Lorenzo Kamel
Chapter 9: Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian
Threat’ Through History
It is estimated that around 7 per cent of the French population took part
in the French Revolution (1789–99). Over a century later, approximately
9 per cent of the Russian population participated in the 1917 Russian
Revolution. It is, however, necessary to wait another six decades (1979)
to encounter the most ‘popular’ revolution of modern times: about 11
per cent of Iranians took part in the revolution of 1979,1 the one that
more than any other shaped present-day Iran and, more in general, the
contemporary Middle East.
Despite such a high participation rates, the regime led by the
‘āyatollāh al-‘uẓma (the great ayatollah) Ruhallah Khomeynī
represented an immediate paradox: in his eyes, the very concept of
popular sovereignty was to be stigmatized as a sort of colonial imposition
created for the purposes of undermining the concept of umma (the
Muslim community). The presence of empowered citizens, thus, was
not deemed as necessary: there was, in fact, only space for ‘subjects’ in
need of guidance.
Islam, or more precisely a peculiar interpretation of its main
dictates, represented the ‘guide’ invoked by Khomeynī. Until the rise
of the Velāyat-e faqih (government of the jurisconsult), the totalizing
doctrine conceived by Khomeynī, local Shiite clerics largely agreed on
the need to limit their influence to the spiritual sphere. It was Khomeynī
who gave the clerics the right and legitimacy to govern the state: ‘it was
1 See Abbas Milani, ‘The Three Paradoxes of the Islamic Revolution in
Iran’, in MEI Articles, 29 January 2009, https://www.mei.edu/publications/
three-paradoxes-islamic-revolution-iran.
200 Lorenzo Kamel
precisely over this point’, in Laurence Louër’s words, ‘that Khomeini
would prove to be “revolutionary”‘.2
These considerations and the historical processes that underlie
them remain – forty years after the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution –
more relevant than ever, and still exert direct repercussions on the (in)
stability and (in)security of a large part of the contemporary Middle East.
With the aim of analysing and placing them within a broader analytical
perspective, this chapter intends to investigate some of the dynamics
that have influenced the most the nexus between religion and politics
in the Iranian context, providing a long-term historical overview of the
political involvement of the country’s clerics. To this end, the first part
examines the 1891–2 Tobacco Protest which prepared the ground for the
outbreak of the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), creating
the conditions for ‘the emergence of Shi’ism as an insurrectionary
movement against colonialism’.3 The section that follows throws light
on the dynamics which prompted London to back the rise of Reza
Shah (1921) as the last but one Persian Shah and the first in the Pahlavi
dynasty, a key piece in the puzzle of the processes triggered in the three
decades which followed. This same section also analyses the causes and
medium- to long-term consequences of the operation with which the
CIA and MI6, taking advantage of internal dynamics, overthrew the
democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq government (1953). The
genesis of the ‘most popular’ revolution in modern and contemporary
history, generally known as the ‘Islamic Revolution’ of 1979, was
directly related to these events, and its causes and consequences are
still clearly visible in the fractures that affect large part of the region.
Fernand Braudel noted that even an apparently minor event ‘can mirror
a long term situation or “structural” circumstances’.4 The four ‘moments’
on which this chapter focuses are themselves components of a wider and
more complex ‘structure’ that has much to do with the ‘security’ and the
2 Laurence Louër, Shiism and Politics in the Middle East, London, Hurst, 2012, p. 6.
3 Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology. Resisting the Empire, London/
New York, Routledge, 2008, p. 77.
4 Cited in Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit. How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace
in the Middle East, Boston, Beacon Press, 2013, p. xi.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 201
‘stability’ of the Middle East. Each of them continues to reverberate in
various ways and forms, both in Iran and in the broader region.
9.1 Colonialism and tobacco
If Michel Foucault had lived at the time of the 1891–2 Tobacco Protest he
would probably have described it as a watershed, ‘the point of inflexion of
a curve’.5 It was, in fact, the first form of organized resistance designed
to combat Western expansionism in Persia and, more specifically, the
agreements that the European powers had drawn up with the local elite to
guarantee certain advantageous concessions. Local women, particularly
in the area of Tabriz, played an active and central role in the protests.6
Shiism’s Twelver branch was an integral part of Persian power until
1501 when it was proclaimed the official religion of the Safavid dynasty
at the expense, in particular, of other Shiite branches. At the time, as
in the bulk of the Qajar era (1794–1925), the influence of the Twelver
clerics was, however, largely limited to the religious, educational and
legal spheres. A sort of unwritten agreement thus existed according to
which the Qajar left the Twelver clerics free rein in each of these fields
in exchange for recognition of the legitimacy of its rule.7
A more concrete and organized political role for the Shiite clerics
began to emerge clearly only in the second half of the nineteenth century
when Persia, like mutatis mutandis the Ottoman Empire, attempted to
respond to its endemic and growing internal weakness by centralizing
the state administration and opening up to European capitals. These were
the years of the Crimean War (1854), an epochal event which, on the
5 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,
New York, Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 9.
6 See M. R. Alam, Sousan Z. Razavi, ‘Study of Women’s Role in Tobacco Protest’,
in Woman and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 15 (Spring 2013), pp. 71–8.
7 Abdellatif al-Zain, LilBahth ‘an Tārīkhanā fi Lubnān [In Search of Our History in
Lebanon], Beirut, n.d., 1973, pp. 481–3.
202 Lorenzo Kamel
one hand, sanctioned the inclusion of the lion’s share of the region in the
world economy, and, on the other, represented the greatest war in which
Great Britain took part in the time frame stretching from the Napoleonic
Wars to the outbreak of World War I.
It is important to highlight that it was precisely to the Crimean
War that some of the first movements and proto-democratic reforms
introduced in Muslim-majority countries are to be linked. In 1861 the bey
(lord) of Tunis brought in the Islamic world’s first written constitution.
