CHAPTER ONE
The Last Great Revolution
Turmoil and Transformation in Iran
By ROBIN WRIGHT
Knopf
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On the dusty highway south from bustling Tehran, an enormous gold dome rises
importantly across the horizon. Heat from the surrounding desert makes it shiver
like a mirage, even in winter. Four spiny minarets quiver rhythmically alongside
it.
The most ornate shrine in Iran — and one of the largest monuments ever
constructed in the Muslim world over the past thirteen centuries — was built in
record time above the burial site of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after he died
abruptly from a heart attack in 1989. Disgruntled Iranians complained at the
time that its cost was greater than the annual budget of Tehran, a city of some
13 million people. Iran's devout boasted that it was finer than both the Grand
Mosque in Mecca and the prophet Mohammad's tomb in Medina, Islam's two holiest
sites. Their message was implicit.
The trip to Khomeini's tomb and the nearby Paradise of Zahra has always served
as a barometer of Iran's revolution. I've stopped there on every visit. The last
time was almost twenty years after the revolution — and a decade after the
ayatollah's death — when I sat in the back seat of a boxy white Paykan taxi, a
warm wind threatening to blow off the big scarf that hid my hair and a tape of
the Spice Girls booming from the taxi's tape deck.
En route, my old friend Lily Sadeghi and I made plans to see a Molière
farce that night at one of Tehran's new cultural centers. We regretted having
missed a local production of Les Misérables, in Persian, that had
just closed after a six-month run.
"We probably wouldn't have gotten in anyway," Lily said. "It was very popular.
It was always sold out."
Then we laughed about all the American tourists who had started coming to Iran
again. Another group had just checked into the Laleh Hotel, the former
Intercontinental renamed for the tulip, a national symbol.
Until just a few months earlier, the Laleh and most other hotels had big signs
emblazoned across lobby walls or on entrance walkways for visitors to tread on
that declared, in English, "down with the usa." They'd been put up in the heady
days of 1979 after the United States Embassy seizure, at the same time that
Khomeini's pledge "America will face a severe defeat" was painted across the
embassy's high brick wall.
But that morning, two decades after the revolution, I'd watched a group of
American tourists assemble in the Laleh's redecorated lobby. They, too, were
going to visit Khomeini's tomb.
Like the world around it, Iran has been — and still is — going through a
transformation. Early passions have been replaced by a hard-earned pragmatism,
produced in part by revolutionary excesses that backfired against the clerics
and exhausted the population. Arrogance has given way to realism. The
"government of God" is ceding to secular statecraft. The passage of time has
also helped to restore perspective. The shift is visible even at the tomb of the
soulful Imam [a term of reverence given a Shi'ite religious leader by popular
consensus rather than by formal appointment or vote. Its use is rare] who in
1979 led a widely disparate movement that ended 2,500 years of monarchy and
then, over the next decade, defined what would replace it.
The main chamber in the domed tomb is, indeed, magnificent. The foundation,
walls and massive pillars are a polished white marble that reflects the light of
chandeliers and gives the tomb an airy feeling. Persian carpets, all handwoven
silks in richly textured designs denoting Iran's different provinces, adorn the
floors.
In the center is a cage-like chamber of glass big enough to be a room. It is
canopied in green, the color of Islam. Inside, the ayatollah lies under a
six-foot-high block of marble, also covered by a green cloth. Next to the Imam,
under a smaller block of marble, is his son Ahmad, who died in 1995. The
official version is that Ahmad died of a heart attack, although the grapevine in
conspiracy-crazed Iran claimed a variety of more sinister causes, each of which
was fueled largely by the fact that Ahmad was only in his late forties.
The chamber's glass walls are covered with a silvery-metal grid, in no small
part to prevent the large crowds that once assembled here from breaking through
to the Imam's remains. The faithful still shudder at the memory of the chaos at
Khomeini's funeral, when his shrouded body was uncovered and tossed around by
mourners vying to get a last look or touch. On each side of the chamber, at eye
level, is a slit through which to pass money. Rial notes used to be piled high
inside around the edges. Inside the octagonal dome above Khomeini are somewhat
incongruous stained-glass windows of giant red tulips with green stems crafted
artistically in the simple modernistic style of New York City's "big apple." In
Iran, the tulip is the symbol of martyrdom as well as the national flower.
For all its splendor, the tomb is now a place of unusual informality.
Non-Muslims and foreigners are welcome; unlike in mosques, men and women mix
freely together here. Out of either reverence or curiosity, almost everyone who
enters heads first for Khomeini's chamber.
