them, the demonstrators threw carnations at the troops. "Brothers in the army," they chanted, "why are you killing your brothers?" Hearing these spine-chilling words, issuing from a million throats that spoke as one, was like hearing the ocean speak. Ayatollah Khomeini had been right: weeping young village draftees of eighteen or nineteen, sickened at killing other Iranians, would tear off their military insignia, stumble into the crowds, and give their guns to the demonstrators even as their comrades kept on shooting them.
The nation of Iran began to collapse:
By late December the whole country was on strike and sabotage was taking place at the army and air force bases. The strike by oil workers meant that the city’s fuel reserves were almost gone, and merchants and shopkeepers began hiding food and other basic supplies for fear of looting. The riots, bonfires, and gun battles were growing steadily worse. Army desertions were now into the hundreds each day, and the young deserters were handing over their weapons to the Ayatollah’s forces.
Far, far too late by this point, the United States attempted a political solution:
The Shah and [U.S.] Ambassador Sullivan were still talking. The United States wanted a civilian prime minister and a regency council to take charge. Everyone was sure that it could not be much longer before the Americans made the Shah install such a regime and abdicate – he clearly had no alternative but to step aside and appoint someone like Shapour Bakhtiar or Karim Sanjabi, whom he had released from jail with Mehdi Bazargan...At long last, on December 29, the Shah announced that he was replacing General Azhari with Shapour Bakhtiar, pending ratification of the appointment by the Majlis.
The power was no longer in the hands of the Shah. Khomeini had the upper hand, and he knew it:
Bakhtiar immediately announced that Ayatollah Khomeini was free to return to Iran, but the National Front merely reiterated its demand for the Shah’s formal abdication and Khomeini exhorted his followers to more strikes and protests. He had vowed not to set foot in Iran until the Pahlavi monarchy was gone, "thrown into the dustbin of history." ...Meanwhile, the Shah was still in his palace, protected by his "Immortals," the Imperial Guard, and no one knew exactly what he meant to do.
At long last, over a year after the original protests, an event unthinkable in more than 2,500 years of Iranian history occurred:
Tuesday, January 16, had been the date set for the Majlis to approve the Bakhtiar government...I noticed that the streets were strangely quiet. Tanks and trucks lined the boulevard as usual, but the helmeted soldiers were simply standing around, doing nothing...The quiet, after four months of demonstrations, honking horns, and gunfire, was eerie.
All at once, at about one o’clock, we heard shouting. Looking out the window at the street, we saw young soldiers jumping up and down, kissing and embracing each other, shouting, weeping. At that moment, the restaurant manager, who had turned on the radio to hear the outcome in the Majlis, cried out for everyone to listen. He turned up the volume and we heard the voice of the announcer saying that the Shah had left....
I looked down at the street again. Grinning newsboys were running toward the soldiers, waving a gigantic black two-word headline that covered the whole front page: "SHAH RAFT!" – "The Shah is gone!"
...everyone in the street was celebrating. On the scarred, littered boulevard, protestors, students, and armed guerrillas triumphantly brandishing rifles were shaking their fists in victory and yelling, hurtling along in cars and riding on the hoods and fenders. Demonstrators and passersby cheered and waved pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini. They hugged each other and the smiling soldiers, who stuck the carnations people thrust at them into the barrels of their guns.
Despite the celebrations, the military was still in place, but there was nothing holding it up any longer:
It was less than a month before Bakhtiar’s government fell. The Shah’s generals, bereft of their commander-in-chief, were stunned by their leader’s departure. A vacuum suddenly existed where none had been, and they did not know what to fill it with.
Bakhtiar warned of the danger of a military takeover and tried to maintain calm, but three days after the Shah left, a million people marched in Tehran to demand his resignation and Khomeini’s return. There were demonstrations in favor of the government, but they could not compare to those in favor of Khomeini. Army officers themselves were rebelling and taking command of their posts...The looting in Tehran had grown worse and spread to the countryside. When a huge army base in the mountains called Lashkarak fell into the hands of the revolutionaries, the teenage sons of the Galandwak villagers who were on the komiteh led a party to help sack it. For two days, the happy villagers came home with wheelbarrows full of shoes, radios, and guns, until there was nothing left to take.
At last, the Ayatollah returned to his homeland, after more than 14 years in exile:
In the final days of January, thirty people were killed when fighting broke out during a protest over the closing of the airport. And on January 29, Bakhtiar announced that Ayatollah Khomeini would be permitted to return to Iran.
Not in almost thirty years, since the nationalization of our oil by Mossadegh, had Iranians felt so joyous, so united in a common emotion, as at this moment. An extraordinary euphoria flooded the entire nation...Without being able to say quite how, we felt that Ayatollah Khomeini’s return would make us a better people. The numerous papers and magazines that had proliferated since the lifting of press restrictions printed poems that compared the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to the coming of the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam. Embezzling the country’s money, stealing the food of the orphans, neglecting the destitute, would become things of the past. Envy, selfishness, treachery, and filial disobedience would cease to be. Everybody would be able to realize their most decent, unselfish goals and aspirations.
