The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath not only brought down the Pahlavi regime and dismantled its elite; it also allowed, for the first time in Iran’s long history, the Shi‘i clerical establishment to assume political power. The magnitude of this paradigmatic shift, and the way a conservative Shi‘i establishment transformed into a radical force of dissent, becomes all the more striking when we set the Islamic Revolution in the broader political and cultural contexts of the past five centuries.
The unraveling of the ancient pact between religion and state, the pillars of an ancient social order with a conservative worldview, did not occur in a vacuum. As discussed in Part III, it was the outcome of a project of the state’s secular modernity that since the early decades of the twentieth century had shaped Pahlavi Iran; the trajectory, which gave the state far greater economic and political autonomy in implementing a top-down program of secularizing and centralizing reforms, gradually alienated the bazaar and the clergy, which in turn eroded Iran’s delicate sociocultural balance. In the middle decades of the century the quest for economic sovereignty and the National Movement under Mosaddeq did not succeed in dislodging Pahlavi because of foreign intervention, but more so because state-religion ties endured. The Shi‘i clerical establishment in effect was the beneficiary of the Pahlavi restoration; it consolidated without giving full allegiance to the state.
To understand how a program of state modernization in the Pahlavi era could be carried through independently of the religious establishment but also independently of a grassroots democratic process, we must look back at the circumstances in the nineteenth century, as discussed in Part II, whereby a number of factors, including the meager economic resources at the government’s disposal, made even selective reforms a formidable task. Long-standing geopolitical pressures from neighboring empires, suppression of indigenous ideas of reform and renewal (as in the Babi movement), and the aborted state-sponsored reform under Amir Kabir—all hindered Iran’s process of modernity. The experience of the Constitutional Revolution clearly demonstrated domestic and foreign obstacles to forging a constitutional regime. While the indigenous dissidents among the preachers and their bazaar support successfully challenged both the Qajar state and the authority of the conservative clergy, they succumbed to the interests of the landed nobility, to imperial vested interests, and eventually to the contingencies of security and territorial integrity that brought Reza Khan and his military cohort to power.
Despite demographic and economic deficiencies, ineffective institutional reforms, and resistance to European intrusions, the geopolitical equilibrium that prevailed in the Qajar period allowed Iran to survive the direct onslaughts of its neighbors. This was not merely because of European imperial deigns to preserve Iran as a buffer state, but more so because of renewed societal bonds and revival of a political culture that relied on the Persian model of kingship and appealed to the imperial memory of the Safavid past. The Safavid and the post-Safavid experiences, as discussed in Part I, made Shi‘ism a defining character of the state and a source of social cohesion and national identity. Resistance against hostile pressures on its frontiers and the forging of new commercial and diplomatic connections with the outside world helped tie the Safavid Empire to the Iranian plateau and set it apart from its Sunni nemesis to the west and east. To incorporate numerous regional entities into the Guarded Domains of Iran, the Safavid project of empire building also required a confederacy of the Qezilbash tribes, a political construct that in long run generated new tensions between the political center and its periphery. After the collapse of the Safavid Empire, at least two attempts to restore the Safavid order were inconclusive, largely because the Afshars and to some extent the Zands aimed to substitute the Shi‘i solidarity and renewal of the state-religion bonds with other sources of loyalty.
Beyond this sketch, looking for patterns over the course of half a millennium between the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the shaping of the Islamic Republic is a formidable task, and possibly a hazardous one. Long-term historical trends, the longue durée, are subject to many exceptions in time and space. Yet they help place the seemingly fragmented course of events into a relatively coherent landscape. Iran has preserved its territorial integrity since the sixteenth century despite domestic ups and downs and losses along its periphery; its political sovereignty endured, as well, against many odds. Military threats from mighty neighboring empires and nomadic and seminomadic incursions along its frontiers were not rare. The Guarded Domains of Iran, as it was traditionally known, survived in part because of a degree of decentralization along its provincial, ethnic, communal, and linguistic divides.