As I peered inside it, a small middle-aged woman next to me wept softly,
reciting a prayer and touching the metal with rough hands stained with henna.
Then, having paid her respects, she walked over to join a group having a picnic
lunch.
Throughout the cavernous tomb, groups were spread across the carpets, eating or
chatting, while children played tag or raced to slide across the marble floor in
their stocking feet; two boys even kicked around a small soccer ball. Some
loners, mainly but not exclusively men, were curled up against the wall napping.
Outside, on the vast plaza that surrounds the tomb, the atmosphere was quite
social, almost festive. A row of outdoor cafés offered an assortment of sweet
delicacies. On the other side of the plaza, souvenir kiosks sold T-shirts, beach
towels, key rings, pinup posters and even large bamboo blinds featuring
Khomeini's image, as well as cassette tapes of the ayatollah's last will and
testament — in Persian, English, French, German and Arabic.
"With a tranquil and confident heart, joyous spirit and conscience hopeful of
God's grace, I leave you, sisters and brothers, and depart for the eternal
abode," one poster proclaimed, quoting Khomeini, who is depicted ascending to
heaven on a rainbow.
Judging from the purchases, T-shirts were clearly more popular than the Imam's
last will and testament.
Like the crumpled rials around the grave, profits from memorabilia were being
used to expand the complex. Construction was already under way on an addition
designed to spread across some five thousand acres and include an Islamic
studies university as well as a seminary, hotels for pilgrims and a shopping
mall, all at a cost of at least $2.5 billion. The tomb will eventually become
the center of a suburb, complete with its own metro stop.
For a weekend afternoon, the tomb was lightly populated — roughly two hundred
people in a facility that could hold several thousand. The count went up when a
class of preteen girls, just old enough to don the headscarf and body cover of
Islamic modesty, filed in with their teachers. The tea men at the outdoor café
said the tomb still bustled at holidays and revolutionary anniversaries and
during various pilgrimages.
"They keep coming and coming," said one, shaking his head, in a tone of curious
disbelief that once might have been considered dangerously irreverent.
The last stop for many visitors before leaving the plaza is a large chunk of
smoothed white stone that features an embossed bust of Khomeini. The image is
almost translucent. That day, a few Japanese tourists and several Iranian
schoolgirls were lined up to have their picture taken in front of it. With the
Imam peering across their shoulders and the domed shrine in the background, the
photo is the ultimate souvenir in the Islamic republic. It captures what even
the most dogmatic clergy now concede is part of Iran's past.
The passions once evoked by Ayatollah Khomeini may have waned, even withered, as
the tough realities of running a large country with a complex economy have taken
precedence. But the idea behind the revolution led by the Imam still had
historic importance two decades later — perhaps in some ways even more than
when it started.
Its significance also extended far beyond Iran, the Middle East, the broader
Islamic world and even the twentieth century, for one simple reason: It is the
last great revolution of the Modern Era.
The singular political theme of the Modern Era — and particularly the twentieth
century — has been empowerment, or the spread of political, economic and social
rights to the earth's farthest corners, to all its diverse ethnic groups, races,
religions and, perhaps last of all, to both genders. Dozens of countries can
claim revolutions in the name of empowerment since the English Revolution of the
1640s created a modern precedent. But fewer than a handful represented seminal
turning points. They set the pace, defined goals, provided justification and,
most important, introduced a viable new idiom of opposition later adapted or
imitated elsewhere.
Two revolutions particularly shook political conventions by introducing new
ideologies: In toppling the Bourbons of France, the Jacobins of the eighteenth
century introduced equality and civil liberty as the basis of modern democracy.
In the early twentieth century, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Romanovs in
favor of classless egalitarianism.
The ideas that emerged from both revolutions in turn helped to topple monarchies
and petty tyrannies worldwide and then defined the political spectrum that
replaced them. The pace accelerated as demand for political participation spread
after World War II. However misguided in application, the empowerment embodied
in democracy and socialism inspired popular uprisings from China to Cuba in the
1940s and 1950s, independence movements from Algeria to Zambia in the 1960s and
1970s and, finally, the penetration of democracy from the Soviet Union to South
Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.
But that pattern of global change has had one large gap: the Islamic bloc.
The Muslim world is a vast and vital area that accounts for more than 50 of the
world's 191 countries. It stretches from Indonesia on the Pacific Ocean to
Morocco on the Atlantic, from Kazakhstan in chilly Central Asia to Saudi Arabia
on the warm Persian Gulf, from Somalia in drought-plagued east Africa to Nigeria
on Africa's fertile west coast and from Yemen on the Red Sea to Lebanon on the
Mediterranean.
