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| Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (photo: al-Majalla) |
Following the steep rise in oil prices in early 1970s, Iran emerged as an extremely wealthy state and began to attract massive American multi-national investment. Because the state owned the petroleum industry, oil revenues went directly to the government. This turned Iran into a "rentier" (French: ron-ti-yay) state that lived off foreign income ("rent") instead of taxes paid by its citizenry. The Iranian regime, therefore (like Saudi Arabia, another rentier state), had little incentive to encourage a relationship of mutual interests with its own people. This is what led the Shah to become more and more autocratic (a common occurrence in rentier states: see Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 137ff.); and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003), 73-76). Development banks began to favor urban businesses over farms in the loans they issued. This led unemployed farm workers to flood into the cities looking for work and living in gritty, tin-roofed slums. More and more, the Shah promoted the interests of newly rich millionaires and adopted punitive measures against the "bazaaris," the petty-commodity producers and marketers. The Pahlavi regime brought into existence a huge new middle class demanding to be educated. Thousands were schooled at home and abroad. However, when after graduation it came time to seek employment, far too few jobs were available.
In the wake of the U.S., defeat in Indo-China, the Nixon-Kissinger doctrine marked Iran as a regional surrogate power in the Middle East toward which America looked to defend its interests in the Persian Gulf. The Shah, therefore, was sold any weaponry he wanted from the U.S. He began to pursue limited campaigns in the region, such as the police action against the Marxist Dhofar tribe in Oman. Juan Cole notes, "The presence of large numbers of influential Western expatriates and multinational companies, the strong leverage of the U.S. embassy, the designation of Iran as proxy for protection of U.S. foreign policy interests in the area, all indicate a neocolonial situation." (Cole, 287)
The rise of petroleum income from a few hundred million dollars a year to 30 billion dollars per year between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s produced extremely high inflation in Iran. After oil prices declined in the late 1970s (a 12.2% drop in 1975 alone) budget deficits erupted because planners had put together their projections based on higher revenues. The regime responded by tripling taxes on salaried workers, and, in order to appear to be fighting inflation, imposed fines on tens of thousands of shopkeepers (bazaaris). People began to resent the outflow of monies to buy American weaponry that Iran did not need and that its army was incompetent to use. Some of the first demonstrations in 1978 leading to the revolution were against big banks with large foreign or minority ownership.
Bazaaris, industrial workers, slum dwellers, white-collar workers, and the Shia clergy - each cluster acting out of its own interests, organizations, and ideologies - came together in 1977-78 to overthrow the Shah. They operated for the most part in urban areas. Increasingly, the army was drawn into the alliance, first by refusing orders to fire on the crowds. Then, in January-February, 1979, some radical young officers, mostly from the Air Force, openly aligned themselves with the revolutionary forces.
After the Shah fled Iran on January 16, the Shia clerics began to maneuver to amass power for themselves at the expense of other groups in the coalition. The first provisional government that Khomeini (newly returned from exile on February 1) installed was run by a liberal French trained engineer named Mehdi Bazargan. But, Bazargan was not able to contain the Shia clergy. After Iranian militants stormed the American embassy and took the Americans inside hostage in November 1979, Bazargan, unable to secure their release, resigned. The next government, headed by Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, an Islamic leftist whom Khomeini confirmed as President on February 4, 1980, fared little better. Bani-Sadr was dismissed from office by Khomeini June 22, 1981, one day after the Shia-controlled Majles (the National Consultative Assembly) impeached him. Khomeini's strategy in getting rid of opponents, both in the case of Bazargan and that of Bani-Sadr, was to put them in power (although on short leashes), then use militant groups and political committees loyal to him to challenge them openly.
On October 20, 1981, a Shia cleric, Hojjat al-Islam Ali Khamenei, took office as the third president of the new Islamic Republic. With his appointment, Iran became a pure Shia theocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini had been shaken by the instability and carnage of the first years of the Islamic Republic. At first he had discouraged the clergy from taking political office. However, the chaos of the first two years drove him to reverse himself and encourage clerics to seek office.
Throughout the early stages of the revolution and the revolutionary governments, the Shia ulema ("scholars") continued to share with other rebel groups in Iran a tendency toward nativist ideology. As Juan Cole puts it, "The very popularity of nativism points to the Revolution having been against not only the shah, but against the neocolonial Western elite of multinationals, expatriates, arms dealers, and pinstriped diplomats as well." (Cole, 289)
The Iranian Revolution ended in the sort of redistribution of wealth and power that social revolutions are noted for. The clergy created a safety net for many of the poor. However, they went on to use the "barefoot" for cannon fodder during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. Moreover, the success of the Iranian Revolution came at the expense of most of the goals that brought the broad coalition of resisters into being in 1978. Autocracy of a new kind replaced that of the Shah: rival political parties were suppressed, thousands were executed, and pogroms initiated against the tiny Bahai minority. As the 1980s wore on, new wealthy elites emerged to take the place of those under the Shah. The revolutionary tilt toward equality turned out to be very short lived, as tends to be the case with most revolutions (more on the aftermath).
Juan Cole detected parallels between Egypt’s Urabi Revolt in 1881-82 and the Iranian Revolution. The common denominator was that both were waged chiefly by the urban crowds. On a final and ironic note, Muhammad Reza Shah was laid to rest in the same mosque in Cairo as Khedive Ismail, who had been one of the targets of the Urabi Revolt.
Sources: Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 286-289.
Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. by Anthony Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106ff.
Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), chps. 12 and 13.
Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)
See also Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.