The Iranian state and social order were fragile, and the forces in the periphery frequently resisted domination by the state. Yet they contributed to a relatively cohesive cultural and religious core. In the Persian political culture, maintaining the balance between “the inland and the border” (Persian: bum va bar; and its synonym marz va bum: “the frontier and the inland”) was key to the security and prosperity of the Guarded Domains. The delicate balance between the sedentary center and the mobile periphery depended on “justice” (Persian dad; Arabic ‘adl), an ancient principle of government and one of the five fundamental beliefs in Shi‘ism. The “injustice” (bidad), as the Shahnameh frequently reminds its readers, destroys both the center and the frontier. Modern nationalism reinforced centralization and fostered greater social cohesion. The relative absence of ethnic hostilities since the early decades of the twentieth century, in contrast to civil wars and sessions elsewhere in the postcolonial era, contributed to Iran’s greater homogeneity. Using a tangible, though imperfect, analogy, Iran stood like an old mansion in the midst of a redeveloped neighborhood in which the plots have been awkwardly divided and the neighbors were, and still are, uncomfortable in their dwellings.
The state continued to seek legitimacy by relying on memories of an imperial past and through claims to be the defender of the land of Islam and the Shi‘i creed. It endured by maintaining an elaborate court, demonstrating the royal might, exemplary punishments, displays of generosity, and patronage of the religious establishment, as well as arts and poetry. A class of landed nobility who held ministerial posts in the divan, and, to a lesser extent, those who enjoyed semiautonomous tribal power, also sustained the state. Defeat in war and loss of territory in the early nineteenth century, however, diminished the Qajar state’s prestige and tarnished its image. Through consent and occasional coercion the state had to negotiate with urban notables, the ulama, the landed class, and the tribal khans, to preserve a precarious equilibrium. The most persistent obstacle, however, was lack of a rational division of labor between the court (dargah) and the divan. The interplay between the court and the bureaucratic elite was never fully regulated, despite repeated attempts to reform the system. Ministers never managed to secure their place at a safe distance from the rulers and often suffered from the insecurity of their high office. It was to remedy this dysfunctional relation between court and bureaucracy that the discourse of reform was first introduced. Plans to restructure the state, a preoccupation of a Westernizing minority within the Qajar elite, were never detached from a sense of decline that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, particularly as a material gap in comparison with Europe became more apparent and the weakening of the domestic economy more tangible.
The urban elites, including members of the divan, and the tribal khans controlled most of Iran’s agrarian economy, which remained the most important source of wealth and state revenue before the twentieth century. The land tenure system was a major tool of state patronage, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private land ownership by the members of the divan, affluent merchants, and even wealthy ulama was not uncommon. Throughout the period, but more visibly since the seventeenth century, Iran’s subsistence agrarian economy was complemented by the introduction of cash crops, which changed the patterns of Iran’s foreign trade. Silk, cotton, and—later in the Qajar period—opium and tobacco, were exports that injected revenue into the Iranian economy and paid for the increasing volume of imports from neighboring lands and overseas.
Despite Iran being at a migratory, commercial, and cultural crossroads in Eurasia, changes in the Central Asian caravan routes, the rise of the Uzbek Empire and other nomadic barriers, and the opening of new maritime routes to China brought Iran’s ancient trade with East Asia to a virtual standstill. Iran’s access to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, too, was restrained, though never fully abandoned, after the rise of the Ottoman Empire and later because of the Shi‘i-Sunni conflict. The decline of the Mediterranean route and the Central Asian route in turn contributed in the eighteenth century to Iran’s economic isolation and had a direct effect on the diminished wealth and the prosperity of its cities. In the nineteenth century the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian and Black Sea routes nevertheless revitalized foreign trade and brought greater prosperity to long-distance merchants and their associates. From late antiquity Iran has always been an active partner in the Indian Ocean trade, but from the seventeenth century onward through the southern maritime route, it gained access to European and East Asian markets and exported a variety of commodities, including silk, opium, tobacco, and carpets, and eventually oil in the twentieth century. Yet for reasons of geography—the difficult terrain, which made access to the interior cumbersome—the Persian Gulf and Caspian ports seldom sustained a powerful mercantile presence like that of Aleppo, Alexandria, Istanbul, or Mumbai. Iranians never became a serious seafaring nation in modern times partly because of a lack of forests in the south to supply timber for shipbuilding. As a land-bound power, Iran had no navy to speak of and nurtured no maritime commercial or colonial ambitions.