Five years later the first elections were held in Egypt and in 1876 the
first Ottoman constitution was drawn up – all events which can at least
partially be linked with the fact that the Crimean War was the first war
in which Ottoman and European soldiers fought side by side against a
common enemy.8 In addition, it was the first war in which news from
the front arrived by telegraph and was printed virtually live by the era’s
newspapers. Also thanks to the first photographs taken on the battlefield,
this novelty generated unprecedented echoes of the victories registered
by the (still incomplete) Western democracies at the expense of the
despotic Russian Empire.
Finally, it should also be mentioned that, during that very same
years, a plethora of missionaries were extremely active in distributing
the Scriptures. Edmund Hornby (1825–96), nominated head judge
of the British Supreme Court in Constantinople in 1857, pointed out
that during the Crimean War ‘British and French bible societies and a
great many missionary corps were extremely active in distributing the
New Testament to Turkish soldiers [...] when these soldiers ended their
military service period a great many bibles thus ended up in the homes
of Turkish families scattered around the country’.9
Whatever the consequences of the Crimean War and other episodes
that occurred at the time, what is interesting here is to note that the
second half of the nineteenth century was the phase in which the interests
8 Specifically, it was the first war in history in which a Christian power (Britain)
fought alongside a Muslim Empire (Ottoman) and against a Christian Empire
(Tsarist Russia).
9 The National Archives (TNA), FO 78/1851, Hornby to the then Foreign Minister
John Russell (1792–1878), Constantinople, 26 July 1864.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 203
of the great powers – Great Britain, France and Russia primarily – and in
relation to the Dardanelles Straits in particular, began to exert a growing
influence in the context of a region and, more specifically, an area (Persia)
which had long seemed impermeable to outside penetration.
Persian Shah Nāsir al-Dīn (1831–96), the first Persian monarch to
have visited Europe (in 1873 and again in 1879 and 1889), made protracted
attempts to exploit these rivalries to his own advantage with results which
were, however, in many ways the reverse of his intentions. The increase in
political and economic interference by the great powers in contexts which
had for centuries been subject to direct or indirect Persian influence was
the most tangible evidence of this. This, for example, is the case of the
decisive role played by Great Britain in the context of the annexation of
Herat to Afghanistan, a country which London saw as functional to its goal
of limiting Russian expansion in Central Asia. For its part, in addition to
conquering modern-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Russia succeeded
in breaking the bonds uniting Persia and other strategic historic cities in
the Samarkand area.
The straw which broke the camel’s back, of determinant influence in
triggering the subsequent Tobacco Protest, dates to late 1890 when Nāsir
al-Dīn granted English Major Gerald F. Talbot a fifty-year monopoly over
tobacco production, sales and exports – a widely consumed product in Iran.
It was not, however, the first grant made by Nāsir al-Dīn. In 1872, German
businessman (naturalized British) Paul Reuter (1816–99) had already
succeeded in obtaining from the Shah ‘exclusive and definitive’ rights to
extract everything he could from Persia’s ‘coal, iron, copper, lead’ and oil
mines and also in obtaining road and other public works building rights.10
In both cases, these grants were greeted with great hostility by local
people. The latter, in particular, triggered a national boycott prompting
immediate withdrawal of the grant, a process which in many ways
coincided with the first phase in modern Iranian nationalism.
10 Firuz Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia. Imperial Ambitions in Qajar Iran,
new edition, London, I.B. Tauris, 2013, p. 107.
204 Lorenzo Kamel
It is precisely to the phase which coincided with the 1891-2 revolt –
still today considered a great success11 – that it is possible to trace the first
concrete involvement in politics by Shiite clerics in modern Iran. More
specifically, the revolt ‘symbolized the alliance that matured between
powerful bazaaris in Iran and senior mujtahids in the shrine cities’.12
The alliance between the clerics and social classes linked to the
‘bazaar’ – ‘the place of prices’,13 which echoes the concept of souq/
market in Arabic – was the backbone of the main historical phenomena
which had occurred in the country since the end of the nineteenth
century (including the Tobacco Protest, the 1905–11 Constitutional
Revolution, and the 1979 revolution). This alliance was not, however,
an inevitable outcome of the country’s internal dynamics but rather the
culmination of a series of failed attempts – by local tujjār (merchants) –
to combat, in a structured and organized way, the concessions granted
to the Western powers. A significant example of this is the Council of
the Representatives of the Merchants of Iran (Majlis-i Vukalā-yi Tujjār-I
Iran), a sort of organized pressure group founded in Tehran in 1883
and led by a famous merchant of the day, Hāj Muhammad Hasan Amīn
al-Zarb, whose objective was to assert its right to ‘a voice in the affairs
of the country’.14 The council was soon dismantled, primarily because
11 Between 1890 and 1980, according to Ali Pirzadeh, ‘only the Tobacco Protest
of 1891 and the 1978 Islamic Revolution can be considered as successful’. Ali
Pirzadeh, Islam Revisited. Exploring the Historical Roots of Culture, Economics,
and Society, Cham, Springer, 2016, p. 145.
12 Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994,
p. 210.
13 For centuries, as Keshavarzian has noted, the very nature of the bazaar represented
‘the necessary foundation for communal allegiance, with its confined nature
fostering long-term and face-to-face interactions among bazaaris’. See Arang
Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran. The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 71–2.
14 Vanessa Martin, Iran between Islamic Nationalism and Secularism. The
Constitutional Revolution of 1906, London/New York, I.B. Tauris, 2013, p. 22.
Mahdawi has noted that the Shah initially gave his full support to the council. See
Shireen Mahdawi, For God, Mammon, and Country. A Nineteenth-century Persian
Merchant, Haj Muhammad Hassan Amin al-Zarb, 1834–1898, Boulder, Westview
Press, 1999.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 205
it was seen as incompatible with the interests of the absolute monarchy,
opening the way to a historic phase in which the great merchants began
to present their protests in religious terms.
