Iran: Empire of the Mind (41 page)

The events of 1963-64 made Khomeini the leading political figure opposed to the Shah, along with Mossadeq, who was still under house arrest and thus effectively neutralised. Khomeini, though he disapproved of constitutionalism in private, had been careful to speak positively about the constitution in public.
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His attack on the new law governing the status of the US military was calculated to win over nationalists, some of whom might previously have been suspicious of a cleric. Intellectuals like Al-e Ahmad gave him their enthusiastic support. He was already applying the political method by which, through addressing popular grievances and
avoiding pronouncements on issues that might divide his followers, he would later make himself a national leader.

But from 1964 Khomeini was out of Iran, and to all appearances, out of Iranian politics. In a sense, Iranian politics was itself exiled, taking place among Iranian students and others living abroad. Within Iran the press was controlled and censored, the elections continued to be rigged, and SAVAK pursued, arrested and imprisoned Tudeh activists and other dissidents.

Oil Boom and Expansion

The land reform programme went ahead from 1963, but with mixed results. The landlords who were to be expropriated were allowed to keep one village only each, but some landlords were able to evade the provisions, for example by giving their property to relatives or by creating mechanised farms, which were exempt. About two million peasants became landowners in their own right for the first time, and some were able to set themselves up on a profitable footing. But for many more the holdings they were given were too small to make a living, and there were large numbers of agricultural labourers who, because they had not had cultivation rights as sharecroppers before the reform, were left out of the redistribution altogether. Because the reform was accompanied by a general push for the mechanisation of agriculture, there was suddenly less work for these labourers anyway. The net result was rural unemployment and an accelerating movement of people from the villages to the cities, especially Tehran, in search of jobs. It has been suggested that the rate of internal migration reached eight per cent per year in 1972-1973,
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and by 1976 Tehran had swelled to become a city of 4.5 million people.

In Tehran these people went to poorer parts on the southern edge of the city, in what were little better than shanty-towns. They tended to settle down in groups from the same village or area, and often they would know a mullah from the same area also, who would have added authority in circumstances of dislocation and uncertainty.
³⁹

Between 1963 and the latter part of the 1970s Iran enjoyed a huge economic boom that saw per capita GNP rise from $200 to $2,000.
⁴⁰
Industrial output increased dramatically in new industries like coal, textiles
and the manufacture of motor vehicles, and large numbers of new jobs were created to absorb the increase in population and the large numbers leaving agriculture. Industrial wages were low, however. Government spending expanded education and health services too—the number of children in primary schools went from 1.6 million in 1953 to over 4 million in 1977; new universities and colleges were set up and enrolment grew from 24,885 to 154,215. The number of students at foreign universities grew from under 18,000 to over 80,000. The number of hospital beds went from 24,126 to 48,000. Improved living conditions, sanitation and health services all contributed to a big drop in the infant mortality rate and a spurt in population growth that continued until the 1990s; in the mid-70s half the population were under sixteen, and two-thirds under thirty—this was to be the generation of the revolution
⁴¹
.

Investment rose dizzyingly as Iran benefited from a windfall bonanza of oil income—especially after the Shah renegotiated terms with the oil consortium to give himself more control over production levels and prices. Then in 1973 the oil price doubled after the Yom Kippur war, and doubled again at the end of the year when the Shah led the other OPEC countries to demand higher prices on the claim that oil had not kept pace with the price of other internationally-traded commodities. Yet more money pumped into the system, though a large amount went back to the west—especially to the US and the UK—in return for quantities of new military equipment. The Shah bought more Chieftain tanks from the UK than the British Army owned.

But the economy was overheating, there was too much money chasing too few goods, there were bottlenecks and shortages, and inflation rose sharply—especially on items like housing rent and foodstuffs, and especially in Tehran. Initially, the Shah blamed small traders for the price rises, and sent gangs (backed by S AVAK) into the bazaars to arrest so-called profiteers and hoarders. Shops were closed down, 250,000 fines were issued and 8,000 shopkeepers were given prison sentences—none of which altered the underlying economic realities by one iota. The arrests and fines joined a list of grievances felt by the bazaari artisans and merchants, who were
already seeing their products and businesses edged aside by imports, new factories, suburban stores and supermarkets.

There was a sense, including in government, that the developing economy had run out of control. In mid-1977 a new Prime Minister introduced a new, deflationary economic policy, designed to bring inflation under control and restore some stability. But the result was a sudden jump in unemployment, as the growing number of arrivals in the cities either lost or failed to find jobs. Inflation and the sudden faltering of the economy were felt particularly by the poor, but to some extent by everyone; rents were high for the middle class engineers, managers and professionals in Tehran, and those with a stake in new businesses felt the impact of deflation acutely.

Tehran in the 1970s was a strange place. Large numbers of very wealthy people, many wealthy to a degree most Europeans could only dream of, lived hard by poor people poorer than could be seen anywhere in western Europe. The city was already largely a city of concrete, with only a core of a few older palaces and government buildings. But despite the traffic and the ugliness, the older Iran was still there in the chadors on the streets and when the call to prayer floated over the city at dusk. The west, and the US, were constant presences, from the Coca-Cola and Pepsi on sale everywhere to the American cars and the American advertising—but constant also (beside a continuing admiration for America and an associated desire for economic development) was a tension and a distaste for that presence.