Iran, moreover, did not seriously industrialize before the middle of the twentieth century. Like other non-Western countries, Iran was further incorporated into the world market in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It supplied the European industrial powerhouses with cash crops while increasingly becoming a market for Western manufactured goods. Iran’s international trade in the nineteenth century mostly benefited the mercantile classes at the expense of local manufacturers. The most important of the export items, petroleum, however, was developed in the twentieth century by the British almost as if it were a colonial plantation commodity, with no direct Iranian input except unskilled labor. The urbanized mercantile classes by and large remained commodity traders rather than industrial manufacturers, but the Iranian bazaar remained a powerful site of their political protest.
The Safavid Empire and its successors also relied on their subjects’ loyalty through a state-enforced creed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, Iran had become not only a Shi‘i state but also a Shi‘i society. Nader Shah’s failure to revert back to the Sunni fold (or even position Shi‘ism as an accepted creed within the Sunni realm) proved the depth of Iran’s Shi‘i conviction. As much as the majority of Iranians became more loyal to their faith, even as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, their Sunni neighbors were adamant to keep them as their heretical “other.” More than any other unifying force, what held together the sinews of Iranian ruling classes—the kingship, the nobility, the divan, the religious establishment, the large landowners, the urban notables, and even the tribal khans—proved to be the Shi‘i religion. Shi‘ism also served as the most important ingredient bonding the majority population in the cities and the countryside to the state and its ruling elites. The Safavids and the Qajars, and to a lesser extent the dynasties in between, posed as “defenders of the faith.”
In reality, this meant that the state had to accommodate a clerical class, which by the nineteenth century came to acquire a semiautonomous status. The sisterhood of the religious establishment and the temporal state (din va dowlat), which was at the heart of Persian political culture at least since the Sasanian era, only renewed in the Safavid era, and then again in the Qajar period. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, the clergy remained in partnership, at least implicitly, with the dynastic state and the nobility. They coexisted, despite inherent tensions. Shi‘ism as a national creed came to reinforce communal identity while avoiding active political involvement. Judicial authority did not rest solely with either the clerical establishment or the state. The blurred boundaries between the shari‘a and customary laws were never straightened out before the implementation of modern legal codes during the Constitutional Revolution and later under early Pahlavi rule.
The dual existence of the Mahdi in Shi‘i beliefs and in Shi‘i concept of authority, that he was presumed to be alive and yet hidden, proved a major obstacle to temporal legitimacy. The existence of the Mahdi not only potentially challenged the validity of the temporal state, and any theoretical possibility of a just and equitable rule, but also gave the clerical establishment a collective authority on behalf of the Imam of the Age. Before the latter half of the twentieth century, Shi‘ism never articulated a workable theory of government that reconciled temporal power with the utopian kingdom of the Mahdi. It never explicitly denied the validity of the institution of kingship either. The ulama always remained indebted to the state for support and patronage. Instead, they invariably labeled anticlerical and messianic movement as heretical, and helped to silence them, although they could not stamp them out altogether or stop prophetic expressions that were inspired, directly or indirectly, by the messianic legacy inherent to the Iranian environment. The dynamics of priests versus prophets, to borrow a Weberian concept, proved one of the most enduring. The clerical authorities were never able to fully eradicate prophetic, speculative, philosophical, and mystical trends, either. Nor were they in full control of folk Shi‘ism or popular beliefs, also inherent to the Iranian environment and often the breeding ground for messianic aspirations. Despite a sustained air of intolerance, an uneasy equilibrium allowed for both formal and informal religions to coexist and even thrive.
