The Making Of Iran's Islamic Revolution

From Monarchy To Islamic Republic, Second Edition

Mohsen M Milani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974083
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Dr. Milani offers new insights into the causes and profound consequences of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Drawing on dozens of personal interviews with the officials of the Islamic Republic and on recently released documents, he presents a provocative analysis of the dynamics and characteristics of factional politics in Islamic Iran. Among the new issues covered are the events leading up to the Teheran hostage crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini's life and writings, President Rafsanjani's activities against the Shah, Rafsanjani's recent reforms, Iran's involvement in the Kuwaiti crisis, and the domestic and foreign policy challenges facing Iran in the post?Cold War era.The second edition is specifically revised for use as a text for courses dealing with Iran, the Middle East, and revolutionary movements.

Part One
Conceptual Framework

1
The Study of Revolution: Science of Anarchy or Anarchy of Science?

Two young men came to me and started talking. One of them said: We have read your writings. “There should be a revolution in this country [Iran].” Before I could answer, the other said: “Yes, we have lagged behind, we must move fast.” I told them, “Your talk is so vacuous that I do not know how to answer. If I ask you what revolution is, I bet you cannot answer. In any event, do you have a plan for it [revolution] and have you prepared the ground for it?” They said, “No. We only wanted to express our views. We have no plan [for revolution] as yet.”

Ahmad Kasravi, Enqelab Chist? (What Is Revolution?), n.d.

Revolution generates both intense enthusiasm and abhorrence. It is revered as a historical necessity: Victor Hugo regarded it as “the larva of civilization.” It is also condemned as a cataclysmic event and “the most wasteful, the most expensive, the last to be chosen.”¹ This is perhaps why, despite the abundance of analytical literature on revolution, there is little consensus about what revolution is and what produces it. There is, however, a unanimous agreement that revolutions are momentous events with long-lasting impact.

The Evolution of the Modern Concept and Myth of Revolution

In the past few centuries, the meaning of revolution has undergone radical changes.² In the late Middle Ages in northern Italy, revolution, rivoluzione, gained its own physiognomy as “a long-term movement of fortunes accompanied by sudden, sharp reversal.”³ This emphasis on fortune gave revolution a mysterious coloring and elevated it to an act beyond human control.

In the mid-sixteenth century, Copernicus popularized revolution in astronomy as the return of the stars to the point of origin. By the mid-seventeenth century, Copernicus’s notion found its way into England’s political literature.⁴ Thus, the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II of the House of Stuart in 1660 and the confirmation of the supremacy of Parliament over the authority of the king in 1688 were both called revolution—the latter, the Glorious Revolution.

The French Revolution of 1787–1794 revolutionized the concept of revolution and gave it a new mystique and meaning, a romantic bent that has persisted to this day.⁵ No longer was revolution conceptualized as the return to the point of origin or as an event beyond human control. The French revolutionaries, inspired by the enlightened thoughts of philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, insisted that once the shackles of superstitions and archaic institutions were removed through creative political engineering, the human mind would usher humanity to a promising future. The change of France’s Gregorian calendar to one beginning at the year zero was symbolic of this new optimism. Soon, revolution, despite the terror of the French Revolution itself, became synonymous with liberty and progressive change, a belief only a few thinkers like Edmund Burke dared challenge.⁶

In the nineteenth century, the towering presence of Karl Marx became the apotheosis of the revolutionary. Marx perceived revolution as an inherently liberating necessity, the motor of historical progress. For him, the task of philosophy was not to interpret the world, but to change it, and to do so by revolution. And this is what one of his disciples, Vladimir Lenin, accomplished in Russia by orchestrating the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Following the imposition of socialism in the former Soviet Union, the idea of revolution became quite attractive to the Third World. For most Third World intellectuals, who were often influenced by the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism, revolution became a political necessity, a convenient shortcut to progress, the only genuine method of terminating the Third World’s dependent ties with the West, and the only road to political independence. This is perhaps why the twentieth century will be remembered as the century of revolution.

With the victory of the Bolsheviks in neighboring Russia followed by the creation of an Iranian communist party, both Marxist views and the idea of revolution gradually found their way into Iran’s political discourse. Until the 1920s, revolution was neither sought nor discussed by most Iranian reformers because monarchy was a religiously sanctioned institution.⁷ This is why during the Constitutional Movement of 1906–1911 reformers never spoke of revolution. It was years later that Iranian historians, influenced by Western and Russian historiography, began to refer to that event as a revolution, which it certainly was not.

As the Pahlavi state became more entrenched and as the Pahlavi shahs became more autocratic, the idea of revolution became ever more tantalizing to the educated Iranians who were disenchanted with the slow pace of progress in their native land. By the 1960s, it had become “chic” to be a revolutionary, so much so that even Mohammad Reza Shah, the very symbol of the status quo, labeled his reforms in 1963 as a “White Revolution.”

Why was the idea of revolution so popular in Iran and in other Third World nations? One reason was the myth that revolution was the harbinger of individual freedom and civil liberties. Dictatorship and poverty, so prevalent in the Third World, made revolution a popular ideal: Revolution was synonymous with progressive change.

