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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: Polity Histories
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Both revolutionary and reactionary, the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been a conundrum for Western observers. A theocracy that aspires to a popular mandate; an anti-colonial state with imperial pretensions of its own: modern Iran is in many ways a reflection of its struggle to reconcile its traditions with the challenges of modernity. In this book, Ali Ansari takes readers on a journey through Iran's turbulent history. Beginning with the country's fall from grace as a Great Power in the nineteenth century, he explores its repeated attempts to modernize in a series of revolutionary movements from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the civil unrest that is breaking out today. In so doing, he reveals how the experience of history and Iran's encounter with 'modernity' have come to define it - and set it on an authoritarian path in confrontation with the West and, often, its own people.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Dedication

Map of Iran

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Revolutionary Land

The Challenge of the West

The Challenge of Reform

A Revolution of the Mind?

Approach and Argument

Notes

1 A Constitutional Revolution (1905–1913)

Revolution

A Long Shadow

Oil

Notes

2 The Rise and Rule of Reza Shah (1914–1940)

The Anglo-Persian Agreement

The Man on Horseback

Reza Shah

Assessment

Notes

3 Oil and Nationalism (1941–1953)

The Azerbaijan Crisis

Oil Crisis

Notes

4 The ‘White’ Revolution (1954–1977)

The Red and the Black

Realizing the Great Civilization

Hubris

Notes

5 Revolution and War (1978–1988)

War

Notes

6 Building an Islamic Republic (1989–2000)

Rafsanjani

Reform

7 Crisis of Authority (2001–2009)

The Twilight of Reformism

Ahmadinejad and the Triumph of Populism

The Green Movement

8 Paranoid State (2010–)

The Nuclear Negotiations

Rouhani and the JCPOA

Map

Map of Iran

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Dedication

Map of Iran

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Begin Reading

Pages

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Polity Histories series

Adrian Bingham, United KingdomKerry Brown, ChinaEmile Chabal, FranceAlan Dowty, IsraelJeff Kingston, JapanDavid W. Lesch, SyriaDmitri Trenin, RussiaJoel Wolfe, Brazil

Iran

Ali M. Ansari

polity

The right of Ali M. Ansari to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2024 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4152-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938502

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Dedication

For Mimi

Map of Iran

Acknowledgements

All books are collective efforts and this one is no exception. I am grateful to my two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the text and comments, and to my copy-editor, Leigh Mueller, for diligently reviewing the text and ironing out the inevitable incoherencies that emerge. I am also grateful to the National Archive for permission to use extracts from their files. Above all, I would like to thank my editor, Louise Knight, and Inès Boxman, who piloted this particular ship safely to port. Any remaining errors or infelicitous use of language are mine and mine alone.

IntroductionA Revolutionary Land

Iran has rarely been out of the news, but rarely in it for positive reasons. Indeed, for much of the history of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s relationship with the outside world has been beset by a series of crises, not least the ‘Islamic’ revolution of 1979 itself – perhaps the first televised revolution in history – which painted a brutal and bloody picture of the unfolding developments. The US Embassy hostage crisis, which was broadcast nightly on US television, ensured that developments in Iran were seared into an increasingly unforgiving American mind.

Since then, each decade has been marked by a particular crisis: the war against Iraq shaped much of the 1980s, followed by the confrontation over the Rushdie fatwa which coloured relations over the 1990s, and then in the aftermath of 9/11 the seemingly insoluble crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. These crises have in many ways defined the way in which the West has seen Iran, and have also served to cloud our perspective and disguise the domestic political drivers that have shaped the country.

Nothing shows this better than the general surprise at the latest turn of events in September 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, at the hands of the Morality Police. The subsequent uprising, led by women, in pursuit of basic rights, can only be understood and appreciated in the context of the general deterioration of State–society relations in the Islamic Republic over the last two decades.

But, more strikingly, the recent protests echo and reflect the drive towards constitutionalism and fundamental rights which has been at the heart of Iranian political history for more than a century, beginning with the launch of Iran’s first revolution, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Largely overshadowed by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, this earlier revolution has arguably had a much more profound impact on political ideas and activism; it is a lode stone and reference point for all students of Iranian politics.

The importance of a constitution and the rule of law, a means to regulate relations between State and society within an Iranian framework, continues to energize politics in Iran to this day, and however much governing elites seek to suppress or eradicate these ideas, they stubbornly resurface with each generation.