Movements of protest thus remained an integral part of the religious landscape and increasingly came to represent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries socioeconomic discontent. Starting with the Safavi order itself in the fifteenth century and followed by the Noqtavi, Sufi Ne‘matollahi, the Shaykhi doctrine and later the Babi movement, the Mahdi cult in Shi‘ism contested clerical authority and its overly legalistic reading of religion. The antinomian ideas ingrained in all these movements sought an apocalyptic end to the shari‘a, implicitly and at times explicitly. The dual existence of the Imam of the Age and the possibility of his advent, posed a unique tension within Shi‘ism that went beyond mere theology. Despite a powerful appeal to the disenchanted, to the ordinary folks, and to communities on the religious fringe, messianic trends seldom withstood the onslaught of the state-ulama symbiosis. Though they had survived in the Iranian world for centuries, they could convert only within clandestine networks. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Constitutional Revolution, a form of secularized messianism, was an exception. And that succeeded only to a limited extent.
Despite the state-clergy symbiosis that ensured some stability in the Qajar era, the structural handicaps of the Iranian political system paved the way for new outside challenges. Virtually throughout the period under consideration, Iranian borders, and at times the state’s very existence, were threatened by geopolitical threats and foreign invasions. The dual Ottoman and the Uzbek threats up to the middle of the eighteenth century forced Iran into a two-front defense strategy. Any imperial expansion beyond Iran proper, such as Nader Shah’s expedition to Iraq and Hindustan, therefore proved ephemeral and unsustainable. From the early nineteenth century the competing strategies of the two European empires, Russia and Britain, introduced a north-south polarity into the region within which Iran stood as a “buffer.”
The two European powers interfered with Iran’s domestic affairs and compromised its sovereignty. Yet their strategies did not result in the Iranian state’s total loss of political agency. It can be argued that Iran took advantage of its buffer status to stabilize and recover from devastation caused by political strife in the eighteenth century. Even though it lost territory and prestige, in the long run Iran managed to gain strategically by acquiring a recognized status in the European imperial vista as a sovereign state. Iranians learned to confirm their survival not by means of confronting mighty armies in the battlefield but by negotiation, backdoor deals, and even playing the European powers against one another. Despite lack of clear foreign policy and a paucity of administrative and economic resources before the Pahlavi era, Iran did not entirely succumb even to Europe’s informal colonialism. The so-called Persian Question in late-nineteenth-century diplomacy can be read as a prelude to Iran’s fragmentation, as the 1907 agreement between Russia and Britain confirmed. Yet it could also be seen as the success of Iran’s foreign policy in keeping the two powers at bay.
During the Constitutional Revolution both the Western-inspired reform and the indigenous messianic trends converged into a relatively coherent discourse giving voice to an emerging urban intelligentsia and their demands to end arbitrary rule, open the political space, and create modern legislative and judicial institutions. The Constitutional Revolution should be seen as a moment in Iran’s modern history when Western-inspired institutions of democracy, division of powers, popular representation, and individual freedoms were adopted into the Iranian environment and fused with aspirations for justice and renewal. Constitutionalism, moreover, was perceived as the key to material progress, secularism, centralization, and state-implemented reforms. The Constitutional Revolution weakened the Qajars’ arbitrary rule but ironically opened the way for the landowning nobility and their vested interests to gain more power without making the new democratic institutions any more effective. They in turn witnessed in the person of Reza Shah and his cohorts the making of a strong state, one of the chief objectives of the Constitutional Revolution. In the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution and at the end of the World War I, a large sector of the Iranian middle class and its intelligentsia by and large acquiesced to autocratic Pahlavi modernism as the only viable option for restoring Iran’s threatened sovereignty and implementing long-awaited reforms.
The rise of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s changed the patterns that had been set at least since the rise of the Safavids. State centralization reduced tribes’ political and military power, marginalized the clerical establishment and eventually dismantled the landowning class’s hold over Iran’s agrarian regime. With the aid of a nontribal army, the Pahlavi state forever emasculated the nomadic periphery and in effect removed tribes as the most powerful player in the political life of the Iranian plateau. Forced sedentarization and, more important, the growth of urbanization transformed a highly mobile nomadic population. This was in consequential contrast to the survival of tribes and tribal networks in neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Central Asia. A socioethnically amalgamated Iran at least since the 1960s, by coercive or by peaceful means, never again would experience a tribal resurgence.