The Islamic bloc also accounts for one of every five people on earth — or more
than one billion who have been excluded from the political process for most of
the Modern Era. As home to the final functioning monarchies and the largest
number of authoritarian regimes, it is today the last bloc to hold out against
the tide of democratic reform that has swept the rest of the world.
In this context, Iran's upheaval is arguably the Modern Era's last great
revolution. It effectively completes the process launched in the West by other
ideologies that were adopted by or adapted to all other parts of the world.
Like its earlier counterparts, Iran's Islamic revolution introduced a new
ideology to the world's modern political spectrum. [In 1984, the State
Department held a closed-door conference on Iran. Marvin Zonis, director of the
University of Chicago's Middle East Institute, concluded at the time, "The
message from Iran is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology
proposed in the twentieth century — since the Bolshevik Revolution. And if we
accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the nineteenth century, then I argue that
we've had only one good one in the twentieth — and it's this one. . . . This
powerful message will be with us for a very long time — no matter what happens
to Ayatollah Khomeini."] In a region where members of the opposition have often
been imprisoned or exiled, it established the precedent of using Islam — a
familiar, legitimate and widely available vehicle — to push for empowerment. It
provided a format, if not a precise formula, for the last group of undemocratic
regimes to make the transition. And despite Western portrayals of it as a force
spinning Iran back thirteen centuries in time, the sixteen-month upheaval in
Tehran demonstrated that Islam could be a distinctly modern idiom of political
opposition in both tactics and goals.
The product has been unique: Although thoroughly Islamic with several unique
twists, Iran has become a modern republic based on a unique blend of Islamic and
European law, most notably borrowing ideas from France and Belgium. It calls for
national, provincial and local elections in which all males and females vote as
of age fifteen. It stipulates term limits for the presidency and allocates
parliamentary seats for Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians — at least token
acknowledgment of individual or minority rights.
The impact of Iran's revolution on its brethren has also been obvious: It
ignited the budding Islamic movement that emerged out of the 1967 and 1973
ArabÐIsraeli wars and spurred on opposition movements throughout the Muslim
world. In the 1980s, the trend was most visibly linked to radicalism, from plots
to overthrow the emir on the tiny Persian Gulf island of Bahrain to the Islamic
takeover in Sudan, Africa's largest country, from the assassination of President
Anwar Sadat in Egypt to the campaign against American diplomats and Marines in
Lebanon.
Less visible and more important, however, were the quiet efforts to produce
Islamic alternatives to failed state institutions, from schools and clinics to
farm co-ops and welfare agencies. Islamic groups struggled to create a new civil
society — the network of associations, unions and clubs for workers, teachers,
engineers, women, doctors, youth and other sectors that became a means of
addressing problems their governments ignored.
In the 1990s, tactics among key political groups increasingly shifted from the
bullet to the ballot, with the rise of political parties trying to work within
the system rather than from outside it in countries such as Egypt, Jordan,
Algeria, Yemen and Kuwait.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the trend is far from climaxing.
For years, empowerment in the Islamic world will be a major theme of political
change — be it peaceful as in Jordan, bloody as in Algeria, or tumultuous as in
Indonesia. Iran's revolution may therefore not be the last revolution; other
societies may well have national revolts that topple outdated ideological
systems.
And in the end, no Islamic country is likely to duplicate the Iranian
experience. Its excesses diminished interest in emulating Tehran, except among a
tiny corps of extremists. The costs were too high, the results too
controversial. The Shi'ite character of the revolution also makes it unlikely to
be repeated among Sunni governments, which most other Muslim governments are.
Finally, strong indications that the specific Iranian model may yet fail —
albeit for economic rather than ideological reasons — will make other societies
wary of imitating the Islamic Republic.
Yet whatever happens, Iran's revolution will still rank as the Modern Era's last
great revolution, because Tehran paved the way for using Islam to push for
empowerment — not only politically. Just as the Reformation was critical to the
Age of Enlightenment and the birth of modern democracy in the West, so too have
Iranian philosophers advanced a reformation within Islam that is critical to
lasting political change.
In some ways, Iran might seem an unusual place for the last great revolution.
The Islamic world is as diverse as it is vast.
But Iran is particularly unique. It is the only overwhelmingly Shi'ite country
in a bloc that is some 85 percent Sunni Muslim. It is an aberration from both
the Middle East and south Asia, the two regions it bridges. It is the only
Muslim state of Aryan people, the Indo-European race whence Iran gets its modern
name.