It is, as such, important for the reader to appreciate just how ingrained and embedded these ideas are, how they have been integrated into the fabric of Iranian politics over the last two centuries and why, as a result, they are not going away. Many of the themes that have shaped Iranian history and politics to this day have been long in gestation and took form in the years leading to and including the Constitutional Revolution. These years provide the template on which all other matters rest, giving shape to the ideas and tensions which occupy Iranians to this day.

The dominating theme has been how to contend with the challenge posed by the West, and modernity in general. How, to put it in simple terms, could Iran be returned to the Great Power status that many Iranians felt was her birth right.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Iran – or Persia in the Western vernacular – identified as an empire: not just any empire, but the oldest and most esteemed of all empires, which had perhaps seen better days but whose history suggested that better days would return. Even in the twilight of the Safavid Empire (1501–1722) when its imperial pretensions were real, as the Huguenot Sir John Chardin noted caustically, they continued to enjoy grandiose notions of their imperial authority.1

By the turn of the nineteenth century, even with the further retreat of borders, that imperial mentality remained stubborn and immovable. Tradition – and imperial mythology – told Iranians that not only was their dominion the oldest in the world, but it was moreover the centre of the universe and the best of earthly territories. Indeed, the founder of the new Qajar dynasty (1797–1925) had ‘acquiesced’ to the royal diadem as long as his new subjects accepted his determination to restore Iran to its rightful greatness.

Identified as a ‘crossroads of civilization’, Iran occupied a plateau in south-west Asia on the ‘silk road’ connecting the West with China. Bounded by the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, the much-diminished imperium was still by the nineteenth century a large country possessed of diverse climes, shielded on two sides by two extensive mountain ranges – the Zagros to the west and the Alborz to the north – the arid climate of its core contrasting with the lush forests of the Caspian seaboard. To the south-west, the plateau descended into the Mesopotamian plain where the Shatt al-Arab waterway – the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers – demarcated the border with the Ottoman Empire (and latterly Iraq).

Even before oil, gas and other minerals were discovered in substantial quantities in the twentieth century, European statesmen were acutely aware of the geopolitical significance of the area. In Lord Curzon’s memorable, if somewhat romanticized, view: ‘Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia – to many these names breathe only a sense of utter remoteness or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me, I confess, they are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.’2

The Challenge of the West

The arrival of the Europeans in the shape of both the Russian and British Empires quickly served notice that an imperial resurgence would not automatically follow, as night followed day. Instead, the European challenge was of an altogether different nature. They may be curious about the ‘Persians’, aware about them from the religious and classical texts, and they might have been seduced by the cultural richness they encountered, but they were driven by new ideas of civilization and progress and were more than sufficiently confident to deal with the ancient empire of the Persians.

More to the point, as the Russians were to show in two devastating wars (1804–13 and 1826–8), this new Europe had found a way to wage war that the Iranians found difficult to contend with. It was not so much that the Iranians were lacking in bravery, but there were new systems of warfare being deployed that only modern states, with better forms of administration, could sustain.

Iranian reformers of the nineteenth century soon realized that this was not a matter of tinkering at the edges. Modern armies could not be procured and sustained with the old methods; new approaches would be required in both politics and economy. But how best to start the process of ‘modernization’? Could one catalyse change through economic reform or was it better to grasp the nettle through political reform?

British observers were in little doubt about the nature of the problem faced by the Iranians. Drawing on their own experience over the previous two centuries, they argued, with considerable force, that the problem faced by Iranians was neither sociological nor, as some would later argue, biological, but political. This could be rectified by applying discipline, expanding education and enforcing the rule of law.

The idea that Iran’s ills could be addressed through the application of different – better – methods was enthusiastically endorsed by Iranian reformers, who drank copiously from the well of Enlightenment Whiggism, digesting the wonders of British industrialization and progress, and pondering on the secrets of liberty. British ideas were especially pervasive in the post-Napoleonic period, when the ideas of the French Revolution, never far from the surface as far as state building was concerned, were nevertheless considered inappropriate for a country that sought to retain its religion and monarchy, albeit under different management.

The Challenge of Reform

The debate on how reform should be managed, however, remained and tended to oscillate between those who emphasized political or economic-led reform and those who preferred some combination of both. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Iranian statesmen had focused on the reform of the army but accepted that a more fundamental reform of the State and its administration would be required. How this might be achieved in the face of stubborn resistance from what may be loosely described as the ‘forces of reaction’ – principally the monarch – was another matter, where indolence and inertia appeared to rule the day.