The double-edged sword of state modernization transformed the economy and infrastructure, built a new middle class, and reasserted Iran’s sovereignty. These were the nonpolitical objectives of the Constitutional Revolution. But it also built an oppressive autocracy that, backed by an effective army and police, was able to dismantle the political achievements of the Constitutional era. Sustaining such a regime was greatly facilitated by Iran’s oil revenue, a small portion of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s total income, but enough to make the Pahlavi project a success. The Pahlavi ideology also facilitated, through the discovery of a new source of legitimacy by greater reliance on Iran’s ancient past. Though Iran’s national awareness and its sense of mytho-historical continuity had never faded, the new nationalist narrative of the Pahlavi era was keen to contrast the glories of distant past with the perceived decadence of the Qajar era. These notions of glory and decadence laid the foundation for a national memory that has lasted up to the present. Reza Shah’s resolute personality also contributed to transforming Iran beyond anything it has experienced at least since the rise of the Qajars.
The material success of Pahlavi modernity demonstrated the importance of oil revenue as a transformative commodity. But unlike coal in nineteenth-century European industrialization, oil revenue proved a blessing toward the creation of a stronger state with an extracting economy rather than a resource for growth of the national bourgeoisie. Since 1953, oil revenue, irrespective of Iran’s share of the proceeds and its legitimate claims for control of its natural resources, further strengthened the state at the expense of its citizens’ political and civil rights. Undermining old political checks and balances, the monopoly of the oil income, which had sharply increased over decades, gave the Iranian state a unique opportunity to implement top-down modernization projects. It also provided the state with more tools of repression and control. The Islamic Republic only reaffirmed that pattern of political coercion that had been set during the Pahlavi rule.
Growth of the population, urbanization, secular education, modern communication, and to some degree industrialization crated new sociopolitical dynamics. In the aftermath of World War II, demands for economic sovereignty and nationalization of the oil industry echoed the discourse of decline and renewal, but also the political demands of the Constitutional era. The downfall of Mosaddeq in 1953, a critical moment in Iran’s collective memory, denoted not only a showdown with Western geopolitical and economic interests but also an old struggle between ministers and rulers. The defeat of the nationalization movement, at least in the way it was perceived by its chief actors, further traumatized the Iranian collective memory, for it denoted to the Iranian intelligentsia the ominous collusion of foreign and domestic forces working to quash Iran’s legitimate demands. That it happened in the context of the Cold War and with the United States as the chief sponsor of the Pahlavi regime disillusioned a whole generation of intellectuals and sympathizers of the left. Control of natural resources continued to erode the state’s accountability, reduce its compliance with people’s political demands, and create in effect a rentier state with its own privileged class.
The Islamic Revolution, in a way, was the final stage in a process that started in the Constitutional Revolution, continued in the postwar era with the National Movement, and later was redefined in the land reforms of the 1960s. The ideological element aside, the Islamic Revolution completed the dismantling of the old landed elites. More important, it diminished in size and influence a secularized middle class that was the backbone of the Pahlavi project of modernity. Yet the emerging middle classes under the Islamic Republic continued to follow the path of their predecessors. Even the inner clique of the Islamic regime, despite its ideological posturing and conspiratorial worldview, by and large has complied with the dictates of global markets and global communications. Despite an early claim of Islamic compassion, the revolution promptly employed all modern means of coercion and control even more intrusively.
With the Islamic Revolution another long-term historical process came to a head. Whereas the clerical establishment under the Safavids and their successors was nurtured by the state and patronized by it, in the postconstitutional era and under Pahlavi rule, it lost much of its institutional privileges and social prestige. Intellectually outcast and socially isolated, by the 1960s a new generation of clerics, mostly from humble backgrounds, began to attract a wider popular constituency mostly by advocating a politicized interpretation of Islam. Aided by a radical ideology, it first opposed the Pahlavi state and later transformed into a revolutionary force. Ayatollah Khomeini and his militant clique borrowed elements of their ideology and rhetoric from the radical left as much as they did from Islamic populists and repenting intellectuals of the left and combined it with politicized readings of the Shi‘i narrative. Yet the potency of Khomeini’s message, and key to his success, was his ability to appropriate the messianic spirit inherent to the Shi‘i heterodox milieu and exploit its martyrdom paradigm in his own favor.
