Essays and Notes on Babi and Baha’i History
by
John Walbridge
A
publication of the H-Bahai Digital Library
an
official site of the H-Net Consortium
Michigan
State University
East
Lansing, Michigan
2002
©
John Walbridge, 2002
To
my Baha’i friends,
from
whom I received more than I gave
2. Some Babi Martyrs
Appendices
Preface
The Babi and Baha’i
religions are historical religions, born in the full light of history,
situating themselves in history, and drawing justification and inspiration from
their own histories, the histories of the religions that came before them, and
the great historical events of their own times. Moreover, Baha’is share a sense that the stories of their three
great leaders—the Bab and Bahaullah, their two prophets, and ‘Abd al-Baha, who
began the process of making the Baha’i Faith into a world community—provide
much of the meaning of the Baha’i Faith.
The teachings of the Baha’i Faith, admirable though they are in
themselves, find their context and power for the believers in the epic story of
the religion and its founders. Shoghi
Effendi, the great-grandson of Bahaullah and the leader of the Baha’i Faith
from 1921 to 1957 four times attempted to express the historical spirit of the
Baha’i Faith: first in his translation of Nabil’s Dawn-Breakers, by which he hoped to expose the Western Baha’is to
the spirit of the Babis; second in The Promised
Day Is Come, a sort of theodicy in which he correlated the events of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the emergence of the Baha’i Faith; and
finally in his two centennial histories of the Baha’i Faith, the English God Passes By and the Persian Lawh-i Qarn (“centennial tablet”). In recent years, the debates about
methodology and authority that have riven the Baha’i academic community have
almost always involved issues of historiography.
Baha’is and Babis have felt an obligation to
preserve their history, in particular the stories of their martyrs, of the
companions of their leaders, and of the early believers in each place. This, of course, has Islamic roots, since
for cultural reasons of their own Muslims alone among the great civilizations
have made the biographical dictionary a major literary and religious
genre. The Western Baha’is brought a
new direction to Baha’i historiography, the search for context. Unlike their Middle Eastern coreligionists,
the Western Baha’is typically knew nothing about the cultural environment
assumed in traditional Persian Baha’i historiography. They needed to understand the strange Arabic and Persian words
and names, the Islamic practices referred to, and the places in which these
events happened. This interest resulted
at first in such things as glossaries and elementary introductions to Islam,
written either by Middle Eastern Baha’is living in the West or by autodidact
Western Baha’i scholars, then later in more ambitious interpretations of the
Persian Baha’i scholarly tradition, such as the works of Adib Taherzadeh and
especially Hasan Balyuzi. In the last
generation, it has produced a school of genuine academic scholarship on the
Baha’i Faith and a number of major works.
The present work belongs to a more modest
school of Baha’i historiography than the works of Balyuzi and Shoghi Effendi:
the historical miscellany. The
following chapters collect a series of investigations, mostly biographical, of
Babi and Baha’i history. Like the
articles that comprise my Sacred Acts,
Sacred Time, Sacred Space (Oxford: George Ronald, 1996), most were
originally written for an encyclopedia on the Baha’i Faith that has not
appeared. In some cases, as in the
chapters on Zanjan and Turkey, they form a collected whole. In others, there is a looser
connection. In some cases, despite my
best efforts, the encyclopedic origin of the articles is painfully apparent,
although I trust the information they contain will be useful to some readers
and interesting or diverting to a few more.
Some sections, like the account of Iranian history and culture with
which this volume begins and a later section on Ottoman Turkey, really are not
about the Baha’i Faith at all, but are intended to provide intermediate
background for readers familiar with Baha’i history but unfamiliar with the
history and culture of the Middle East.
As in my earlier work, my central operating principle is the belief that
cultural context and detail illuminates Baha’i history. In general, I have written for an
intelligent reader who is well read in the English literature of the Baha’i
Faith but who does not have special knowledge of Iran, the Middle East, or
Islam—for example, the reader who wishes to know more about the people
mentioned in Bahaullah’s last major work, The
Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. I
have not tried to make the book or its constituent parts relevant to readers
unfamiliar with the Baha’i Faith.
