A rocky road ahead for the Islamic republic…
This year sees the 30th anniversary of the 1979 revolution in Iran. It was in January that year that demonstrations began and the Shah fled the country, while on 1st February the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran, finally proclaiming an Islamic republic on 1st April. The rest is both history and an increasingly troubled present: which is why, in his lead essay for our 30th anniversary special feature, Christopher de Bellaigue explores the increasingly brittle confidence of an Iranian regime that faces declining oil wealth and a shaken confidence in its national project. Whatever happens in Iran’s June elections, though, de Bellaigue argues that what the world most needs is a fresh approach to engaging with Iran from Obama’s America.
While de Bellaigue looks to the future, historian Dominic Sandbrook looks to the past, and explores the story of Iran’s revolution in the context of those other shaping revolutions of the last few centuries: 1789 and 1917. How does what actually happened in 1979 compare to these epochal moments? Meanwhile, Katharine Quarmby tells a story on the most intimate of scales: of how she was one of a unique generation, the love child of a Persian naval officer and an English mother; and how, almost 40 years after her birth and adoption, she found her father again.
Finally, academic and author Michael Axworthy takes an in-depth look at a new biography of Iran’s last Shah written by none other than the man who served as Iran’s deputy minister of the interior before the revolution, Gholam Reza Afkhami. Afkhami’s account, Axworthy argues, has all the vivid and sympathetic detail one might expect from a monarchist insider—yet it, like the Shah himself, is blind to the larger historical currents that swept away his regime 30 years ago.
Share
Comments
Print
Add Comment
Interesting collection, especially Michael Axworthy’s piece. However, he suggests towards the end of his article that the division which had hampered the clerics in the past (Tobacco movement, constitutional revolution etc) was ended by Khomeini’s supplying of the ‘Velayat-e fariq’ doctrine of clerical leadership. This is factually incorrect, and also misses more important points concerning the way in which Khomeini actually centralized power and united the clerics and their followers in the years leading up to the revolution.
In ‘The Making of an Islamic State’, Vanessa Martin shows how the rationalization of the Shia establishment, a process begun by Khomeini’s mentor, provided the vehicle to reduce theological pluralism, and centralize the powers exercised by the clergy. This centralization facilitated the ‘unity’ which Mr. Axworthy describes.
As regards the degree of unity achieved in the wider Islamic Opposition, credit must be given to the organizing efforts of Khomeini’s disciples in Iran who wored throughout the 1960s and 1970s to establish networks of activists, organizing, proselytizing, and campaigning in the face of SAVAK. It was the work of these activists, many of whom are now (for better or worse) the Islamic Republic’s senior statesmen, which shaped the political conciousness of the Iranian people, and laid down the logistics to organize the mass movement of 1978-9.
To chalk up the immense and costly achievements of fifteen years’ action by Khomeini’s deputies to the apparent solving of a theological dispute is to engage in a crude reductive idealism which lets down the rest of an interesting review. Also very un-Peterhouse!
The U.S. is SO going to kick Iran’s ass. And they won’t trouble themselves to clean things up afterward. One would think Islam would figure out that the U.S. is NOT going to tolerate Islam’s lame and feeble talk. Iran should take a lesson from Libya, Saddam, and Osama, who hides like a little girl in the caves.
Islam is going DOWN in this century, as surely as Islam went down in the 6th century.