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Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKMUWOThe Muslim World0027-49092004 Hartford Seminary

October 2004944

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

What Recent History has Taught IraniansThe Muslim World Volume 94October 2004

What Recent History Has

Taught Iranians

1

Nikki R. Keddie

Professor Emerita

University of California

Los Angeles, California

A

s of early 2003, the situation in Iran appears to be one of crisis, multiple

uncertainties, growing opposition to the ruling elite, and continuing

arrests and crackdowns carried out by elements of that elite. Some

people are predicting that basic changes will happen very soon, some think

such changes will take some years, while others are pessimistic, except

perhaps in the very long run. I learned early that nearly all specific predictions

about Iran are most likely to be wrong, and so will here confine myself tolooking at some of the ways that Iran has fundamentally changed since 1890

as well as pointing to some cultural continuity, leaving it to others to make

predictions based on these factors.

One major element in Iranian political history since 1890 and, in particular,

in its movements of resistance and revolt between 1890 and 1979, has

been the often effective political alliance between the bazaar, or traditional

bourgeoisie, led by its large merchants, and the clergy, or important parts

of the clergy. This alliance was central to the successful movement againsta British monopoly tobacco concession in 189192, to the revolution of

190511, which gave Iran parliamentary constitutional rule (even though

the constitution was subsequently more honored in the breach than the

observance) and to the alliance that reappeared in force in the revolution

of 197879 and still continues as the underpinning of the ruling elite. While

this alliance may seem natural or obvious to many Iranians, it is not a

significant feature of any other Middle Eastern country nor, to my knowledge,

of any other Muslim country. This is in part due to the great predominance of

Muslims in the Iranian bazaar class, whereas in other Middle Eastern countries,

minority populations often predominated, especially in the modern period,

where they could take advantage of their ties to the West.

The clerical role in politics is due not to Twelver Shi

ism itself, which was

predominantly a politically quietist movement after the disappearance of the

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twelfth imam, but to its special development in Iran after the Safavid dynasty.

This dynasty established Shi

ism as the state religion in the early sixteenth

century. While the early Safavids controlled the leading clergy, there

developed a largely autonomous clerical institution led bymojtaheds

(today

mostly called ayatollahs

), who were empowered to make judgments on a

wide variety of matters that were binding on their own followers.

The clerical institution, unlike those in many Muslim countries, also kept

most of its financial independence from the government, collecting religious

taxes and managing growing inalienable endowments, or vaqfs

. Clerical

autonomy was furthered by the location of most of the leading Iranian clerics

outside the borders of Iran, in Ottoman Iraq. While clerics mostly supported

the government, they also represented grievances held by their constituents,especially from the bazaar. Those from the bazaar thus effectively appealed to

clerics to denounce the tobacco concession and, in 1905, to challenge their

own mistreatment at the hands of the monarch and they way this monarchy

favored foreigners.

The Failing Clerical-Bazaar Alliance

The situation in 1978 was more complex as there had been much modern

class development; politics and education had occurred, especially underthe Pahlavis. However, the old alliance reappeared as the government had

effectively suppressed many leftist and liberal nationalist oppositionists,

and it was far more difficult to suppress mosque sermons and networks.

The more modern groups came to think they could trust Khomeini to set

up a modern liberal government; this was the image of himself that he put

forth in 197879 under the influence of his young non-clerical Parisian

advisers.

From 1979 to today, however, as the core of the ruling elite has becomemore limited and challenged by opposition, the government continues to

follow policies that really favor only those clergy who are in or allied with state

or quasi-state institutions and elements of the bazaar who are involved in

trade. The great majority of the population do not fall into either of these

groups, and while some follow their ideology, most have come to see that the

bazaar-clerical alliance, which may have played a positive role a century ago

in limiting foreign intervention in Iran and allowing constitutional rule, has

since 1979 overwhelmingly been a factor in repression and an obstacle to

modernization and democracy.The repressive aspects of the government are well known, with continued

jailings, executions, limits on dress and behavior, the institutionalization of

second-class status for girls and women, and so forth. Less well known are

economic aspects of this Islamic regime, which ironically arose from a

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combination of elements of doctrinaire leftism with clerical control. Royal and

migr properties were confiscated and put under the control of either the

state or of large new foundations. The largest of these foundations is the

Foundation for the Dispossessed. Despite some reform efforts by Khatami

and the new parliament, the Foundations remain essentially untaxed and

accountable only to Leader Khamene

i, which makes them even more subject

to nepotism and corruption than usual and discourages private sector

competition in the many branches of the economy they control. They are

paralleled by large traditional religious foundations, such as that of Mashhad,

which similarly controls numerous agricultural and industrial enterprises and

is by far the largest economic unit in Khorasan province.