As Mohammad Shah lay dying in 1848, his minister consoled him by noting that he left a stable country devoid of the sort of revolution then gripping much of Europe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Venality and corruption had infected the body politic, money was perennially short and, to make matters worse, the country faced a religious insurrection known as the Babi Revolt, after Ali Mohammad Shirazi – known as the Bab (the gate) – proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam of the Shias, returned at the end of time to inaugurate a new era.

Iran had been a Shia Muslim state since the Safavids imposed the minority branch of Islam on their subjects from the sixteenth century. It helped to distinguish the Safavids from their Ottoman rivals, but it also provided for other distinctions as far as domestic politics was concerned. Twelver Shi’ism was distinguished by a belief in the hereditary succession of the Muslim community through the Prophet’s family and his son-in-law Ali, the first of the twelve Imams, along with the belief that the Imams could interpret the law, a privilege which in their absence could be practised by ‘chosen’ intermediaries and religious jurists (clerics). In this case, the Bab had declared himself the twelfth Imam, returned along with the abrogation of all religious law, leading dramatically to the first public unveiling of a woman by one of his disciples Tahereh.

The revolt, which was suppressed with some brutality (the Bab himself was executed), shattered the prevailing religious orthodoxies and encouraged people to think the unthinkable. Others who were appalled by both the emergence and treatment of a millenarian movement were further convinced of the necessity of reform. The Babi Revolt would in time give birth to a new faith, that of the Bahais.

Political volatility was followed in 1857 by defeat to Britain, in the one – and, to date, only – Anglo-Persian War. Britain subjected Iran to much more modest terms than the Treaty of Turkmenchai (1828) which had ended the wars with Russia, thereby winning the peace as emphatically as it had won the war. Iranian statesmen then decided that a better route to success might be economic – and indirect – rather than overtly political, a position that British interlocutors increasingly accepted, not least because they would be the principle beneficiaries of this new approach.

It proved to be highly controversial, not least because the Russians were not keen on allowing the British to acquire economic interests at their expense. Some concessions, like that for the new telegraph network, were pursued because they serviced India, but others were pursued by private interests keen to profit from a country largely untouched by economic development. They benefitted from Iranian short-termism and lack of experience in negotiations, leading to contracts that often embarrassed the British Foreign Office, such was the largesse on offer. Indeed, the Reuter Concession of 1872 was so notorious that Curzon described it as ‘the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of, much less accomplished in history’.3

It was soon cancelled, but Reuter was later compensated by being awarded the right to establish the first bank in Iran, with full rights to issue notes. The British Imperial Bank of Persia effectively served as Iran’s central bank until the rule of Reza Shah. If the concessions did help to catalyse reform, they did so primarily by exposing the venality of the Qajar State, most obviously in the person of the monarch whose interest in reform appeared limited to the amount of money he could extract in short order from concessionaires. One especially tawdry concession, giving a monopoly on all tobacco sales to a British entrepreneur, proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and an alliance of clergy, intellectuals and merchants forced its cancellation through a nationwide Tobacco Boycott (1891). This alliance, which witnessed the first ‘political’ application of a fatwa (religious ruling), was a signpost of things to come.

A Revolution of the Mind?

If the means by which reform might be implemented continued to be debated, there was little doubt that Iranians needed a revolution of the mind that moved them from being selfish subjects to selfless citizens of a reinvigorated nation – an imperial nation rooted in history, but a nation nonetheless with a clear sense of itself and a pride, but not conceit, in its past.

The only way to reconcile tradition and modernity, argued Iran’s reformers, was to be rooted and to have a clear sense of where one had come from. Was this primarily Iranian, or Islamic, or indeed a combination of both? Most appreciated that the construction of the ‘nation’ could only proceed and reach a successful conclusion if Iranians understood the cosmopolitan nature of their inheritance, founded in a shared history and language for which Providence had provided them with the perfect repository: a poetic epic, redacted by the eleventh century, known as the Book of Kings (Shahnameh). This epic contained the history, myths and legends of the Iranians from the moment of Creation till the fall of the last great Persian empires to the Arab Muslims in the seventh century AD. This shared literary-historical inheritance bound the Persianate world but was of especial value to the inhabitants of Iran, the political heirs of the epic, and Iran’s early nationalists understood its power and utility in helping to shape and bind a modern identity.

