Opinion: Remembering the 1979 revolution towards the US-backed monarchy and condemning in the present day’s theocratic brutal violence should not opposing positions. Each truths have to be held collectively to know Iran’s wrestle.
Many individuals in Iran, together with me at one time, secretly or overtly longed for a person in cost who wore neat fits and spoke good English on the world stage – giving interviews to distinguished journalists like Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes and Barbara Walters. He had a wonderful queen, carrying gorgeous, Aryan-rooted attire, they usually lived in fairytale palaces.
That’s the image many people, even in the present day, carry of Iran’s fairytale previous – when Iran sat on the remnants of the huge Persian Empire. What glory, what greatness. Whilst a baby, watching the information and seeing the brand new ‘kingdom’ dominated by males in lengthy robes, turbans, and beards, making an attempt to show their piety and authenticity as Muslims, I bear in mind pondering: I’d trade the oppressive clergy working the nation now for that sort of lovely look in a second.
Every part modified once I left Iran and commenced researching the 1979 revolution at Victoria College’s library. I learn all the things I might discover, and saved studying because the years handed. Why did hundreds of thousands of individuals take to the streets, together with so many non-religious girls? Why was there a lot poverty and illiteracy regardless of speedy modernisation? Who was SAVAK, the Shah’s feared safety equipment, skilled by Mossad and infamous for torturing political prisoners? Why did the Shah more and more body his rule as divinely guided and traditionally destined? And what was the position of america and the CIA in all of this? Why did the US keep such an unusually giant embassy in Tehran, with round 1400 diplomats, help employees, army advisers, and different personnel?
The extra I learn, the extra the items got here collectively. Khomeini had stolen the favored narrative. The conservative spiritual beliefs of the bazaar resonated with what he was saying. He borrowed slogans from different opposition teams to collect help: Iran’s oil can be for Iranians, not the US; there can be freedom of political exercise and expression; there can be no accumulation of wealth by the royal household and the elite; poverty can be abolished; and there can be independence from Western and Japanese interference – primarily all the things the Shah was failing to ship. To win girls’s help, newspapers ran headlines assuring the general public that girls wouldn’t be required to cowl their hair and that Khomeini had no intention of taking energy himself – that the clergy would keep out of politics.
Everyone knows what occurred subsequent. When Khomeini returned to Iran, amplified by Western media, his ideology and followers steadily took over. The average interim authorities led by Mehdi Bazargan was pushed apart, and mass executions started. Anybody who didn’t align with Khomeini and his ideology grew to become a goal. Many younger individuals who had been communists (together with members of the Tudeh Celebration) or who held even barely left-leaning beliefs have been executed – the identical folks the Shah had beforehand imprisoned and tortured. A lot for freedom of political exercise and expression.
I used to be very younger, however I clearly bear in mind watching younger folks on TV, blindfolded – a few of them girls carrying headscarves – giving compelled confessions: infidel, overseas agent, traitor. Even at that age, I felt one thing was deeply fallacious. It was merciless, staged, and terrifying.
Hundreds of political prisoners have been executed within the early years of the Islamic Republic, and that stage of brutality rapidly grew to become normalised. Arrests, torture, assassination, and, in some instances, execution of political prisoners proceed to today. The Shah constructed Evin Jail; the Islamic Republic expanded it. Evin grew to become the nightmare of political prisoners each earlier than and after the revolution.
It’s effectively documented that the Shah didn’t tolerate opposition to his rule. In his interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, he acknowledged that SAVAK operated past Iran’s borders and monitored dissidents overseas who opposed his monarchy. The parallel with the present regime is tough to disregard: in the present day, the Islamic Republic depends on IRGC networks working internationally to intimidate, surveil, and silence critics.
The Shah’s legitimacy was additional undermined by overseas intervention. In 1953, after Iran’s first and solely democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalised the oil trade, he was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and Britain’s MI6. The coup restored the Shah to energy and secured Western entry to Iran’s oil – an consequence clearly not in Iran’s nationwide curiosity. Though he later tried gradual reforms – a few of which have been meant to develop social freedoms – as opposition to his absolute rule intensified, these efforts got here too late. For a lot of Iranians, the difficulty was not reform however legitimacy. They not accepted the Shah’s rule and sought his removing.
That disaster of legitimacy formed how the Shah ruled. He dominated as a dictator whereas making an attempt to modernise a deeply conservative society quickly from above, largely by aligning himself with the West – and the US particularly. In contrast, the Islamic Republic established a theocratic dictatorship wherein extremely conservative and patriarchal interpretations of Islam have been codified into legislation and embedded into each facet of governance and day by day life.
Once we place the Shah’s system and the Islamic Republic facet by facet, the similarities are putting. Each concentrated energy in a single particular person, counting on surveillance and concern to silence dissent and crush ethnic and non secular minorities once they challenged the state. One justified authority by means of bloodline, the opposite by means of God – however in each methods, odd folks had no actual voice.