Nonetheless, I think there is a fair amount here that will be of use to
scholars who happen to want to know something about the history and thought of
the Babis and Baha’is. The reaction to Sacred Acts encourages me to hope that
the present work will be useful to some readers.
The transliteration system is, with slight
modifications, the Library of Congress customarily used by scholars of Islam
writing in English. It should be
transparent enough to readers familiar with the slightly different system
customarily used by Baha’is.
In sections on general topics, such as the
chapter on Iranian history and culture with which this work begins, references
are minimal and confined to documenting direct quotes and making suggestions
for further reading. In sections
representing specific research, I have given full documentation, although
usually at the end of sections.
For the most part, the original articles
were written between 1987 and 1991 and have not been revised. It would, of course, have been better to
update them in the light of a considerable amount of primary and secondary
material on the Babis and Baha’is that has appeared since, but that would have
delayed their appearance further. I
hope that in their present form they will spur others to new research.
Most of the articles that comprise the
present work were written while I was an employee of the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States, and I wish to gratefully
acknowledge the commitment of that body to the development of Baha’i
scholarship. I also would like to acknowledge
the assistance of the Baha’i World Centre, which supplied some of the source
materials used in this work. I would
also like to acknowledge the editors of the journal Iranian Studies, with whose permission I have used the article on
Zanjan originally published there. I
owe a great deal to my former colleagues on the Editorial Board of the Baha’i
Encyclopedia, with whom I worked for eleven years, especially to Will. C. van
den Hoonaard and B. Todd Lawson. Juan
R. I. Cole has been a constant friend and source of information for many years,
and I am particularly indebted to him for his assistance on the chapter
relating to the Baha’i Faith in Turkey.
It was also he who encouraged me to publish this material as a book
through the H-Bahai web site. H-Bahai
in turn is part of the H-Net family of listservs and is underwritten by the
National Endowment for the Humanities, who thus have underwritten the
electronic publication of this work.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose patience has been long
tried by my scholarly interests, and particularly my wife Linda.
John Walbridge
Lahore
February 2001
Chapter One
An Introduction to the History and Culture
of Iran
“In the Middle
East,” I tell my students, “history is not something that goes away after it
happens; it piles up in heaps and gets in everybody’s way.” When I first encountered Baha’is, I heard
the story of the Bab and Bahaullah, but I only came to understand the story
when I knew a great deal more about the history and culture of Iran and the
Islamic Middle East. Islam is tolerably
familiar to well-read Western Baha’is, who have taken to heart Shoghi Effendi’s
dictum that it is necessary for Baha’is to know the basics of Islam and its
history. Iranian culture, except in the
most superficial aspects of food and etiquette, is less well known to
them. This is a pity, since the Bab,
Bahaullah, ‘Abd al-Baha, and Shoghi Effendi were all profoundly Iranian
figures, though each in different ways, and can really only be fully understood
in their Iranian contexts. The Iranian
contexts in question, moreover, go back several thousand years. For example, the fact that the Bab traced
his discent to the Prophet Muhammad, while Bahaullah traced his to the last
Zoroastrian emperor of Iran tells something quite important about their
characters and religious projects, and thus about the differences between the
Babi and Baha’i religions. In the
chapter that follows, I attempt to give a sketch of the main features of
Iranian history and culture that have shaped the Iran of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and thus provided the cultural and historical context of
the rise of the Babi and Baha’i Faiths in Iran.
1.
Geography. The modern state of Iran
is centered on the Iranian Plateau, a high arid plain surrounded on most sides
by mountains. The center of the plateau
contains several regions of almost impassable desert. Most of the population of the plateau lives in oases near the
mountains where water is available, often conveyed to the irrigation works by
long tunnels called qanats, an
irrigation system that has been in use for several millennia. The bulk of the population of the plateau is
Persian-speaking. In the past large
parts of the population have been nomadic, with most of the rest of the
population living in agricultural villages.
In the twentieth century most of the nomadic population has become
sedentary, and the proportion of the population living in cities has greatly
increased.