A central role in this process was played by Mīrzā Shīrāzī (1814–96),
an eminent mujtahid (Islamic law judge) originally from Shiraz, who had
also distinguished himself for his consolidated bonds with traders active
in Southern Iran. Urged on by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1838–97) –
possibly the most influential ideologist in the Muslim world during the
late nineteenth century – Shīrāzī15 acted as spokesman for the assertion
of rights which were increasingly deeply felt by the local population,
first and foremost its traders. The concessions granted by the Shah to
the European powers – including the one regarding tobacco – effectively
constituted a serious threat to merchant wealth in the country’s largest
towns and cities, from Isfahan to Fars by way of Tabriz and Tehran. As
noted by Nakash:
The interdependency that began to mark the relations between the bazaaris and
senior mujtahids in the shrine cities reinforced the strong orientation of the latter
toward Iran. The bazaar emerged as the major source of credit for senior mujtahids
in Iraq while the latter became both the superior authority for arbitration between
bazaaris and mujtahids in Iran, as well as a counterpoise against the government.16
15 Al-Afghānī wrote a letter to Shīrāzī in which he urged the latter to ‘save and defend’
Iran from the ‘criminal’ concessions granted to the great powers. Ideologically
speaking, Al-Afghānī, native to Iran, held that Islam and progress were entirely
compatible. His ideas were taken on board by a great many intellectuals including
Egyptian jurist Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), one of the key figures in Islamic
modernism as well as a direct witness to the British occupation of Egypt (1882).
Al-Afghānī’s thesis was promoted in a historic phase in which a growing number
of scholars were questioning whether Islam and modernity were compatible: this
questioning undermined well-established certainties and fostered the ideological
conditions necessary to the penetration of nationalist and/or secular ideologies
and concepts. See Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Muḥammad ‘Imarāh (eds), al-A’mal
al-kamilah [The full works of the Imam Muḥammad ʿAbduh], Vol. 3, Beirut,
al-Mu’assasat al-Arabīyya, 1972; and Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Muḥammad
‘Imarāh (eds), Al-Islam wa al-mar’ah [Islam and Woman in the Opinion of the
Imam Muḥammad ʿAbduh], Cairo, Al-Qāirah li al-Thaqāfa al-’Arabīyya, 1975.
16 Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq, cit., p. 210.
206 Lorenzo Kamel
It is significant to note that each of these elements contributed to
preparing the ground for the 1905 Constitutional Revolution, the first
constitutional revolution in the whole of Asia. As in the case of the 1979
revolution, a wide spectrum of local people were involved (including
merchants, intellectuals and clerics)17 and it was significantly influenced
also by an exponential rise in the prices of primary goods – wheat
prices shot up 90 per cent in the first three months of 1905, largely as a
consequence of the Russian Revolution and a cholera outbreak – as well
as the fears expressed by merchants and clerics alike about growing and
pervasive ‘external interference’.18 It was precisely in the excitement of
the protests, which resulted in the promulgation of the new constitution,
that the expression ‘Mellat-i Iran’ (‘the Iranian nation’) was first heard
on the streets of Tehran.19
9.2 The 1921 and 1953 coups d’état
The origins of the Pahlavi dynasty can be traced to the 1921 coup d’état
in which the Reza Khan regime emerged, thanks in particular to the
17 It is significant that the central role played by the clerics in the 1905–11 revolution
notwithstanding, this latter generated a markedly Western-style constitution and
form of government. However, the 1979 revolution, in which secular elements in
the population also played a significant part, led to an Islamic revolution whose
constitution accords religion a totalising role.
18 These include the (pro-Russian) policies implemented by Belgain consultant
Joseph Naus (1897) to whom Iranian Prime Minister Amin ad-Dauleh had turned
for assistance. Afshin Matin-Asgari has noted that during World War I ‘the entire
[Iranian] constitutional experiment was suspended as British and Russian occupation
forces put an end to the country’s independence. Moreover, the occupying armies
requisitioned food and other vital resources, causing enormous economic
devastation, famine, and millions of deaths’. Afshin Matin-Asgari, ‘The Pahlavi
Era Iranian Modernity in Global Context’, in Touraj Daryaee (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Iranian History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 347.
19 Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1982, p. 82.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 207
support assured by the British authorities present in the country. His son,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, came to the throne via a further coup d’état
three decades later, in 1953. The deposition of the last Qajar dynasty
sovereign was not the outcome of planned and organized military action
(Iran did not have a full-blown army). It was actually a sort of ‘one man
show’,20 largely triggered and implemented by the British authorities
in order to get a strong man capable of combating the covert ambitions
of post-Bolshevik Russia into power. The individual chosen for this
purpose, a ‘violent’21 and ‘illiterate’22 army officer known as Reza Khan,
immediately suppressed all forms of opposition in order to consolidate
his personal power.
Inspired by the policies adopted by Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)
in Turkey, Reza Shah adopted an ambitious modernization programme
and succeeded in a short time in presenting himself convincingly as
a reformer, a modern statesman. Appearances notwithstanding, his
frequently counterproductive methods did not go unnoticed by the
British authorities present in Iran either: ‘The fact that the Shah alone
has policies and drives them through’, noted the British legation in
Tehran, ‘increases his prestige and strength politically, but this political
predominance is apt to interfere in business and in the long run the effect
cannot be beneficial’.23
It is thus reasonable to question why he chose not to follow in the
footsteps of the great ‘modernisers’ of his era (including Atatürk), opting
for a Republican- rather than monarchist-style government. The answer
to this is largely to be found in his desire not to make an enemy of
20 Hazem Kandil, The Power Triangle. Military, Security, and Politics in Regime
Change, New York, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 35.