This was not an identity shorn of religion, but it was one shorn of superstition. Drawing on the ideas of the anglophone Enlightenment in particular, religion was not regarded as antithetical to progress, but early thinkers followed broadly secular models which dictated that ‘Church’ and ‘State’ should be held separate. This was as much to protect the purity of religion as it was to desacralize the State, and it is remarkable that the experience of the Islamic Republic, where religion was once again injected into the body politic, has again encouraged thinkers to revert to the secular distinction. The Islamic Revolution, they argued had intended to provide a moral guide for politics, but instead it had resulted in the politicization – and corruption – of religion.

All these debates and tensions were laid bare during the constitutional period and continue to reverberate to this day, with one distinct difference. One of the reasons the Constitutional Revolution faltered was because the politically conscious and active parts of society were limited. Iran did not enter the twentieth century with a print culture of any significance. Literacy was low. But, through the twentieth century, the social fabric of the country changed, becoming better educated, better connected and more aware. The country began the complex process of modernization and industrialization.

Society, which had enjoyed a cultural cohesion, now increasingly enjoyed a political cohesion and unity of purpose. Where the Persian language had been the primary language of perhaps half the population, technology and education now ensured it was both standardized and understood throughout the country. Technology at once allowed the centralization and diffusion of power. It empowered the modern state, but new means of communication soon served to empower society too, building links within the country but also extending outwards.

By the end of the twentieth century, Iranians found themselves increasingly connected to a global community, not least facilitated by an extensive diaspora that had emerged after the Islamic Revolution. This global community further reinforced the impulse for change and, if intellectuals had been affected in the nineteenth century, now ideas were penetrating on a societal scale. The balance of power between State and society was beginning to change and much of what we see on the streets of Iran today is a reflection of that changing dynamic.

Approach and Argument

This short history seeks to distil those ‘essential’ aspects of the development of Iran over the last two centuries which can best provide the general reader with a critical appreciation and understanding of why we are where we are. It is by its very nature an abridgement and there is much detail that has been left out. It is, as a consequence, a more argumentative piece. But those whose interest has been piqued may wish for a deeper dive by perusing some of the material listed in the brief guide to further reading.

The text, as well as being an abridgement, has deliberately avoided the liberal use of referencing or the use of Persian terms. This has not always been possible, but, for example, I have tended to refer to ‘parliament’ throughout rather than ‘Majles’. Where Persian words have been used, I have applied common English spellings (e.g. Tehran), and for transliterations, Persian pronunciations, thus ‘Tehran’ rather than ‘Tihran’, ‘Taleban’ rather than ‘Taliban’.

Some readers will no doubt wonder about the use of the names ‘Persia’ and ‘Iran’ – whether they refer to one and the same place, and whether indeed ‘Iran’ is a new country founded on the ashes of the old. As should be apparent from the preceding text, the terms refer to the same country, but one, ‘Persia’, is the name accorded to the country by Western observers, inheriting the name from the Greek and Latin variants, while ‘Iran’ is the name by which the natives know the country.

The term ‘Iran’ has been in use since at least late antiquity and, even if the state disappeared, the cultural identity survived to re-emerge again in the sixteenth century with the establishment of the Safavid dynasty. By then, Western travellers were well aware of the name and recorded it. In 1934 (see chapter 2), the Iranian government instructed Western governments to desist from using ‘Persia’, but in the later twentieth century, this stricture was relaxed. Churchill insisted on the use of ‘Persia’ in all official documents because he felt, not without justification, that Iran would be too easily confused with Iraq – to the detriment, no doubt, of both! The Daily Telegraph persisted in using ‘Persia’ until 1979.

In choosing areas to focus on, I have tried to highlight those historical experiences that have shaped the current political landscape. In some cases, these are conscious influences frequently referred to by Iranians themselves – such as the Coup of 1953 – in other cases, there are events and developments which have perhaps more quietly yet durably informed opinion. Iranians can be a curiously ahistorical people, talking of events a hundred years ago as if they happened yesterday, although this does reflect the power of historical mythology (and selective memory) in shaping current attitudes.

This is why I have spent some time on the intellectual and political changes around the Constitutional Revolution in 1906, which were put into practice during the rule of Reza Shah. Indeed, the first fifty years of the twentieth century are in many ways the most productive period of political development, in which the foundations of the modern state were laid. An appreciation of the period is vital for any understanding of the current period.

Similarly, since the era of oil nationalization ranks so high in the popular memory, it is important for the reader to have an appreciation, as well as a more balanced understanding, of the achievements, perils and pitfalls of the last Shah, overthrown in 1979. Here the age-old dynamic between economic and political reform raises its head again, to be repeated, as will be seen, in the post-Islamic Revolutionary period.