The modern state of Iran also includes
several adjacent geographical areas. In
the northwest, Azerbaijan is a region of mountains and high plains. With more rainfall than in most areas of the
country, it has traditionally been Iran’s most important source of grain and
meat. Its population, though Shi‘ite in
religion and Iranian in culture, is Turkish-speaking and thus is closely tied
by language and experience to Turkey in the west and to the Republic of
Azerbaijan to the north, the latter a province of Iran until the early
nineteenth century. North of the
plateau are Mazandaran and Gilan along the south and southwestern shores of the
Caspian. These areas, below sea-level,
contain rainforests. Though the
predominant language is Persian, these areas remain somewhat distinct from the
rest of Iran. South and west of
Adharbajan is Iranian Kurdistan, an area inhabited by the semi-nomadic Kurds
and closely related by culture to the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Turkey, and
Syria. Separatist movements have
flourished in this area. The corner
formed by the Iraqi border and the Persian Gulf is an ethnically Arab lowland,
geographically contiguous with Iraq, of which it has often been a part. Though Arabic remains the predominant
language, there are large Persian settlements there and the region has become
much more culturally integrated with the rest of Iran since the discovery of
oil at the turn of the century. The
extreme southeast of Iran is inhabited by the Baloch, a nomadic people also
living in neighboring areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Finally, northeastern Iran is a continuation
of the plains of Central Asia.
It should be noted that just as all
Iranians are not Persian speakers, not all speakers of Persian live in
Iran. Persian is one of the two main
languages of Afghanistan, and Tajik, a closely related dialect, is spoken in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan. Persian was also the lingua franca of
Islamic India and survived in India and Pakistan as a literary language into
the twentieth century.
A large country, the climate of Iran varies
from region to region. On the Iranian
Plateau, summers are hot and dry. In
the northern areas and in the mountains winters can be quite severe. Even in Tehran, snow is common in the
winter.
2. History
Pre-Islamic
Iran
The Aryans and their
religion. The Iranians are an
Indo-European people. Sometime,
probably in the early second millenium B.C.E., a people calling themselves
Aryans migrated from north of the Black Sea southwest towards Iran and
Afghanistan. These people worshipped a
pantheon of gods preserved both in Hindu and Zoroastrian mythology. Their economy seems to have been based on
cattle-raising. One group, the
Indo-Aryans, went southeast into northwestern India, where they apparently
conquered the native population. Their
religion formed the nucleus of modern Hinduism. Another group, the Iranians, moved southwest into Iran,
eventually settling a region including much of Afghanistan, Iran, and the area
east of the Caspian. There is no direct
evidence of the movements of the Aryans, but something can be deduced from comparing
the languages and mythology of the Aryans of India and Iran. The Indo-Aryans, for example, used a word
for “god” that the Iranians use to mean “devil,” thus indicating a religious
split between the two groups early in their histories. Likewise, the oldest myths of both peoples
preserve something of their early culture.
By the early first millenium B.C.E. various Iranian groups were dominant
on the Iranian plateau and neighboring areas to the east and north.
At some time before or during the migrations
of the Iranians, a prophet named Zarathushtra (“Zoroaster,” the usual English
form, derives from the Greek rendering of his name) arose among them. He was a priest of the traditional religion. On the basis of visions of the supreme god
Ahura Mazda (probably meaning “Lord Wisdom”), he denounced abuses and taught a
religion in which believers were to carry out various rituals, particularly
concerning purity, in order to aid Ahura Mazda in his battle against the devil,
Ahriman. Zoroaster formulated his
teachings in the form of a series of hymns known as the Gathas. These were committed to memory by his
followers and passed down by them until they were finally written down,
together with much additional traditional material, sometime around the fifth century
C.E. This body of literature is the
Avesta, the holy book of Zoroaster’s religion.
For his teachings Zoroaster was persecuted until he finally found refuge
with King Vishtaspa, who established Zoroastrianism as the state religion of
his kingdom and fought the enemies of the new faith.
Though there is no direct evidence about
Zoroaster until much later, there cannot be much doubt that he lived and
preached. There is great controversy
about where and when he lived, the traditional date and place—258 years before
Alexander (570 B.C.E.) in Adharbayjan—being clearly too late and too far
west. Various modern authorities place
him in Sistan (on the border between modern Iran and Afghanistan), Choresmia
(south of the Aral Sea), and Kazakhstan.
Dates range from the early second millenium to the early first
millenium.