21 Citing Kandil: ‘Always a violent man, Reza cursed his generals, struck them with
his cane, and ordered court-martials all around’. Ibid., p. 41.
2 Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings. How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia
2
Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East, New York, Simon & Schuster,
2011, p. 417.
23 British Library Manuscript Collection (BLMC), India Office Records, Coll. 28/39,
v. 1, f. 117, British legation in Tehran to Foreign Minister Anthony Eden (1897–
1977), 27 June 1936.
208 Lorenzo Kamel
the clerics whose main representatives Reza Shah himself consulted in
March 1924 in the holy city of Qom.
To this is to be added the fact that a ‘monarchist framework’ fitted
more naturally with the process of ‘racialization’ which marked out Reza
Pasha’s regime right away. As Adib-Moghaddan has noted, ‘Reza Shah
imagined grandeur exactly in psycho-nationalistic terms: Iranian identity
was racialised and Iranian superiority was thus inscribed in the syntax
of the emerging Pahlavian national narrative.’24
An instrumental role was played in this sense by ‘Aryanism’, an
ideology inspired by a self-attributed sense of the superiority of the
‘Aryan race’ which prompted Reza Shah to change the nation’s name
from Persia to Iran, that is, ‘Land of the Aryans’, in 1935. Reza Shah’s
attempt to ‘purify’ the country culturally and ‘racially’ speaking also took
the form of a marked attention to the presumed cultural affinities between
Iran and Nazi Germany (then on the rise) as well as via the systematic
suppression of a large number of ‘foreign’ words, primarily Arabic,
present in the Farsi language, a goal which was achieved thanks to the
creation and strengthening of specific institutes and research centres
including Farhangistan (1935).
Both Aryanism and the concomitant emphasis on the great
pre-Islamic Persian empires constitute two aspects of great
importance: those which more than any other bind together Reza Shah
and his son and heir, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The latter laid claim,
twenty-two years after (1965) the defeat of the Nazi regime, to the title
of Aryamehr (‘the light of the Aryans’), an expression chosen to assert
‘his leadership of a racially defined ethnic group’.25 Fascinated, as his
father had been, by Napoleon, like the latter he had himself crowned
monarch in an opulent ceremony in 1967. Reza Pahlavi went as far
as to cancel out or downplay all traces of Islam’s influence over the
country and declared that Iran’s history and culture were ‘more akin
24 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Psycho-nationalism. Global Thought, Iranian
Imaginations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 54.
25 Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2012, p. 174.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 209
to that of the West’.26 In his opinion, Persian culture was ‘the oldest
continuous one racially and linguistically linked to that of the West’.27
It is thus hardly surprising that the repression set in motion under Reza
Pahlavi’s dictatorship had an immediately identifiable and well-defined
target. It struck, in particular, at two specific sectors of the population,
those which had acted as the backbone to the great historical processes
which had occurred in the country in previous decades: ‘the bazaar’ and
the ‘ulema’.28 The Rastakhiz (Party of Rebirth), a party founded in the
1970s, represented the latest and most effective incarnation of a series of
tools adopted for this purpose. According to the Shah, those who did not
agree to join Rastakhiz fell into two categories: either they were members
of the Tudeh (Communist party), and thus liable for imprisonment, or
they were traitors and thus to be exiled from the country. Repression
went well beyond this, however. Note that in June 1977 the Red Cross
confirmed that 900 of the 3,000 political prisoners present in Iranian jails
had been tortured.29 In the words of Michael Axworthy: ‘It appeared that
quiet dissent was no longer an option: the regime was intent on erasing
all dissent. It was not just Tudeh and extremists that were threatened –
large sections of Iranian society became anxious that their interests were
in danger.’30
26 Cited in Zhand Shakibi, Revolutions and the Collapse of the Monarchy. Human
Agency and the Making of Revolution in France, Russia, and Iran, London/
New York, I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 86.
27 Ibid.
28 Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran. A History of the Islamic Republic, New York,
Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 91. More than the bazaars – the corporations
were reformed and placed under direct regime control – it was, however, the ‘ulema
who were subjected to the greatest repression. This aim was pursued by means of
the creation of repressive bodies set up for this purpose. A new calendar was also
established – to substitute the Islamic calendar – calibrated to match the date of
the rise to the throne of Cyrus the Great.
29 See Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven. The Pahlavis and the Final Days
of Imperial Iran, New York, Henry Holt, 2016, p. 237; Afshin Matin-Asgari,
‘Twentieth Century Iran’s Political Prisoners’, in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 42,
No. 5 (September 2006), pp. 689–707.
30 Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran, cit., p. 92.
210 Lorenzo Kamel
How had things gone this far? To respond to this question it is
necessary to take a step back in time and look at the frantic months
of 1953 and thus the historical processes which led to the downfall of
the democratically elected government of nationalist leader Mohammad
Mossadeq, and the return to power of Reza Pahlavi.
Between 16 September 1941 – when, following on from the Anglo-
Soviet invasion of the country,31 Reza Pahlavi succeeded his father Reza
Shah to the throne – and 1953, thirty-one cabinets and 140 ministers
succeeded one another in office, a much higher figure than the ten
cabinets and fifty ministers who had occupied the highest state offices
in the previous sixteen years.32 The last of the sixteen cabinets was led
by Mohammad Mossadeq, who had won more votes than any other
member of Tehran’s key council. Arrested in the early 1920s for his
opposition to Reza Shah’s rise to power, Mossadeq had devoted much of
his life to defending Iran’s national integrity. His policies were especially
unfavourable to Western interests in the area. The nationalization of
Iranian oil was, in fact, seen by the London establishment above all as a
serious threat to British interests in the area.33 Washington, for its part,
31 The purpose of the invasion was to undermine a possible support by the Reza
Pahlavi regime for the Axis powers. It also aimed to create a safe supply route
by which British help could be sent to the Soviet Union. A new book by Ashley
Jackson confirms the thesis according to which a sort of unwritten pact was in
place at the time which was well summarized by the words of the man who was
soon to be the British ambassador to Tehran, Reader Bullard (1885–1976): ‘The
Persians expect that we should at least save them from the Shah’s tiranny as a
compensation for invading their country’. Cited in Ashley Jackson, Persian Gulf
Command. A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq, New Haven, Yale
University Press, 2018, p. 183. On Bullard’s point of view, including discriminatory
judgements on Iran’s Kurdish community, see also TNA FO 624/28/152, a dispatch
signed by R. Bullard, Tehran, 28 October 1942.