Many histories of modern Iran tend to look at 1979, the onset of the Islamic Revolution, as year zero, with what preceded it as little more than a preamble. This is clearly nonsensical. The Islamic Revolution overthrew a monarchy, but it inherited a State built over half a century which was in large part founded on ideas shaped in the Constitutional Revolution. The social and economic developments realized in the post–1979 period were products of a revolution that started much earlier, and in many ways the history of the Islamic Republic is less one of how it sought to reimagine the reconciliation between tradition and modernity, and more one of how it has wasted its inheritance.

Indeed, the tragedy of modern Iran has been the inability of successive states to understand the integral relationship between political and economic reform, and that a modern economy requires transparency and accountability which reaches into political life and gives people a stake in the system that regulates their lives. If Enlightened Despotism was justified in the early parts of the century on account of the paucity of social and economic development, as society developed and people became more engaged and aware, this justification faded into irrelevance. The greatest criticism that can be directed at Mohammad Reza Shah is that he failed to live up to the promise of his father’s generation and take Iran towards a democratic settlement. Impatient for progress, he ignored political imperatives and catastrophically failed to take the people with him, resulting in revolution, war and continued political turmoil.

The Islamic Republic too had its moment, but rather than take the path towards greater democratic accountability, however messy that appeared at times, it chose instead to reinstate autocracy, but this time on a scale few monarchs would have aspired to. This was a sacral monarchy with few inhibitions, constitutional or otherwise, who justified its policies on theocratic rather than national grounds. Far from being an authentic expression of Iranian national culture, the radical Islamist ideology of the Islamic Republic was taking the country in a wholly new direction, rooted in neither its recent history nor its culture.

Notes

J. Chardin,

A new and accurate description of Persia and other eastern nations

, Vol. II (London, 1724), p. 125.

George N. Curzon,

Persia & the Persian Question

(London: Frank Cass, 1966; first published, 1892), Vol. I, pp. 3–4.

Ibid., pp. 480–1.

1A Constitutional Revolution (1905–1913)

On 9 July 1906, Evelyn Grant Duff, the Secretary at the British Legation in Tehran received a letter from a senior Iranian cleric, seeking British assistance in the ongoing protests against the Shah. Grant Duff declined the invitation on the clear diplomatic basis that it would be inappropriate for the British government to engage in any activity against the Shah. In the following days, the protests that had been waxing and waning for the better part of seven months took a violent turn with the death of one of the protesters. The clerics decided that now was the time to leave the capital in order to prevent further bloodshed, but took the opportunity to convey ‘the hope’ to Grant Duff ‘that they would have his sympathy in their struggle against cruelty and oppression’.1 They were not to be disappointed. A week later, some 50 clerics and merchants took up residence in the British compound, building gradually over the next month to reach an astonishing total of 14,000 people. This figure was all the more remarkable when one considers that the population of Tehran at the time was probably not more than 250,000, and as such the gathering at the compound represented pretty much every politically active male in the city. It proved a turning point in the movement known to posterity as the Constitutional Revolution. Empowered by the bast, and after having nominated Grant Duff as their spokesman, the protesters succeeded in extracting from the Shah a constitution, an elected parliament (Majles), the separation of powers, and a recognition that the State would henceforth be governed by laws. It was the Revolution that established the template for modern Iran, changing the political landscape forever. Yet, seven months earlier, no one had foreseen it.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 was to transform the political landscape of modern Iran and to leave a profound imprint on the political psychology of the country to this day. Hailed by many Iranians as the first revolution of its type in the Middle East (it was in fact preceded by the failed Ottoman experiment in 1876), the Revolution provided Iran with its first constitution, limiting the power of the monarch with a separation of powers, and the establishment of the principle, if not the practice, of the rule of law. For all its practical limitations, it has set the template and become the reference point for all subsequent political activity and, as with many such political transformations, the catalyst for change appeared, to all intents and purposes, trivial.

Revolution

Customs collection was at this time the responsibility of a seemingly brusque Belgian official by the name of Naus. His harsh exactions, a vain attempt to stave off the insolvency of the State, were compounded by similar attempts by Iranian officials. What observers failed to appreciate was not only the depth of anger among the wider political populace, but the cogency of their ideas shaped over decades of frustration. The catalyst proved the most trivial of events: the beating of an aged ‘Seyyed’, a descendant of the family of the Prophet – not a particular rarity in the Muslim world, but of significance nonetheless because of the individual’s age and pious associations.

This resulted in a protest among the leading clerics who decided to take bast