The
Medes and the Persians. The
Iranians come into written history with the rise of the Median empire, an
Iranian dynasty, in western Iran in the ninth century B.C.E. In the seventh century one of the Iranian
vassals of the Medes, Cyrus II the Great of Persis in southwestern Iran,
overthrew his master and went on to conquer a vast empire, which eventually
stretched from Libya to the gates of India and from the Bosphorus to the Indian
Ocean. The Persian or Achaemenid
Empire, as it is known, was the greatest state the world had yet seen, and its
efficient administration set the pattern used throughout the Middle East for
centuries to come. The Persian Empire
plays a conspicuous role both in the Bible—it is the Persian king who restores
the temple in Jerusalem—and in classical Greek history—Xerxes’ famous and
unsuccessful effort to conquer Greece.
It was by means of the Persian Empire that Iranian culture and religious
ideas were conveyed to the Mediterranean world.
The Persian Empire was unexpectedly and
suddenly destroyed by Alexander the Great’s invasion in 334. Alexander himself died before he could
establish his dynasty, and the empire was divided by his generals, Iran falling
to the descendants of Seleucus, who also ruled Iraq, Syria, and the Holy
Land. Though the Greek culture brought
by Alexander influenced the Iranians, there was only a thin Greek veneer on
what was still an Iranian nation. By
the second century B.C.E. the Seleucids had been supplanted by an Iranian
dynasty originating near the southeastern corner of the Caspian. This dynasty, known to the West as the
Parthians and to themselves as the Arsacids, ruled a loose confedation controlling
a territory from Iraq and the borders of Syria to Afghanistan and the Aral
Sea. Their famous mounted archers were
the most formidable opponents of the Roman legions. Though more Iranian than the Seleucids, they were still much
under the influence of Greek culture.
In the third century C.E. the Sasanians, a
local dynasty of Fars (the same region that was the homeland of the
Achaemenids) overthrew the Parthians and formed the Sasanian empire. Occupying much the same territory as the
Parthians, the Sasanians were militantly Zoroastrian in religion and continued
the Parthian tradition of opposition to the Romans. The Sasanian empire was well-organized and centralized. At their high point in the early seventh
century, the Sasanians were able to occupy much of the Byzantine Empire and
besieged Constantinople itself. Whereas
the Persians nearly forgot the Achaemenids and Parthians, the Sasanian kings
have remained well-known figures in many aspects of Iranian culture:
literature, statecraft, art, and folklore.
The
Arab Invasion and Empires. In the
years when Muhammad was preaching his new religion and establishing a Muslim
state in Medina and northwestern Arabia, the Sasanians faced military defeat
and civil unrest. Thus when the Arabs
invaded Sasanian Iraq, resistence was ineffective. The provincial nobility
failed to unite to support the central government against the invader. Thus, the Arabs were soon able to occupy
both Iraq and Iran. Yazdegerd III, the
fugitive Sasanian emperor, was killed in Marv, in the far northeastern corner
of his empire. Thereafter, Iran was
ruled first from Medina and then until 750 from Damascus.
Persians quickly came to play a key role in
the Islamic state. The first Arab occupiers
were dependent on Persians to administer the old Sasanian provinces: Persian
was the official language of administrative records in the eastern part of the
Islamic world through the seventh century, and Persian officials carried on the
routine of tax collection and administration under the eyes of their new Arab
rulers. By the end of the century
considerable numbers of Persians had become Muslims. In 750 a Shi‘ite revolution in eastern Iran led to the overthrow
of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus. The
Abbasids, the new caliphs, were descendants of an uncle of the Prophet. They moved the capital to Iraq, building the
new city of Baghdad. Their chief power
base was the eastern empire—Iraq and Iran, the Sasanian lands—and Persians
played an ever-greater role in administration and cultural life. The administrative system and court rituals
of the Sasanian empire were to a considerable extent resurrected by the
Abbasids. During this period Iran
gradually became overwhelmingly Muslim, mainly Sunni in this period, although
there were always pockets of Shi‘ite sympathy.
The
Military Successor States. By the
end of the ninth century the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad could no longer
exercise full control over their dominions.