32 Bahman Baktiari, Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran. The
Institutionalization of Factional Politics, Gainesville, University Press of Florida,
1996, p. 28.
33 It was defined ‘a heavy blow to our prestige’ in a memorandum signed by Under-
Secretary of State, Roger Makins (1904-94), 11 August 1951 (TNA FO 371/124968/
ZP24/2).
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 211
primarily feared that the country’s powerful Communist party, Tudeh,
might take control.34
When, in late 1951, Mossadeq succeeded in getting parliamentary
approval for his oil nationalization law proposal – closing down the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and inspiring what happened later
in Algeria and Libya in the 1960s and 70s respectively – the British
authorities responded by blocking Iranian oil exports and appealing to
the Hague Court of Justice. Despite this latter coming down clearly
on the side of the Iranians, London reacted by tightening its embargo
on Iran and exerting growing diplomatic pressure on its allies to do
likewise. Iranian oil exports only restarted from 1954 onwards, after the
creation of the Consortium for Iran led by British Petroleum (ex-AIOC),
together with Gulf Oil, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Standard Oil of California
and Standard Oil of New York: the famous (in Enrico Mattei’s definition)
‘seven sisters’.
It is certainly true that, in the three years between the nationalization
of Iranian oil and the August 1953 coup which led to the removal of
Mossadeq – replaced by General Fazlollah Zāhedī (1892–1963) – this
latter became the object of growing hostility by a significant segment of
the country’s public opinion (the collapse of the local economy played a
front-rank role in this process as did the growing hostility of the clerics).
It is, however, clear that the role played by the United States and Great
Britain in implementing this coup d’état exerted an enormous influence,
directly or indirectly, on the country’s subsequent history.35 In the words
of Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne:
34 This does not imply that Washington had no other aims. On 23 April 1951 the
future (from 1953) president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower (1890–
1960), then Supreme Commander of NATO’s Allied Forces noted the following in
his diary: ‘Lord knows what we’d do without Iranian oil’. Cit. in Louis Galambos
(ed.), The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Vol. 12: NATO and the Campaign
of 1952, Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1989, p. 239.
35 According to Paul R. Pillar, ‘it’s impossible to say what directions Iran would have
taken if Britain and the United States had not pushed out Mossadegh. But it’s a safe
bet that, with the Cold War having come and gone, we wouldn’t be talking today
about what was the main worry in 1953: a communist Iran’. Paul R. Pillar, ‘Sixty-
Five Years On: Iran Regime Change Advocates Haven’t Learned from Coup’, in
212 Lorenzo Kamel
The Anglo-American operation interrupted the Iranian drive to affirm its own
sovereignty over its own resources and helped to bring an intense period in the
history of the country’s nationalist and democratic movement to an end. These
consequences came dramatically back to haunt Iran in the years which followed.
The fall of the Shah in 1979 brought back memories of 1953 US action as it had
made possible the subsequent increasingly unpopular monarchy and intensified
the anti-American nature of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians in the
intervening twenty-five years.36
9.3 The rise of the clerics and the ‘twilight’
of the bazaars
In a famous speech given in June 2009 at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University,
President Barack Obama admitted that ‘the United States played a role
in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government’ at the
peak of the Cold War.37 The three decades which followed – inaugurated
by Reza Pahlavi’s return to Tehran with the director of the CIA, Allen
Dulles (1893–1969), as his escort38 – also marked a watershed in what
IranSource, 15 August 2018, Available online: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/
blogs/iransource/sixty-five-years-on-iran-regime-change-advocates-haven-t-
learned-from-coup. It should, however, be highlighted that the general opinion of
the day was very different. On 16 June 1932 the apostolic delegate in Iran, Egidio
Lari (1882–1965), made known to Cardinal (and future pope) Eugenio Pacelli
(1876–1958) that ‘the Russians are very active in Persia especially in the primary
schools, hospitals […] and trade but the Bolsheviks have the upper hand and
are flooding Persia with their products. In this they have beaten their rivals, the
English’. Vatican Secret Archives (ASV), Arch. Deleg. Apostolica in Iran, fasc. 24,
b. 10, f. 201.
36 See the book abstract of Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (eds), Mohammad
Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2004.
37 White House, Remarks by the President at Cairo University,
4 June 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/
remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09.
38 For years Dulles played an active role as arms sales middleman, including for the
Nazi regime.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 213
Ahmad Ashraf called ‘the two inseparable twins’ of the Iranian context,
the bazaars and the mosques.39
Whilst he was also an expression of the Iranian conservative
oligarchy, Mossadeq came down decisively against repeated attempts
by the militant Shiite clerics to impose the use of the full face veil
as well as to legally ban alcohol. He also immediately undertook to
improve the country’s health system and ensure a minimum of social
insurance. A convinced secularist, Mossadeq embodied the spectre of a
Turkish Atatürk-style secular republic in the eyes of the more hardline
religious groups – including the Quietist Shiite hierarchy based in the
holy city of Qum. It was precisely this strata of the population – the one
that ultimately had benefited the most from the interference of external
players – which represented one of the foundation stones of the events
which occurred three decades later. Darioush Bayandor went as far as
to argue that ‘the core group in the Islamic Revolution [1979] was in
effect of direct ideological lineage to the clerics who played a key part in
Mosaddeq’s downfall’.40 In this sense it is certainly not a coincidence that
it was some of the Mossadeq’s most fervid enemies, including Ayatollāh
Abu’l-Qāsem Kāshāni (1882–1962) and Navvab Safavi (leader of the
Fadā’iyān-e Islam movement), who emerged as ‘icons of the new order’
in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.
