By Ray Takeyh & Reuel Marc Gerecht
Thursday, February 21, 2019
The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution has
sparked the usual lamentations from many Iranians. They revolted for democracy
only to have the Machiavellian mullahs hijack their revolution and squash its
liberal aspirations.
Such soothing revisionism is the wont of Persians,
especially those who now live in the West and routinely contort history to fit
their preferred narrative. The uncomfortable truth: In 1979, the vast majority
of Iranians wanted an Islamic government. They may not have understood all the
dimensions of the theocracy that Ruhollah Khomeini was contemplating, but they
certainly wanted their spiritual leaders to oversee the temporal realm.
Iran is today the most consequential Muslim state in the
Middle East precisely because the revolution wasn’t a story of democracy
betrayed, but rather an Islamist pledge that Iranians first redeemed and then
came to regret. Forty years ago, Iranians had masuliyat, responsibility for their own fate, and they chose
poorly. The political and religious writings of disgruntled revolutionaries
have often been fascinating — the most “progressive” in the region — because
the authors confess their own mistakes. They don’t blame America for the
despotism brought on by their zealous embrace of a revolutionary faith.
In the 1970s, behind all the glitter of the shah’s
modernization, Iran was experiencing a spiritual revival. The same was
happening throughout the Middle East, where the magnetism of secular
dictatorships had faded and Islam as an explicit politico-cultural creed had
gained ground. In Iran, religious books topped the best-seller lists and annual
pilgrimages attracted large numbers. Men with beards and women wearing
religious attire became a common sight in the universities and even government
offices. Iranians then, unlike those today, filled the mosques on religious
commemoration days. Anthony Parsons, an unusually astute British ambassador,
recalled in 1976 “a well-informed professor at Aryamehr University [Iran’s
MIT] telling me that about 65% of his students were motivated by Islam and
about 20% by communism while the neutral remainder would always side with the
Islamist groups if it came to trouble.”
Two intellectuals would do much to popularize Islamist themes,
although neither would live to see the triumph of the revolution. Jalal Al-e
Ahmad’s 1962 book Gharbzadegi, whose
title loosely translated as “Westoxification,” was a celebration of indigenous
values untouched by Occidental intrusion. Born of a religious family, Al-e
Ahmad was a clerical student who fell under the influence of Marxism, and he
saw Islam as inextricably intertwined with the Iranian identity. Casting aside
Islam, as westernized Iranians often did, degraded an essential part of being Persian.
For Al-e Ahmad, Islamic history was glorious; Occidental history, a prelude to
aggression. The charge of Westoxification became an effective gravamen against
those who understood that modernization, by definition, meant borrowing ideas
from Europe and America. Al-e Ahmad died in 1969, but his critique gained power
as tier-mondisme became the dominant
creed in Middle Eastern universities. Another intellectual, Ali Shariati,
further electrified Iran’s lower- and middle-class youth, who were attending universities
in ever greater numbers, with his own equally contentious reading of Islamic
history.
Shariati cleverly developed religion as an ideology of
rebellion. With a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in the sociology of religion, he
reconceptualized Shiism as a religion of dissent and presented the Prophet
Mohammed as a rebel seeking social justice. He clearly understood that most
Iranians were looking for a belief system anchored in Islam. Shariati offered
his mesmerized listeners a chance to accept modernity while holding fast to
beloved traditions. Pivotally, he divided Iran’s clergy into two historical categories:
red and black mullahs, the former being the harbingers of social justice, the
latter its antagonists. Shariati died in exile in London in 1977 of natural
causes, but soon his death was attributed to the shah’s secret police. In the
Iran of the 1970s, no one died of natural causes. The revolutionaries needed
their martyrs.
Bolder and more charismatic than Al-e Ahmad and Shariati,
Khomeini, too, understood the religious impulse in Iran’s developing rebellion.
Expelled from Iran in 1964 because of tenacious opposition to the shah,
Khomeini in 1970 published a series of lectures entitled “Islamic Government”
that called for clerical rule. The ayatollah’s contempt for democracy and his
hatred of religious minorities are clear in the book. Despite later claims by
many that they didn’t know about this text, copies of his “theocratic theses”
were widely available, including one at Harvard’s Widener Library. In private
correspondence, meetings, and telephone calls, the Princeton historian Bernard
Lewis apprised many in Washington of the lectures’ contents — and was denounced
by some in the State Department as a Zionist for doing so. On December 30,
1978, perhaps a bit late, the New York
Times even profiled the book.
In the 1970s, Iran had approximately 9,000 mosques, and
they were usually filled with worshipers. No secular party could command such a
constituency or national network. Mosques were not privileged sanctuaries for
the revolutionaries: Published documents from SAVAK, the shah’s intelligence
service and secret police, reveal that the organization maintained tight
surveillance of mosques. Dissident mullahs were regularly arrested, exiled, or
banished to different parts of the country. But the mosque remained a resilient
national institution despite the harassment. The shah could shut down the Tudeh
Communist party, but not the mosque.
As the revolution unfolded, Khomeini’s media-savvy aides
tried to sanitize the ayatollah, especially for Western audiences, and sweep
aside his inflammatory positions. But the public-relations management of an
antediluvian figure straight out of the Old Testament was difficult, as
Khomeini rarely concealed his contempt for liberalism. The Imam, as his
followers called him, understood better than most that the masses were
clamoring for Islamic rule. This was his revolution, and it was waged for
religious redemption. He regularly mocked those questioning clerical
participation in government and stressed that the Prophet Mohammed “ruled,
engaged in politics, and fought wars, never saying, ‘Let me sit at home and
devote myself to prayer and devotional reading; what business do I have with
politics?’” In interviews he was insistent about the real source of authority:
“I want to make it clear that government is the right of the religious
jurists.” As for laws passed by an assembly, they “should not be contrary to
the principles of Islam.”
The ayatollah was, of course, not the only opposition
leader. Iran had secular parties, such as the venerable National Front and the
Liberation Movement headed by the respected Mehdi Bazargan. Most of the leaders
of the opposition favored compromise with the shah, who was offering them a
constitutional monarchy with a free press and freely elected parliament. Yet no
liberal politician dared to challenge the Imam. The opposition leaders
appreciated that if they defied him, they would stand alone, deprived of public
support and with no role in the future of the country.
To be sure, the Iranian people may have hoped for a more
benign religious rule. But they should not be looked upon as victims of
clerical fraud. The revolution may have featured a coalition of forces, but the
most important leader was Khomeini. He could summon millions to the streets and
banish any man who challenged his vision. In 1979, the Iranian people revolted
for Islam. Having lived under a theocracy for four decades, they are, of
course, entitled to buyer’s remorse.
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