The fact remains that very few private banks or industries can be formedto compete with such protected units. Private capital, as often in the past and

in other countries in the global south, heads for trade and real estate, which

have fewer barriers and promise quick returns. While Khatami had a five-year

plan for 20002005 that addressed some of these problems as well as that of

growing unemployment, little of it has been realized, as it would injure the

self-interest of those in the bazaar, and of all traders, speculators, and the many

clergy involved in the current economy.

The foreign investment provisions of the Islamic Republics constitutionmake it virtually impossible for foreigners to invest in Iran and repatriate

reasonable profits. While some new interpretations have meant that there is

some foreign investment, much more is needed, and again attempts in a freer

direction have met with considerable resistance by the institutions placed

above the parliament. Suspicion of foreign control of the economy has a

historical basis, but Iran has veered too far in the opposite direction. Greater

freedom and incentives for local and foreign productive investment alone will

not solve Irans problems; they will have to be accompanied by increasedjob availability and welfare for the poor and unemployed. The point here,

however, is that the clerical-bazaar alliance, while effective in the past in

mobilizing mass movements, has proved disastrous in managing an economy

that could benefit all Iranians.

Reform vs. National Strength

A second historical trend that has come to fruition under the Islamic

Republic is the increase in numbers and maturity of many of those whose

ideas have been key elements in movements for change. In the early twentiethcentury, reformist thinkers tended to focus on one or two elements that

they thought accounted for the Wests advancement and Irans backwardness,

and advocated the adoption of these elements. Among these, one of the first

was nationalism, which several Iranian thinkers interpreted in terms of the

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so-called scientific racism that was rampant in the West between the

mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

Racist theories confused language with race, and had a hierarchy of

language groups, with Indo-Europeans at the top, and did not much note that

Indo-Europeans ranged from dark South Asians to blond Scandinavians. By a

contingency lucky to those who held this theory, Persian is an Indo-European

language, and this was used to bolster the common nationalist tendency to

deprecate those who had at various times conquered and ruled the Persians

as being responsible for Iranian backwardness namely the Turks, Mongols,

and especially the Arabs. Along with denigration of the Arabs went, for the

educated new middle and upper classes, a deprecation of Islam and of Shi

ism,

including its practices and clergy. There thus emerged a dual culture, with aWesternized class with modern education and values, and a larger group

encompassing mostly the bazaaris and popular classes with more traditional

cultural values that came increasingly to be identified as the proper Islamic

ones. Also, half of Irans population for whom Persian was not the first

language were often discriminated against.

The Westernized groups also had, early on, certain cure-alls, one of which

was a constitution and parliamentary rule, and another of which was reducing

the role of foreigners in Iran. Both of these were important elements increating a modern Iran, but neither was sufficient. Russian and British

intervention and control after the parliamentary government tried to set up an

efficient tax collecting and budget system with the help of U.S. adviser Morgan

Shuster in 191011 showed that parliamentary government was not enough.

To be truly independent, Iran needed a strong military. This it got in the

interwar rule of Reza Shah (r. 19251941), who also introduced other elements

of modernization such as tariff autonomy, protected industries, and new public

education opportunities for those of both sexes, including at the universitylevel. His positive achievements were often marred by having been brought

about by brutal methods, including the forced settlement of tribes who had no

way other than migration to adequately feed their flocks, and forced the

unveiling of women at a time when many found this as shocking as we today

would find forced public nakedness. A number of intellectuals joined Reza

Shah early on, thinking national strength was more important than democracy

or parliamentarianism.