Just as the 1890 revolt coincided with the first Shiite clerical
intervention in modern Iranian politics, so the events of 1953, and
Mossadeq’s failed attempt to establish his sovereignty over the country’s
energy resources, directly or indirectly ushered in the definitive pre-
eminence of the clerics in the country’s political life. In this context it
should be underlined that many scholars have recently downplayed the
United States and British roles in the events which led to the overthrow
of Mossadeq. Bayandor, for example, noted in a 2010 book based largely
on US and British sources that ‘internal political dynamics more than
39 Ahmad Ashraf, ‘Bazaar-Mosque Alliance: The Social Basis of Revolts and
Revolutions’, in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 1,
No. 4 (Summer 1988), p. 538.
40 Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the CIA. The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited, Basingstoke,
New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 2.
214 Lorenzo Kamel
foreign intrigues were responsible for the ultimate blow’.41 The role
played by the country’s internal dynamics have, indeed, for long been
underestimated or ignored. Plenty of archival sources published for the
first time in the last five years have, however, confirmed beyond any
reasonable doubt that it was, to a considerable extent, Washington’s
interference which triggered the process which ultimately led to
Mossadeq’s fall and the strengthening of the Iranian Shiite clerics. More
specifically, the strategies implemented by the US ‘resulted in literal
revolt of the population’.42 The British establishment, at the same time,
was and remained aware of ‘some very embarrassing things about the
British’43 in the context of the 1953 coup d’état.
What has been argued thus far does not intend to suggest that the
1979 revolution, whose primary slogan was Istiqlāl, Āzādī, Jomhūri-e
Eslāmī (‘Independence, Liberty, Islamic Republic’), was exclusively
related to the involvement and initiative of the clerics. It is enough to
mention that even a figure like Ali Shariati (1933–77), a firm oppositor
of the Shah and considered by many as the ‘Revolution’s ideologue’,
was largely influenced by the anti-imperialist policies of the global
left and perceived Islam as a theological tool serving a purpose (‘the
liberation’).44 It should also be added that the lay and secular component
of the revolution was present right from the start while its (however
41 Ibid., p. 155.
42 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), DDO Files, Job 80–01701R, box 3, file 11,
Misc. TPAJAX Correspondence. The file is available online: Summary, Campaign
to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB435/docs/Doc%202 %20-%201954-00-00 %20Summary%20of%20
Wilber%20history.pdf.
43 TNA PRO FCO 8/3216, B.L. Crowe to R.S. Gorham, ‘Iran: release of confidential
records, US State Department papers for 1952-1954’, 12 October 1978. The file is
available online: Minute, B.L. Crowe to R.S. Gorham, Anglo-American Planning
Talks: Iran, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/docs/Doc%20
23 %20-%20October%2012.pdf.
44 Shirali wrote: ‘Shariati transported religious discourse onto the ground of the
Marxists, the progressives, and the liberals, that is, the ground of ideology in the
full meaning of the term’. Mahnaz Shirali, The Mystery of Contemporary Iran,
New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2015, p. 135.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 215
prevalent) ‘Islamic’ character became an all-encompassing element only
later, in particular as a consequence of the occupation of the American
Embassy in Tehran (4 November 1979–20 January 1981) and the
outbreak of the war with Iraq (22 September 1980): two historical events
which played a crucial role in paving the way to the most extremist of
the revolutionary groups. In the words of Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar,
‘revolution came first, and “Islam” followed’.45
In the context of these arguments, a further aspect would appear to
be especially significant. By means of the Savak, Iran’s terrible secret
police whose power Mossadeq had attempted unsuccessfully to weaken,
for years Reza Pahlavi engaged in brutal repression of any (be it ‘timid’
and/or clandestine) form of opposition, adopting his infamous ‘torture
rooms’, particularly from 1963 onwards.46 To this it should be added,
citing Benjamin Smith, that ‘most “old” social institutions in Iran were
destroyed or significantly weakened during the Pahlavi dynasty (1926–
79)’,47 a process which peaked in 196548 and 1975, the year the single
party was founded (Hezb-e Rastakhiz, Party of Rebirth), imposed by the
Shah.49 The wide-ranging anti-monarchical sentiments – within which
45 Mohammad Tabaar, Religious Statecraft. The Politics of Islam in Iran, New York,
Columbia University Press, 2018, p. 5.
46 In 1963 the Iranian economy became de facto bound to what Ibrahim M. Oweiss
has called the ‘petrodollar’. Katouzian was referring to the post-1963 period –
when the autocratic character of the dictatorship headed by Reza Shah reached
its apex – using the concept of ‘petrolic despotism’. See Homa Katouzian, The
Political Economy of Modern Iran. Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926-1979,
New York, New York University Press, 1981.
4 7 Benjamin Smith, ‘Collective Action with and without Islam: Mobilizing the Bazaar
in Iran’, in Quintan Wiktorowicz (ed.), Islamic Activism. A Social Movement Theory
Approach, Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 185.
48 Katouzian has noted that ‘the long-term origins of the revolution [1979] may be said
to go back to the 1960s when the upper and modern social classes were eliminated
from politics and so the state lacked a social base’. Homa Katouzian, Iran. Politics,
History and Literature, Abingdon/New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 100.