There were Americans everywhere in Tehran in the ’70s. James A. Bill has estimated that between 800,000 and 850,000 Americans lived in or visited Iran between 1944 and 1979, and that the number resident there increased from less than 8,000 in 1970 to nearly 50,000 in 1979. Ten thousand were employed in defence industries around Isfahan alone. There were of course some Americans living in Iran who made an effort to understand the country, but many did not. For the most part, the Americans lived entirely separate lives, shopping in the US commissary (the biggest of its kind in the world) and often living on American-only compounds (many British expatriates lived in a similar way). The American school
admitted only children with US passports (unusual by comparison with American schools in other countries) and occasional suggestions that the children be taught something about Iran generally failed—a school board member said in 1970 that the policy had been ‘Keep Iran Out’. In the mid-’60s an American hospital in Tehran took on some well-educated Iranian nurses to supplement their staff. The Iranians were not allowed to speak in Persian even among themselves, and were excluded from the staff canteen, which was kept for US citizens only. They had to eat in the janitor’s room. The hospital cared only for American patients, and when one day a desperate father tried to bring in his child, who had just been seriously injured by a car in the street outside, he was sent away to find transport to another hospital. Other Americans, notably those working for the Peace Corps, worked with ordinary Iranians and were much appreciated. But the majority were in Iran for the money and the lavish lifestyle, which they could not have afforded at home:

As the gold rush began and the contracts increased, the American presence expanded. The very best and the very worst of America were on display in the cities of Iran. As time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high proportion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillusioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran. Companies with billion-dollar contracts needed manpower and, under time pressure, recruited blindly and carelessly. In Isfahan, hatred, racism and ignorance combined as American employees responded negatively and aggressively to Iranian society.
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Iranians returned the compliment and incidents between US residents and Iranians led to newspaper articles about drunken and lewd Americans, encouraging anti-American attitudes.

There was another kind of tension too, within Iranian society. The young men of south Tehran, newly-arrived from traditional communities in the countryside, either with no job or with only poorly-paid jobs, with little prospect of being able to afford to marry or support a family for some years, saw (if they took a bus or taxi uptown) pretty young middle-class women sashaying up and down the streets, flush with money, unaccompanied or with girlfriends, dressed in revealing western fashions, flaunting their freedom, money, beauty and (from a certain point of view) immorality.
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On
hoardings, garish depictions of half-dressed women advertised the latest films. Status, and the lack of it, is not just about money—it is also about sex and desire. Tehran was a place of aspiration, but in the late ’70s it became a place of resentment, frustrated desire and frustrated aspirations for many.

In an inspired passage Roy Mottahedeh described this time in Tehran as the time of
montazh
, when imported things were being assembled and put together in the city, often rather less than satisfactorily, and never quite completed—a time when everything in Tehran seemed to be ‘intimately connected with the airport’—when:

… in joking, Tehranis called all sorts of jerry-built Iranian versions of foreign ideas true examples of Iranian montazh.
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The most obvious examples of
montazh
were the ubiquitous
Paykan
cars assembled just outside Tehran from imported parts (to the design of the British Hillman Hunter), but the same principle could be seen or imagined at work elsewhere too—in corrupt property deals, in big buildings put up without enough cement, in the chaotic traffic, and in the new plaques and statues of the Shah that appeared everywhere.

As the 1970s advanced, the political culture of the Shah’s regime both became more repressive and hardened on the one hand, and more remote and attenuated on the other. In the 1970s SAVAK had a new target—radical movements prepared to use violence against the regime: notably the Marxist Feda’i and the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO)—both of which fused Islam and Marxism. SAVAK expanded, and its use of torture became routine. In 1975 Amnesty International pronounced the Shah’s government to be one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The previous two tame parties in the Majles became one, called
Rastakhiz
(Resurgence)—with a role simply to support and applaud the Shah’s efforts. Politics became a matter of who could be most sycophantic to the Shah in public:

The Shah’s only fault is that he is really too good for his people—his ideas are too great for us to realise them
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The Shah himself rarely met ordinary Iranians, went from place to place by helicopter and, following various assassination attempts, usually viewed parades and other events from inside a special bullet-proof glass box. In 1971 he held an event at the historic sites of Persepolis and Pasargadae to celebrate, supposedly, the 2500
^th
anniversary of the Iranian monarchy. This was
folie de grandeur
on a sublime scale. Heads of state from around the world were invited, but those from monarchies were given precedence, so Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was specially honoured, while President Pompidou of France was set low in the precedence order, took umbrage and sent his Prime Minister instead.
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Thousands dressed up as ancient Medes and Persians, television coverage of the event was beamed around the world by satellite and the distinguished guests drank champagne and other imported luxuries (the catering was laid on by Maxim’s of Paris in three huge air-conditioned tents and 59 smaller ones, and 25,000 bottles of wine were imported for the event—rumours of the overall cost ranged as high as $100 or $200 million
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). The Shah made a speech claiming continuity with Cyrus and a rebirth of ancient Iranian greatness.

But for most Iranians the Achaemenids meant little—they had probably never been to Persepolis, and what they knew of ancient Iran revolved around the stories of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh rather than what might or might not appear in Herodotus, or what had been discovered at archaeological sites. There had long been an anti-clerical, secularising strand of nationalist thinking that appealed to the pre-Islamic, monarchical tradition of Iran, but it was a slender reed to carry this burden of regime self-projection. For most the Iranian heritage was an Islamic heritage, and the jollifications at Persepolis left them nonplussed. Khomeini denounced the event from Iraq, thundering that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy in principle, that the crimes of Iranian kings had blackened the pages of history, and that even the ones remembered as good had in fact been ‘vile and cruel’.
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The Shah also replaced the Islamic calendar with a calendar that took year 1 as the year of the accession of Cyrus, which again left most Iranians irritated and baffled.