The final collapse of the military was swift and decisive:
By this time it was obvious that Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters had, for all practical purposes, already won. Bakhtiar’s government was all but nonexistent. Not only his regime but the whole state bureaucracy had collapsed. The ministries were empty of employees...The civil servants, like everyone else, were on strike. The city’s neighborhoods were in the hands of the Mojahedin, radical Islamic student groups, Tudeh, and other armed organizations, and were run and supplied by the komitehs, which reported to the mullahs. The Imperial Guard was still loyal to the government, but the leaderless generals were disputing among themselves about whether to keep on supporting Bakhtiar or reach an understanding with Ayatollah Khomeini. The commander-in-chief of the air force himself had supplied the helicopter that had taken Ayatollah Khomeini on his visit to the cemetery [to visit the graves of martyrs]. Soldiers were now deserting by the thousands.
Bakhtiar courageously continued to call for the rule of law. But on the evening of Friday, February 9, when the Imperial Guard attempted to crush a mutiny by air force cadets and technicians on their base near Jaleh Square, the street bands and other underground organizations sprang to arms to help the mutineers. After a few hours, finally demoralized by the killing of fellow soldiers and other Iranians, the Imperial Guards withdrew. The mutineers and revolutionaries distributed truckloads of guns to the neighborhood and to students at the University and set up street barricades from one side of the city to the other. Then, for two days, they broke open prisons and led mobs in attacks on police stations and armories. By Sunday, February 11, not only the guerrillas but every male in Tehran who was old enough to walk had a rifle or a machine gun, and the barracks of the Imperial Guards and the main army bases were under attack.
That afternoon, the generals of the Supreme Military Council declared the army neutral in the conflict, and we learned over the radio on the news that evening that Iran now belonged to the forces of the Islamic revolution.
Of course, the story doesn’t end here, though the reign of the last Pahlavi Shah does. After the final abdication, and after the unrealistic euphoria began to dissipate, a power struggle emerged among the various forces that had united under a common desire to oust the Shah. Over time, the hardline mullahs were able to force out the various liberal and leftist leaders and then, under the pretext of national security with Iran-Iraq war as backdrop, execute them. But despite all of the continued meddling in Iranian affairs by the West during the 1980s, Sattareh Farman Farmaian concludes with a profound admission of truth. The problems of Iran today cannot be blamed on outsiders. I’ve quoted this passage at length because I find it so moving and inspiring – and so applicable to social change today, anywhere in the world:
...now I understood how I had been part of this failure. Always believing that there was still plenty of time, I had procrastinated, saying to myself that I could teach Iranians about the importance of democracy, of having a genuine political process, of making our government listen to us, after I had raised the living standard. To this end, which I had believed to be the more urgent one, I had been willing to postpone speaking out until it was too late. Like other people who knew what was happening in our country and who understood the importance of political participation and freedom of expression, I had been afraid – afraid of prison, torture, and exile, afraid of sacrificing my ambitions and my cherished dreams. Iranians like me had missed our chance, neutralizing ourselves by keeping our mouths shut, withdrawing from the political process, letting the Shah do what he wanted.
This harj-o-marj [chaos] was the ultimate fruit of that. It had happened because we, who should have been teachers of the ignorant, did not set an example of leadership, did not sacrifice ourselves, our careers, our cherished dreams, to protest what the Shah was doing to us. We did not speak out against his injustices and his lack of respect for the people’s voice. Perhaps, since we had so few examples of courage and principle to imitate after Mossadegh, we couldn’t be blamed for letting SAVAK intimidate us. Perhaps too, we could not have won human and political rights for the Iranian people no matter how brave and unselfish we were. But if the Shah had suffocated us, we had also let him. I felt now that if enough of us, the moderate, educated, reasonable people, had gotten together, spoken out, resigned from our jobs, gone to jail, and even died – as a few brave ones had – we might have had the leader we needed now.
And unlike us, the mullahs had had guts. They had endured jail and exile. They had let themselves be beaten, tortured, and killed to destroy the Shah. They had had no plan, no program, and almost nothing positive to suggest – only "The Shah must go!" But they had been brave. While we had waited to see what would happen and which way the wind blew, they had ridden the wave of the people’s rage. Now they were stepping into the leadership vacuum the Shah had created, the vacuum we had let him create. They weren’t taking control because they had planned to, or because it was "destined," but because people like me had no strong alternative to offer. There had been no more Mossadeghs. Once more, the long struggle for liberty was being aborted. But this time, I thought, we couldn’t blame the foreigners. This time we, the fortunate Iranians, the educated ones, had aborted it ourselves.
If Iran is ever to be become a nation with freedom and liberty, it will be because Iranians make it so, themselves.