Yet despite the Islamic Revolution’s fervor and ideological mission, it did not essentially transform the state’s interaction with society at large. The Islamic Republic shared too many authoritarian traits with its predecessor, in theory and practice, to be able to dislodge the state’s institutional hegemony. But almost in all respects it superseded its predecessor. It upheld the monopoly on power, repression of essential liberties, propaganda and indoctrination, nepotism and corruption, and control of the economy and natural resources in manners almost unprecedented in Iran’s past. It also displayed conspiratorial traits to justify its militancy and monopoly of power. The conspiratorial approach to politics and history allowed for an easy escape from the painful realities and from having to assume responsibility for failures. Far more agency was given to the evil other, the aniran of the Iranian mythology, than to the immaculate self. Self could be celebrated only as victim and martyr. Repeated conspiracies from 1911 to 1953 and military occupations in the course of two world wars no doubt offered (and still offer) ample fodder for such a confined and fearful outlook.
Postrevolutionary Iranian society nevertheless appears to have a different perspective from that of the state. There is a vibrant and eager younger generation better informed about the world outside and by and large immune to the state’s militant ideological hegemony. The state’s systematic efforts to reconstruct Iran in its own Islamic image have had mixed results. Despite a consistent effort, and billions invested and wasted, the Iranian society has not turned, conceptually speaking, into a greater Qom. Nor are the prospects for such a metamorphosis is very bright. Representations of an Islamic identity are amply displayed and Islamification policies resolutely enforced in schools, workplaces, and the public space. Yet under the surface, a tenacious quest for alternative identity motivates a vast sector of Iranians, especially urban youth. Disillusioned with the revolution’s unfulfilled promises and frustrated with the harsh realities of everyday life, most Iranians are in search of an alternative. However nebulous, the postideological ideals that younger Iranians are looking for seem to be culturally more sophisticated, and more pluralist, as became amply evident during the 2009 Green Movement.
The emerging generations, who are products of Iran’s demographic revolution, are better nurtured, better educated, and often less romantically nationalist. They are by and large cynical about the regime’s xenophobic outlook and its isolationist policies. The age of Westoxification and imagining a strict bipolarity between the East and the West seems to be over. The mystique of another revolution that could bring about an ideological utopia is also safely dispelled. Yet the women and men whose future now hangs in the balance are often disillusioned by the prospect of ever freeing themselves from the shackles placed on them by an indoctrinating regime. Whether they succumb to the mold stamped on their society or succeed in redefining Iran in their own image as an open and pluralistic society remains to be seen.
What is undeniable is that for five centuries Iran produced paintings, music, and architecture, fine craftsmanship, sustainable, horticulture, irrigation, and habitats, as well as poetry and philosophy, history and narratives, and—more recently—theater and cinema, to reflect on, or perhaps to escape from, the cruelty, intolerance, and fetters of conformity. Though in the past the best of these creative expressions were patronized by the state, they were shaped by motifs and memories of a complex cultural legacy, whether legendary, lyrical, or religious. The sense of nationhood that consciously emerged in the twentieth century and enforced by the state, Pahlavi or Islamic Republic, aimed to make the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional diversity of the past conform to a generic nation of compliance and docility. Yet the collective memory that was passed along through generations persisted and helped define and redefine a national identity defiant of repressive authorities. Expressions of political discontent, utopian ideals, and heretical visions often were couched in the language of metaphor that withstood censorship and pressure. Quests for alternative values, for cultural authenticity, and for moral change were seldom fulfilled, at least not in ways that their initiators intended or idealized them. However, grieving the loss of golden opportunities, disillusionment and anguish over what went wrong, resenting the abuses of power and mourning for lost chances have always been the stuff of Iranian intellectual and artistic creativity. These were voices that endured despite suffering and material defeat and empowered the Iranian peoples. When Forugh Farrokhzad wrote, “It is only the sound that endures” (tanha sedast keh mimand), she probably was pointing to this long and complex culture, perhaps the sum total of the best Iran ever offered. In this respect she was echoing Hafez’s memorable verse nearly six centuries earlier:
Anything sweeter than the sound of love I haven’t heard.
Memorable echoes remain under this revolving dome.
Under Iran’s revolving dome sounds of memories are still echoing.