49 Chehabi noted that ‘the bazaaris resented the creation of the Rastakhiz party, whose
totalitarian tentacles threatened to reach into the farthest corners of civil society
and take away the last vestiges of Bazaar autonomy […] Their anger and hostility
contributed greatly to the close cooperation between the Bazaar and Khomeni
216 Lorenzo Kamel
the militant clerics50 represented just one of many components – were
thus solid and deeply rooted. It should not come as a surprise, thus, that
also the bazaaris (a significant proportion of whom were ideologically
close to the Khomeyni’s ideology),51 in common with thousands of
workers, students and intellectuals with Marxist–Leninist tendencies
(many of whom belonged to parties and groups such as Tudeh and
Fadai’i), played a prominent role within the revolutionary body which
enabled the 1977–9 revolutionary movement.52
Many among those workers, students and intellectuals were also
bound by a firm opposition toward the privileges granted by the regime to
a growing number of foreign entities, American first and foremost. It has
been estimated that around 8,000 Americans lived in Iran in 1970. Just eight
years later, in 1978, this number had risen to 50,000. Many of these lived
separated off from the rest of the population enjoying benefits, including
in the hospitals, which were out of reach to the bulk of Iranians. James Bill
has noted that ‘the very best and the very worst of America were on display
in the cities of Iran’.53
Without prejudice to these and other potential considerations, it
is, however, worth bearing in mind that the definitive affirmation of the
Shiite clerics, favoured by the events of 1953 and which came to full
fruition twenty-six years later, coincided precisely with a reduction in
the historical role played by the bazaaris, perceived by Reza Pahlavi as a
during the years that led up to the revolution’. H. E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics
and Religious Modernism. The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and
Khomeini, London, I.B. Tauris, 1990, p. 94.
50 The clerics initially opposed the social reform (‘White Revolution’) enacted by
the Shah. The same can be said for agricultural reforms by means of which many
goods controlled by the religious authorities (mortmain) were expropriated.
1 According to Keddie, ‘the “traditionalist” bazaar attitude, along with the close
5
family, financial, and cultural ties of the bazaar with the ulama, help explain the
bazaar-ulama alliance that has been responsible for so much revolutionary activity
in Iran since 1891’. Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran. Roots and Results of Revolution,
updated edition, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 227.
5 2 James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion. The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988, p. 381.
5 3 Ibid.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 217
‘crowd of fanatics’.54 This progress was given a determinant boost under
the Reza Pahlavi dictatorship and then reached full fruition in the wake
of the 1979 revolution. In the words of Arang Keshavarzian:
When the Pahlavi regime stepped in to directly restructure the Bazaar in 1976, these
functions were politicized and directed resources toward mass politics. However, the
shifting institutional setting and location of networks that transformed the Bazaar
structure after the Islamic Revolution also inhibited its potency.55
The Islamic Republic was easily able to implement a series of policies
which (also) shaped the ways in which the bazaar operated with evident
repercussions for the bazaaris’ own potential to have their say in the country’s
political mobilization context.56 To this it should also be added that, in post-
1979 Iran, both the imposition of the monopolies and a more interventionist
management of licences and the growing co-optation of the more influential
business people into the state apparatus (public administration included)
undermined the bazaaris’ power and scope for action at the roots, effectively
leaving the militant Shiite clerics an empty field.
Conclusions: Qablan, Alan, Ayandeh
Regular elections, monitored by international institutions, are held every
four years in Iran. Yet, the country’s power structure (ultimate power is
54 For the Shah the ‘bazaaris were a crowd of fanatics, highly resistant to any change
as a result of the fact that their status guaranteed them a lucrative monopoly’.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History, New York, Stein and Day, 1980,
p. 156.
55 Arang Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran, cit., p. 23.
56 Zahedi noted that ‘the theocracy has proved itself to be just as harsh, even more
severe, than the monarchy in controlling and repressing segments of the bazaari
community’. Dariush Zahedi, The Iranian Revolution Then and Now. Indicators
of Regime Instability, Boulder, Westview Press, 2000, p. 47.
218 Lorenzo Kamel
in the hands of a non-elected religious leader57) is criticized and/or seen
with suspicion by many, in particular amongst the younger segments of
the population.58 Torture, unregulated arrests and extra-judicial killings are
well-documented.59 Despite this, a large proportion of public opinion in
Iran is aware of the long-term processes which led to the 1979 revolution
(the ‘rise of the mullahs’) and looks with a mixture of concern and
disillusion to the potential consequences of fostering a new power structure.
57 The current Supreme Leader of Iran, ʿAlī Ḥoseynī Khāmeneī, substantially performs
a guarantor and intermediary role within the system. In this sense it is important
to bear in mind that the Velāyat-e faqih (‘rule of the jurisconsult’) principle, a
totalitarian doctrine conceived by Khomeynī in accordance with which the task of
a Muslim jurist is to oversee parliament’s action in order to ensure that it conforms
to what a jurist (faqih) would consider suitable, has changed significantly over the
last four decades. See Mojtaba Mahdavi, ‘Ayatollah Khomeini’, in John L. Esposito
and Emad El-Din Shahin (eds), Key Islamic Political Thinkers, New York, Oxford
University Press, 2018, pp. 104–39.
58 See Maral Karimi, The Iranian Green Movement of 2009. Reverberating Echoes
of Resistance, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2018.