Each claimed to behave within the title of the folks and of God, but wealth and energy amassed within the fingers of a small elite – whether or not within the Shah’s courtroom or in in the present day’s clerical and IRGC networks. You both accepted the monarchy otherwise you have been punished, simply as persons are punished in the present day underneath clerical rule on a bigger scale. Each saturated public house with their photographs, reminding you who was in cost – even at school textbooks. Each named streets after themselves. Each offered themselves as messiahs who alone knew what was greatest for the nation – till it was too late for one, as it should quickly be too late for the opposite.
There are variations, they usually matter. The Shah dominated by means of a secular nationalist monarchy that glorified Iran’s historical previous and imposed modernisation from above. There have been some authorized reforms for girls and larger tolerance for sure spiritual minorities, together with Baháʼís. Faith was managed to a level by the state slightly than embedded in each facet of life. Political repression was actual, however on a regular basis ethical policing was restricted. The economic system was state-driven and unequal, overseas coverage was pro-Western, and energy handed by means of hereditary succession.
Whereas the Shah promoted secular nationalism, he additionally employed spiritual symbolism and funded mosques to take care of legitimacy in a deeply spiritual society and to counter different actions.
By making an attempt to look accommodating towards the clergy whereas crushing secular, nationalist, leftist, and liberal opposition, the Shah made a profound political miscalculation. Somewhat than confronting clerical energy as an organised political power, he sought to handle and co-opt it from above whereas making an attempt to eradicate each different channel of dissent. In doing so, he left the clergy as one of many few nationwide, organised forces able to mobilising society. By systematically making an attempt to destroy all social and democratic options, the Shah strengthened probably the most conservative components of Iranian society and created the situations that allowed clerical rule to emerge victorious after his fall.
The Islamic Republic went additional. Faith grew to become legislation, getting into school rooms, courtrooms, bedrooms, and streets. Girls’s rights have been rolled again and discrimination institutionalised. Every day life is tightly policed. The judiciary is clerical, the economic system is dominated by IRGC networks, overseas coverage is ideological, and non secular minorities – particularly Baháʼís – are systematically persecuted.
As a lady, it may be simple to fall into nostalgia for the Shah’s period and cling to the few reforms he made for girls. However I’ve consciously chosen to not transfer backwards and reinstate the identical system – or an identical one – that failed. Even the Constitutional Monarchy (مشروطه), which some advocate in the present day, finally didn’t endure. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution sought to restrict royal energy and set up democratic establishments, however these positive aspects have been violently dismantled and later absolutely undone when Reza Shah centralised authority within the monarchy. His son, regardless of having the chance, selected to not reverse this course.
This historical past issues. With out significant accountability for the way constitutional monarchy was dismantled previously, it’s troublesome to belief that it might be protected slightly than undermined if revived underneath the identical political lineage.
The Shah was not a easy determine. Turning him into both a monster or a hero doesn’t assist us perceive our historical past. However it is very important do not forget that he didn’t come to energy by means of the poll field, nor did he enable himself to be voted in or out. He permitted no actual opposition. Just one get together was allowed to exist – his personal, Rastakhiz.
It is usually essential to notice that he was deeply patriarchal. He divorced his second spouse, Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, as a result of she couldn’t produce a male inheritor. In a 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, when requested whether or not Queen Farah might govern in addition to a person, he refused to affirm it. The second was tense; Farah regarded visibly uncomfortable. For a person presenting himself as a progressive moderniser, he confirmed little perception in girls’s management or skills.
Sure, he launched the Household Safety Regulation, proscribing polygamy and increasing girls’s rights in divorce and custody. These reforms have been constructive, however they made no severe effort to have interaction with or educate conservative spiritual sections of society about primary girls’s rights.
After I take a look at the 1979 folks’s revolution, I’m uncomfortable erasing the voices of hundreds of thousands – throughout lessons, ideologies, and beliefs – who rose as much as overthrow a centralised, US-backed monarchy. On the identical time, I strongly oppose the present theocratic authoritarian regime, which has taken repression and cruelty to unprecedented ranges, as seen in its steady brutal crackdown on nationwide protests, together with mass killings and the longest digital blackout within the nation’s historical past – now getting into its sixth day with no signal of restoration – imposed to hide its violence and crimes towards humanity. I can maintain each truths directly and provides every the eye it deserves.
When it comes to the Shah’s son, I personally discover it troublesome to comply with a person whose solely declare to legitimacy seems to relaxation on his bloodline. I additionally don’t really feel snug following a person whose supporters undermine the revolutionary slogan Girl, Life, Freedom (زن زندگی آزادی) – a phrase that erases girls at its core. Believing in equal rights for ladies and men – that’s, being a feminist – I don’t wish to align myself with actions that mock feminism, use sexist language, dismiss non-monarchist beliefs and echo right-wing supremacist rhetoric, defend violence and future executions, or flip a blind eye to the killing of hundreds of harmless girls and youngsters in nations they oppose, reminiscent of Palestine.