Ethnically it also stands alone, with Arabs to the west, the Central Asian mix
to the north, Indo-Afghan-Pakistanis to the southeast and assorted Asian Muslims
to the far east. Even Tajikistan, a northern neighbor and the only other
Farsi-speaking country in the world, is Sunni Muslim.
Iran stands apart geographically, too, because of two great mountain ranges, the
Alborz and the Zagros, and three great bodies of water, the Caspian Sea, the
Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Yet those attributes are also reasons why Iran was a logical place for such
sweeping political innovation.
First, Shi'ite Islam demands that the faithful fight against injustice and
tyranny, even if it means certain death. Islam's so-called second sect was born
out of a sense of persecution by a seventh-century dynasty that usurped
leadership of the new Islamic world — and spawned a sense of outrage that lives
on today. Shi'ite clerics also have a mandate to mobilize and direct their
flocks into action, not just to advise them. That power explains why Ayatollah
Khomeini emerged as a natural leader to unite both secular and religious
opposition against a twentieth-century dynasty.
Islam, which makes no distinction between the powers of Caesar and God, had also
long been a nationalist force in Iran. Shi'ism had been a source of national
identity — even among those less than devout — since it was introduced in 1501
by the new Safavid Dynasty to create a sense of common identity separate from
the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by Sunni Muslims. And even into the
twentieth century, Iran was a country of feudal fiefdoms, tribes and ethnic
groups whose rivalries ran deep — hence the historic need for strong leadership
or a binding social force, or both.
Second, Iran was politically more experienced than virtually any other Muslim
state. Most countries were created or gained independence from European colonial
powers only in the twentieth century. But Iran had a long, if somewhat varied,
history of sovereignty.
Third, with more than 2,500 years of civilization, Iranians have a sense of
historic importance and of a role in shaping the world. Iran has produced
centuries' worth of great writers and philosophers. It also had the intellectual
environment that stimulated questioning, new ideas and, eventually, a
revolutionary spirit.
Fourth, as a crossroads between East and West and a target of invading armies
from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain, Persia had long exposure to ideas
from the outside world. Iranians absorbed and adapted many of the traditions,
ideas and skills from other cultures to their own ways, from the early medicine
of the Jews and the religion of the Arabs to English as a second language. Along
the way, they were also influenced by the Greco-Roman legacy and the
Judeo-Christian values that, together, formed the basis for Western revolutions
since the Age of Enlightenment.
Fifth, the quest for empowerment in Iran did not simply explode unpredictably in
1979. The trend of the entire century, particularly two earlier upheavals,
centered on ending dynastic rule.
The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 was sparked by the weak Qajar Dynasty's
decision to dole out political and economic concessions to Britain and Russia.
Britain won the exclusive right to tap Iran's oil.
To curtail powers that allowed the king to give away the country and to rid
Persia of foreigners who challenged religious and social traditions, a powerful
alliance of the clergy, the intelligentsia and the bazaar merchants launched a
protest. Prolonged instability forced the Qajar monarch, in 1906, to accept
demands for Persia's first constitution and its first parliament — both of
which limited the king's powers.
In 1953, the last Pahlavi shah, also weak and also heavily influenced by foreign
powers, faced a similar challenge from the National Front. The front, led by
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, was a four-party coalition that advocated
constitutional democracy and limited powers for the monarchy. But the shah's
attempt to have Mossadeq dismissed backfired, forcing the monarch to flee to
Rome. The last dynasty looked as if it had fizzled — until the CIA and British
intelligence orchestrated riots that forced Mossadeq to resign and allowed the
young king to return to the Peacock Throne for another quarter century.
The revolution was thus an extension of earlier challenges. With attempts at
evolutionary change repeatedly blocked, revolution became the alternative route
to empowerment.
But the political endgame in 1979 marked the Modern Era's last great revolution
not only because of its success in scrapping one of the world's oldest kingdoms.
What happened after the revolution may be even more important, particularly the
way Iranians, often in defiance of the government, adapted the Islamic system in
creative and progressive ways.
During the Islamic republic's first two decades, new approaches to everyday
issues produced everything from an internationally acclaimed cinema to an
alternative press, from novel family-planning programs to women's activism.
These nonpolitical innovations are virtually certain to produce the revolution's
real legacy — and to have a far more enduring impact in the wider Islamic world
than Iran's political system will have.
(C) 2000 Robin Wright All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40639-5