5 9 On the summary executions common since the earliest days of Khomeynī’s rise
to power, see Payam Akhavam, ‘Is Grassroots Justice a Viable Alternative to
Impunity? The Case of the Iran People’s Tribunal’, in Rebecca Barlow and Shahram
Akbarzadeh (eds), Human Rights and Agents of Change in Iran, Singapore,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 85–6. To this it should be added that women’s
status, whilst better than that of many other countries in the region (Saudia Arabia
first and foremost), has taken substantial steps backwards from the days of the
Reza Pahlavi regime. Axworthy has noted that, since 1979, ‘Iranian women have
been subject to one of the most restrictive dress codes in the Islamic world, yet
partly in consequence, Iranian families have released their daughters to study and
work in unprecedented numbers’. Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran. Empire
of the Mind, New York, Basic Books, 2008, p. 20. It should also be noted that,
certain reforms implemented notwithstanding, Reza Pahlavi always demonstrated a
disdain for women. An example is the following declaration during an interview in
English with Oriana Fallaci: ‘In a man’s life, women count only if they’re beautiful
and graceful and know how to stay feminine and… This Women’s Lib business,
for instance. What do these feminists want? What do you want? Equality, you
say? Indeed! I don’t want to seem rude, but… You may be equal in the eyes of
the law, but not, I beg your pardon for saying so, in ability. Oriana Fallaci, ‘The
Shah of Iran: An Interview with Mohammad Reza Pahlevi’, in The New Republic,
1 December 1973, https://newrepublic.com/article/92745.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 219
This is made even more evident by a widespread awareness that the
two ‘inseparable twins’, bazaar and mosque, are further apart than ever
before. In this sense, the imbalance in favour of the ‘mosques’ would
now seem irreversible. The little that has remained of the economic
power and historic role played by the bazaaris – including their political
mobilization ability – has been swept away in recent years, last but not
least by a series of markedly neo-liberal policies implemented by former
president Rafsanjāni (in the 1990s) and Ḥasan Rūḥānī (in office since
2013). The ‘alliance’ which was the backbone of the great historical
phenomena which cut through the whole of Iran’s history from the
second half of the nineteenth century onwards represents now a sort of
vestige of the past: a fact which would make any attempt to undermine
the current leadership even more vulnerable and uncertain.
In other respects, however, little seems to have changed. Various
actors, for the most part external to the region, are in fact committed, in
more or less direct ways, to reinforcing the country’s most conservative
and extremist elements60 or, in other cases, to hing on a series of
strategies and pressure groups in order to trigger regime change. These
attempts have grown to an unprecedented extent in the last decade, and
in particular in the wake of Iraq’s implosion (and thus that of Pan-Arab
party Ba’th, hostile to Tehran), a geographical area and, later, a state
which had always constrained Persian/Iranian influence in the region.
The Trump administration, in particular, has identified growing
economic sanctions and groups/parties such as Mujahedin-e Khalq
60 The protests which began in January 2017 in Mashhad, an area in which the
most militant and extremist clerics are concentrated, were largely triggered by a
strengthening in the more conservative elements in the country as well as by the
concurrent failure of the economic policies adopted in recent years by the regime’s
more moderate and pragmatic wing. Supported by the cultured elite, the bourgeoisie
and the urban middle classes, President Hassan Rūhānī had, in fact, implemented
a policy of moderation in internal affairs and greater Iranian integration into the
international economy. Washington’s unilateral abandonment of the so-called ‘Iran
deal’ (the nuclear weapons agreement signed in 2015 by the 5 plus 1 countries, the
European Union and Iran) was the factor which undermined the success of these
objectives to the greatest extent.
220 Lorenzo Kamel
(MEK)61 as the key to constraining Iran’s growing influence in the region
and/or promoting regime change in the country. Whilst it has as yet
no effect on public opinion in Iran, groups such as MEK embody, in
some respects, what General Fazlollah Zahedi represented at the time
of the 1953 coup d’état. As the current US National Security Advisor
John Bolton noted during a meeting organized by MEK in Paris in July
2017, ‘there is a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs, and
that opposition is centered in this room today’.62 The political actors
who contributed most to fostering – primarily as a consequence of the
invasion of Iraq in 200363 – the structural conditions for Tehran’s rise
to power in the region are thus the same that are now prompting the
international community to act against the ‘regime of the āyatollāhs’.
The past, as is frequently the case, thus does not seem to have passed.
For some eminent observers this represents even a sort of cause and
structural responsibility for the region’s current troubles. In the words of
a recent work by Thomas Friedman, the Middle East ‘made itself poor
by repeatedly letting the past bury the future’.64 Rather than facing up to
61 Set up in 1965 in Tehran and included by the US State Department in its list
of terrorist groups until September 2012, MEK has been involved in various
assassination attempts in Iran (causing the deaths of a large number of civilians).
In the 1980s the movement’s leadership took shelter in Paris. Its militias were,
however, in Iraq (at the time of the war with Iran), becoming loyal allies of Saddam
Hussein, thus significantly tarnishing their reputation in large swathes of Iranian
public opinion.
62 ‘John Bolton on Iran’, in The Iran Primer, 22 February 2018, https://iranprimer.
usip.org/node/4796. Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York and great Trump
supporter, went even further: ‘I say to the Iranian government, you must truly
be afraid of being overthrown’. Cited in ‘Trump Attorney Rudy Giuliani: US
Sympathizes with Iran Regime Change’, in The Guardian, 23 September 2018,
https://gu.com/p/9enjg.
63 Five of the 19 terrorists involved in the 11 September 2001 massacre were
Saudi citizens. Despite this, the Bush government reacted by attacking Iraq and
Afghanistan.
64 Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Crazy Poor Middle Easterners’, in The New York Times,
4 September 2018, https://nyti.ms/2Nfb9xx.
Whose Stability? Assessing the ‘Iranian Threat’ 221
the weight of history, a widely held current of opinion, well embodied
by Friedman himself, has thus chosen to burn its bridges with the past,
promoting an approach which is as widespread as it is short-sighted: the
qablan (before), alan (now) and ayandeh (future) of Iran – as well as of
the rest of the region – are and will remain inextricably bound together.