So once I see slogans like ‘Lengthy Reside the Shah’ or ‘Pahlavi Will Return,’ or giant photos of the Shah’s son on protest posters outdoors Iran – usually carried alongside Israeli and American flags by some members of the diaspora, notably for the reason that present rebellion started in Iran – or on social media, I hear one thing much more troubling beneath the nostalgia. I hear the exclusion of different voices, an embrace of dynastic energy, inherited authority, and a system with out accountability – and sure, entrenched patriarchy and pro-foreign interference. This isn’t a name for democracy, however to resurrect the outdated monarchy – the very system that failed, that folks rose as much as overthrow, and that historical past has already rejected.
The contradiction in the present day is putting. The Shah’s son says he helps democracy and claims he doesn’t wish to rule as a king however as a transitional chief to democracy – but he by no means challenges the slogan that casts him as the subsequent monarch. He has lived in luxurious overseas for nearly half a century, funded by huge wealth that his household faraway from Iran after the monarchy ended. He has no skilled background in management, public service or public-sector establishments. How can somebody so rich and so faraway from the day by day struggles of odd Iranians – round 90 million folks, together with girls, employees, and ethnic minorities – declare to know them, once they face skyrocketing costs, a devalued forex, and the cruel realities that proceed to spark protests throughout the nation – protests wherein persons are being killed proper now, throughout a digital blackout?
That contradiction ought to fear us. His lack of expertise ought to fear us. His lack of connection to grassroots activism ought to fear us.
The Shah was broadly seen as excessively accommodating to US affect in Iranian affairs, and comparable considerations at the moment are being voiced about his son. Specifically, his public positions aligning with American and Israeli insurance policies – most lately his defence of Israel’s army actions towards Iran – have reportedly alienated many Iranians contained in the nation, together with distinguished activists. For them, these stances echo the previous: a political determine perceived as aligning himself with Washington and Tel Aviv, slightly than with the folks of Iran. Throughout the present protests in Iran, he has additional aligned himself with each nations, overtly calling for overseas – together with army – intervention in Iran with out acknowledging the devastating results this could have on civilian lives or on the infrastructure of the nation. This additionally overlooks the historic undeniable fact that the US usually intervenes in a rustic solely when there’s a important strategic profit – in Iran’s case, oil.
After a long time of repression underneath each monarchy and theocracy, Iranians are exhausted. They deserve a real democracy – one rooted in accountability, independence, and standard consent, not overseas patronage.
I didn’t go away Iran to return to a life underneath leaders for all times and authoritarian rule – whether or not cloaked in a turban or dressed within the polish of nostalgia. I refuse to commerce one authoritarian system for an additional, irrespective of how seductive it seems to be or how refined its propaganda machine could also be in convincing us that there is no such thing as a different means.
However there may be another. Look inside Iran – on the nation’s civil society and ladies’s rights activists, together with these imprisoned for his or her resistance. They’re dwelling proof {that a} totally different future is feasible. Ought to we not put all our power, braveness, and assets behind them – serving to them organise, resist, and reclaim their nation?
Ought to we not query who advantages from the fixed character assassination of those courageous ladies and men working for freedom inside Iran? If no motion exists [AT5] contained in the nation, as we’re repeatedly advised, how do protests erupt throughout so many cities? How do coordinated strikes and joint statements – signed by academics, college college students, teachers, attorneys, pensioners, girls’s rights teams, artists, administrators, unions, and others – proceed to emerge time and again?
Is it not time we begin believing in Iranians taking their future into their very own fingers – and supporting it – slightly than undermining it by insisting there is no such thing as a different?
Once we cling to a fairytale previous, we ignore the darker truths behind palace partitions. Concentrated energy – whether or not held by one household or by a supreme chief – inevitably produces oppression, inequality, and silence. Historical past has confirmed this. Iran has confirmed it. Such methods at all times go away girls, employees, and ethnic minorities unheard and expendable.
Some say the Shah’s son would make a “good king.”. However what does a superb king imply within the twenty-first century? It nonetheless means a system constructed on inheritance slightly than consent, energy justified by bloodline slightly than accountability, and amassed wealth whereas odd folks wrestle to outlive. It means returning to the very buildings Iranians rose up towards – concentrated energy, silenced voices, and a nation formed round one man and his dynasty.
After greater than a century of resistance, repression, revolution, and sacrifice, why would we chant “Lengthy Reside the Shah” (جاوید شاه) – or lengthy dwell anybody, for that matter – when historical past has already proven us the fee? Our folks deserve one thing higher than repeating the previous.
