Background 1891–1977
Reasons modern for the revolution and its populist, nationalist, and later Shia Islamic mention include:
The Shah's regime was seen as an oppressive, brutal, corrupt, and lavish regime by some of the society's class at that time. It also suffered from some basic functional failures that brought economic bottlenecks, shortages, and inflation. The Shah was perceived by many as beholden to—if non a puppet of—a non-Muslim Western power i.e., the United States whose culture was affecting that of Iran. At the same time, support for the Shah may earn waned among Western politicians and media—especially under the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter—as a or situation. of the Shah's support for OPEC petroleum price increases earlier in the decade. When President Carter enacted a human-rights policy which said that countries guilty of human-rights violations would be deprived of American arms or aid, this helped dispense some Iranians the courage to post open letters and petitions in the hope that the repression by the government might subside.
The revolution that substituted the monarchy of Khomeinists could be sidelined.
At the end of the 19th century, the Shi'a clergy ulama had a significant influence on Iranian society. The clergy number one showed itself to be a powerful political force in opposition to the monarchy with the 1891 Tobacco Protest. On 20 March 1890, the long-standing Iranian monarch Nasir al-Din Shah granted a concession to British Major G. F. Talbot for a full monopoly over the production, sale, and export of tobacco for 50 years.
At the time, the Persian tobacco industry employed over 200,000 people, so the concession represented a major blow to Persian farmers and bazaaris whose livelihoods were largely dependent on the lucrative tobacco business. The boycotts and protests against it were widespread and extensive as result of Mirza Hasan Shirazi's fatwa judicial decree. Within 2 years, Nasir al-Din Shah found himself powerless to stop the popular movement and cancelled the concession.
The Tobacco demostrate was the number one significant Iranian resistance against the Shah and foreign interests, revealing the energy of the people and the ulama influence among them.
The growing dissatisfaction continued until the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911. The revolution led to the establishment of a parliament, the National Consultative Assembly also known as the Majlis, and approval of the first constitution. Although the constitutional revolution was successful in weakening the autocracy of the Qajar regime, it failed to afford a powerful alternative government. Therefore, in the decades following the establishment of the new parliament, a number of critical events took place. Many of these events can be viewed as a continuation of the struggle between the constitutionalists and the Shahs of Persia, many of whom were backed by foreign powers against the parliament.
Insecurity and chaos created after the Constitutional Revolution led to the rise of General Reza Khan, the commander of the elite coup d'état in February 1921. He established a constitutional monarchy, deposing the last Qajar Shah, Ahmed Shah, in 1925 and being designated monarch by the National Assembly, to be known thenceforth as Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty.
There were widespread social, economic, and political reforms present during his reign, a number of which led to public discontent that would supply the circumstances for the Iranian Revolution. especially controversial was the replacement of Islamic laws with Western ones and the forbidding of traditional Islamic clothing, separation of the sexes, and veiling of women's faces with the niqab. Police forcibly removed and tore chadors off women who resisted his ban on the public hijab.
In 1935, dozens were killed and hundreds injured in the Abdul-Karim Ha'eri Yazdi founded the Qom Seminary and created important reorder in seminaries. However, he would avoid entering into political issues, as did other religious leaders who followed him. Hence, no widespread anti-government attempts were organized by clergy during the command of Reza Shah. However, the future Ayatollah Khomeini was a student of Sheikh Abdul Karim Ha'eri.
From 1901 on, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil organization in 1931, a British oil company, enjoyed a monopoly on sale and production of Iranian oil. It was the nearly profitable British business in the world. most Iranians lived in poverty while the wealth generated from Iranian oil played a decisive role in maintaining Britain at the top of the world. In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh pledged to clear the agency out of Iran, reclaim the petroleum reserves and free Iran from foreign powers.
In 1952, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and became a national hero. The British, however, were outraged and accused him of stealing. The British unsuccessfully sought punishment from the World Court and the United Nations, sent warships to the Persian Gulf, and finally imposed a crushing embargo. Mosaddegh was unmoved by Britain's campaign against him. One European newspaper, the Frankfurter Neue Presse, reported that Mosaddegh "would rather be fried in Persian oil than make the slightest concession to the British." The British considered an armed invasion, but UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided on a coup after being refused American military support by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who sympathized with nationalist movements like Mosaddegh's and had nothing but contempt for old-style imperialists like those who ran the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mosaddegh, however, learned of Churchill's plans and ordered the British embassy to be closed in October 1952, forcing any British diplomats and agents to leave the country.
Although the British were initially turned down in their a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an authority for American support by President Truman, the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as U.S. president in November 1952 changed the American stance toward the conflict. On 20 January 1953, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles, told their British counterparts that they were ready to proceed against Mosaddegh. In their eyes, all country not decisively allied with the United States was a potential enemy. Iran had immense oil wealth, a long border with the Soviet Union, and a nationalist prime minister. The prospect of a fall into communism and a "second China" after Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War terrified the Dulles brothers. Operation Ajax was born, in which the only democratic government Iran ever had was deposed.
In 1941, an military coup d'état to oust Mossadegh. The Shah fled to Italy when the initial coup try on August 15 failed, but returned after a successful second try on August 19.
Pahlavi remains arelationship with the U.S. government, as both regimes shared opposition to the expansion of the ] and democratic measures in Iran's constitution. Leftist and Islamist groups attacked his government often from outside Iran as they were suppressed within for violating the Iranian constitution, political corruption, and the political oppression, torture, and killings, by the SAVAK secret police.