The CIA Plot and Removal of Mosadeq

After a wartime and postwar period when the constitution was essentially

followed, there came the 195153 oil nationalization period under the very

popular Mosaddeq, who was overthrown by a plot driven primarily by the

CIA, though both the British and local elements were involved. Mohammad

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Reza Shahs cooperation with this plot and subsequent increasing autocracy

colored both popular and intellectual attitudes towards him. The leftist and

nationalist opposition tended to see him in an exaggerated way, as a mere tool

or puppet of foreigners with the U.S. assuming the dominant role formerly

occupied by the British. The 1960s and 70s were a period when oversimplified

and highly ideological solutions were in vogue among opposition movements.

The secular leftist parties followed either a Soviet or Maoist type of

line, with emphasis on anti-Americanism and eventual worker and peasant

rule. Two leftist groups, the Marxist Feda

iyan-e Khalq and the Left Islamic

Mojahedin-e Khalq justified individual assassinations dubbed urban warfare

in the prevailing situation of dictatorial controls. Nationalists were split

between those who tried to revive the Mosadeqqist oppositional NationalFront and those who felt more could be accomplished by working with the

government. In a situation of dictatorship and jailings, with little leadership

from secular parties who could not express open opposition, it is not

surprising that effective opposition took an Islamic form. This comprised both

the strong attacks on the government by Khomeini, who was exiled during

196479, and more modernist and even leftist readings of Islam, especially by

Ali Shariati, the Freedom Movement, and the Mojahedin-e Khalq.

New Thinkers in Post-Revolutionary Iran

While Khomeinis new view of Shi

ism as endorsing rule by a top jurist

was not voiced during the revolution, it came out when the new constitution

was drafted by a largely clerical group. In the early period after the revolution,

there was a strange semi-alliance between Khomeinis followers and the so-

called Islamic left, which dominated early parliaments and favored measures

like extensive land reform. Such parliamentary measures were, however,

overwhelmingly vetoed by the clerical Guardian Council, which representedthe interests of the clergy and the bazaar bourgeoisie.

In time, most of the intellectuals in the former Islamic left radically

changed their views, including those of the students, following the line of

the imam who took over the U.S. embassy and held its occupants hostage for

444 days. Also changing their ideas since the early days of the revolution were

the leading oppositional thinkers of the 1990s, including Abdolkarim Sorush,

and to some degree President Mohammad Khatami himself.

Soroush, Khatami, and a whole series of new thinkers, both clerical and

secular and including many women who have effectively fought for increasingwomens rights, have presented many talks and published writings that try to

make room for Islamic values and their adherents while retaining Iranian

identity and placing a new value on democracy and power for democratically-

elected legislators. The diversity of these new writings and talks makes them

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difficult to summarize, but they reflect a double disillusionment with the

effects of Islamic government and with the failures of communism. Instead of

following a single ideology such as Islamism or Marxism, the new thinkers

tend to be suspicious of ideology.

Reflecting advances and changes in the educational system, where Western

philosophy is widely taught not only in secular higher schools but also to

budding clerics, the new thinkers are often well acquainted with both Western

and Islamic thought. This gives them a basis to reinterpret Islam not in the

manner of former Islamic modernists, who tended to find everything they

liked in Islamic texts, but rather to stress the spirit of Islam and the need to

distinguish between its fundamental teachings about God and ethics on the

one hand and the rules of Islamic law on the other, which reflect particulartimes and should therefore change with the times. Some like Soroush go

further, distinguishing between essential Islam, which is unknowable, and its

interpretation, which is all that humans can do and which changes with time

and circumstance.

There are also brave secular oppositional thinkers like Akbar Ganji who

have called the rulers fascist and blamed them for killing many oppositionists

and been jailed for it or Professor Hashem Aghajari, who said that imitation of

leaders was for monkeys, not people. Aghajaris lawyer is currently appealinghis death sentence. Their sentences do not mean that oppositionists have been

silenced, however, as recent student demonstrations show. The point here

is that the opposition has learned from history; its thinkers are putting forth

ideas both more sophisticated and more attuned to appeal specifically to

contemporary Iranians rather than their predecessors. In the realm of womens

rights, thinkers and publications have found ways to bring together those who

take a secular feminist approach and those who base their ideas on new

interpretations of Islam. The overwhelming support for democratic reformexpressed in four elections and the flowering of intellectual reform efforts,

which now go to the Internet when most reformist newspapers are banned,

give hope that Irans historic future can be better than its recent past.

Endnote

1. This article is based on a talk given early in 2003 at UCLA and contains elementsfrom Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

(New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2003).