Hannah Arendt explained why this perception of revolution could be erroneous. She argued that revolutions often are launched with the objective of expanding democratic rights. Once the ancien régime is demolished, revolutionaries begin to consolidate their power and expand their popular base of support by adding a social dimension to revolution, which means advocating the herculean but popular goal of eradicating poverty and misery. But the revolutionaries often fail to achieve this goal. In order to perpetuate the myth of their “success,” they must therefore suppress those who may expose the revolutionaries’ utter failure to accomplish what they had promised. Soon, Arendt concluded, revolutions would rot and become even more repressive than the regimes they had replaced.⁸ The fate of the twentieth-century revolutions seems to have vindicated Arendt’s position.

Revolution Defined

Today few other words in the lexicon of social sciences are more ubiquitously and loosely used than the term “revolution,” a reflection of the preparadigmatic stage of the study of revolution. For Raymond Tanter and Manus Midlarsky, revolution is an event in which a “group of insurgents illegally and or forcefully challenges the governmental elites.”⁹ For Charles Tilly, it is “the displacement of one set of power-holders by another.”¹⁰ For Hannah Arendt, only when “the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom, can we speak of revolution.”¹¹ Samuel Huntington regards revolution as “a rapid, fundamental and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership and government activity and politics.”¹² Theda Skocpol refers to it as “a rapid, basic transformation of a society and state structure … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.”¹³

For the purpose of this study, I define revolution as a rapid, fundamental change in the social structures as well as in the state’s personnel, institutions, and foundation of its legitimacy, accomplished from outside the legal channels and accompanied in part by a movement from below (the nongoverning classes).

This definition distinguishes revolutions from coups d’état (the forceful replacements of one faction of the elite by another), from rebellions (spontaneous mass uprisings against a specific government policy or event), and from “révolutions from above” (radical, elite-initiated change imposed on society). Further, the definition is neutral: It attaches no moral standards to outcomes of revolutions, which may be progressive or regressive. It also regards a revolution as a modern and rare phenomenon. Great civilizations of the past (Egypt, Babylon, Persia) experienced dynastic changes and slow societal transformations, but not revolutions.

According to our definition, the 1979 event was a revolution: The Shah’s regime was overthrown in part by the participation of the lower classes; the state’s personnel and its foundation of legitimacy were changed; and new structures and institutions were built. Those who have a romantic view of revolution may claim that because Islamic Iran is less free and more regressive than Pahlavi Iran, no revolution has taken place there. This tautological reasoning is a reflection of what they think revolution “ought to be” rather than what it “is” or “has been.”

The Shah and the Experts: An Iran That Was Not

It was not for lack of information that the experts were bewildered by the Shah’s fall and the ulama’s victory, for information was abundantly available. Rather, the problem was what I call “theoretical glaucoma,’’the roots of which may be traced back to the prevalent assumptions in social sciences about the nature and consequences of modernization in the Third World. Many of these ethnocentric assumptions were designed to provide intellectual justification for U.S. interventionist foreign policy in the era after World War II.¹⁴ They reflected the arrogance of power and the utter insensitivity of the United States to the cultural and religious orientations of Third World nations. This is why, as Sheldon Wolin eloquently pointed out, “the Third World understood itself in one way, while social science understood it in another.”¹⁵

Perhaps the source of all misleading assumptions was and is that the Western model of development has universal applicability, one that no nation can escape and all nations should emulate wholeheartedly.¹⁶ What is altogether ignored in this simplistic model is the undeniable fact that the domestic and international conditions under which Western Europe was modernized have been qualitatively different from those that the developing world has faced. What has effectively worked for Western Europe and for the United States may not prove fruitful for the Third World, and what has been good for the West may not be good for the Third World, whose religion, culture, and history are often different from those of the West.

Based on the universality of the Western model, a number of other erroneous conclusions were drawn. For example, it was assumed that economic growth is a catalyst for stability and a deterrent against communist temptation, an idea that originated from the success of the Marshall Plan in rebuilding the ruined Western Europe after World War II. It was in that spirit that the United States provided economic assistance to the Third World. It was only in the mid-1960s that some scholars began to challenge the direct correlation postulated between economic growth and stability, at least for the Third World.¹⁷

Another misleading assumption was the dismissal of religion as a relevant force in revolutionary movements. The unfolding of modernization in the Third World, as in the West, was thought to go hand in hand with secularization—the emancipation of politics from religion.¹⁸ Ironically, both Marxist and non-Marxist paradigms generally viewed religion as a dying and anachronistic force, as the “opiate of the masses.” Thus, secular ideologies such as nationalism and socialism, not religion, and the peasantry and the middle class, not the religious groups, were identified as the potential agents for radical change in the Third World.

Many of these myopic assumptions had also permeated the discipline of Iranology. James Bill, for example, argued in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Chronology of Significant Events
• Introduction
• Part One: Conceptual Framework
• Part Two: Historical Background
• Part Three: Preconditions of the Islamic Revolution
• Part Four: The Mechanics of the Transfer of Power
• Part Five: The Postrevolutionary Power Struggle
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index