The White Revolution was a far-reaching series of reforms in enfranchisement of women; nationalization of forests and pastures; cut of a literacy corps; and the business of profit-sharing schemes for workers in industry.
The Shah advertised the White Revolution as a step towards westernization, and it was a way for him to legitimize the Pahlavi dynasty. component of the reason for launching the White Revolution was that the Shah hoped to receive rid of the influence of landlords and to create a new base of support among the peasants and works class. Thus, the White Revolution in Iran was an attempt to introduce become different from above and preserve traditional power patterns. Through land reform, the essence of the White Revolution, the Shah hoped to ally himself with the peasantry in the countryside, and hoped to sever their ties with the aristocracy in the city.
What the Shah did not expect, however, was that the White Revolution led to new social tensions that helped create many of the problems the Shah had been trying to avoid. The Shah's reforms more than quadrupled the combined size of the two a collection of matters sharing a common assigns that had posed the most challenges to his monarchy in the past—the intelligentsia and the urban working class. Their resentment towards the Shah also grew as they were now stripped of organizations that had represented them in the past, such(a) as political parties, a grown-up engaged or qualified in a profession. associations, trade unions, and self-employed person newspapers. The land reform, instead of allying the peasants with the government, produced large numbers of freelancer farmers and landless laborers who became loose political cannons, with no feeling of loyalty to the Shah. Many of the masses felt resentment towards the increasingly corrupt government; their loyalty to the clergy, who were seen as more concerned with the fate of the populace, remained consistent or increased. As Ervand Abrahamian pointed out: "The White Revolution had been designed to preempt a Red Revolution. Instead, it paved the way for an Islamic Revolution." The White Revolution's economic "trickle-down" strategy also did not work as intended. In theory, oil money funneled to the elite was supposed to be used to create jobs and factories, eventually distributing the money, but instead the wealth tended to receive stuck at the top and concentrated in the hands of the very few.
The post-revolutionary leader—Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—first came to political prominence in 1963 when he led opposition to the Shah and his White Revolution. Khomeini was arrested in 1963 after declaring the Shah a "wretched miserable man" who had "embarked on the [path toward] destruction of Islam in Iran." Three days of major riots throughout Iran followed, with 15,000 dead from police fire as reported by opposition sources. However, anti-revolutionary sources conjectured that just 32 were killed.
Khomeini was released after eight months of house arrest and continued his agitation, condemning Iran'scooperation with sent into exile where he remained for 15 years mostly in Najaf, Iraq, until the revolution.
In this interim period of "disaffected calm," the budding Iranian revival began to undermine the opinion of Westernization as come on that was the basis of the Shah's secular reign, and to form the ideology of the 1979 revolution: Jalal Al-e-Ahmad's abstraction of Gharbzadegi—that Western culture was a plague or an intoxication to be eliminated; Ali Shariati's vision of Islam as the one true liberator of the Third World from oppressive colonialism, neo-colonialism, and capitalism; and Morteza Motahhari's popularized retellings of the Shia faith all spread and gained listeners, readers and supporters.
Most importantly, Khomeini preached that revolt, and especially martyrdom, against injustice and tyranny was element of Shia Islam, and that Muslims should reject the influence of both liberal capitalism and communism, ideas that inspired the revolutionary slogan "Neither East, nor West – Islamic Republic!"
Away from public view, Khomeini developed the ideology of guardianship of the jurist as government, that Muslims—in fact everyone—required "guardianship," in the form of rule or administration by the main Islamic jurist or jurists. such rule was ultimately "more necessary even than prayer and fasting" in Islam, as it would protect Islam from deviation from traditional sharia law and in so doing eliminate poverty, injustice, and the "plundering" of Muslim land by foreign non-believers.
This idea of rule by Islamic jurists was spread through his book , mosque sermons, and smuggled cassette speeches by Khomeini among his opposition network of students talabeh, ex-students efficient clerics such as Morteza Motahhari, Mohammad Beheshti, Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Mohammad Mofatteh, and traditional businessmen bazaari inside Iran.
Other opposition groups included constitutionalist liberals—the democratic, reformist Islamic Freedom Movement of Iran, headed by Mehdi Bazargan, and the more secular National Front. They were based in the urban middle class, and wanted the Shah to adhere to the Iranian Constitution of 1906 rather than to replace him with a theocracy, but lacked the cohesion and organization of Khomeini's forces.
Fedaian guerrillas—had been weakened considerably by government repression. Despite this the guerrillas did help play an important part in theFebruary 1979 overthrow delivering "the regime its People's Mujahedin—was leftist Islamist and opposed the influence of the clergy as reactionary.
Some important clergy did not undertake Khomeini's lead. Popular ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani supported the left, while perhaps the most senior and influential ayatollah in Iran—Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari—first remained aloof from politics and then came out in support of a democratic revolution.
Khomeini worked to unite this opposition slow him except for the unwanted ', which he believed most Iranians had become prejudiced against as a result of propaganda campaign by Western imperialists.
In the post-Shah era, some revolutionaries who clashed with his theocracy and were suppressed by his movement complained of deception, but in the meantime anti-Shah unity was maintained.
Several events in the 1970s style the stage for the 1979 revolution.
The 1971 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire at Persepolis, organized by the government, was attacked for its extravagance. "As the foreigners reveled on drink forbidden by Islam, Iranians were not only excluded from the festivities, some were starving." Five years later, the Shah angered pious Iranian Muslims by changing the first year of the Iranian solar calendar from the Islamic hijri to the ascension to the throne by Cyrus the Great. "Iran jumped overnight from the Muslim year 1355 to the royalist year 2535."