Governors of distant provinces became independent while still
acknowledging the nominal authority of the prestigious but powerless caliphs in
Baghdad. The example of independent
provincial governors was soon followed by military adventurers who carved out
ephemeral empires for themselves.
Frequently drawing their strength from nomadic Turkic or Mongol tribes,
such states characterize Iranian history into modern times. Often these rulers were little more than
adventurous gangsters whose states prospered so long as the founder lived and
fell apart under less ruthless heirs.
Under such rulers life continued unchanged in the Persian cities, for a
change of ruler usually meant nothing more than a change of tax collector. Such cultural achievements as these military
rulers could boast of tended to consist of monumental architecture or the books
written by the poets and scholars they subsidized—both intended to legitimize
the sovereign’s rule. Only in a few
cases did these states have lasting effects on Iranian life.
Iran as a political entity can scarcely
said to have existed in this period.
Political boundaries bore little relation to ethnic boundaries. Religious identities were often stronger
than identies based on language or nation.
The
Safavids. The modern state of Iran
came into existence in 1500 through the conquests of Shah Isma‘il Safavi, the
hereditary head of an order of militant Shi‘ite Sufis. Isma‘il was a Turk from Ardabil in
Azerbaijan, in the northwest of modern Iran.
His state occupied the territory of modern Iran and some parts of Iraq,
the Caucasus, and Afghanistan. Until
this time Iran had been largely Sunni, though there was a long tradition of
sympathy for radical Shi‘ite groups.
Isma‘il forcibly converted his territories to Twelver Shi‘ism, to the
great irritation of neighboring Sunni regimes such as the Ottomans and the
Uzbeks. Though under continual military
pressure, particularly from the Ottomans, Isma‘il and his successors were able
to consolidate a regime that lasted for over two hundred years. The cultural achievements of the Safavids
were considerable. The Safavid kings
and their courtiers were often lavish patrons of art, literature, and
scholarship. Safavid architecture
represents the highest achievement of Islamic architecture in Iran, notably Shah
Abbas the Great’s magnificent capital, Isfahan. Islamic philosophy reached its highest level of sophistication
under the Safavids.
After a series of weak rulers the Safavid
state collapsed in the early eighteenth century in the face of an invasion from
Afghanistan. This event triggered a
half-century of instability in Iran.
Two rulers in this period managed to gain control of the bulk of the old
Safavid territories. The first, Nadir
Shah, was a Sunni soldier from Khorasan, who in the classic pattern of military
rulers in Iran, rose through his bravery, charisma, and luck to become a
conqueror. His greatest achievement was
his invasion of India in 1739, in which he sacked Delhi and brought back to
Iran a fabulous treasure, including the famous Peacock Throne. He was eventually assassinated by his own
soldiers and his empire fell apart. The
second strong ruler was Karim Khan Zand (r. 1751-79), who ruled much of Iran from
Shiraz. Less ambitious than Nadir, he
ruled under the unpretentious title of “regent” (vakil). Though typical of
military adventurers in Iran throughout history, he won the affection of the
Persians through his wise and moderate rule, his concern for commercial
prosperity, and the magnificent buildings he erected in his beloved Shiraz.
The
Qajars. Karim Khan’s successor was
immediately challenged by Aqa Muhammad Khan (d. 1797), a eunuch of the Turkish
Qajar tribe. He had been variously a
rival and advisor of Karim Khan. After
the latter’s death he established himself as ruler of most of the old Safavid
territories, first uniting the various branches of the Qajar tribe under his
rule, then defeating and killing Karim Khan’s son Lutf-‘Ali, and finally
recapturing the lost territories of Georgia and Khorasan. After Aqa Mohammad’s murder in 1797, his
nephew Fath-‘Ali became the ruler.
Fath-‘Ali Shah was distinguished less for his statecraft than for his
uxoriousness: his wives, concubines, and resulting children numbered in the
hundreds. During his reign Iran faced
its first serious challenge from Europeans.
Blundering into two disastrous wars with Russia, Iran lost the northern
half of the key province of Azerbaijan.
Fath-‘Ali Shah’s heir apparent was his son ‘Abbas Mirza, who ruled
Azerbaijan for more than thirty years and conducted Iran’s foreign policy. ‘Abbas Mirza was an intelligent and
forward-looking man, who sought to adopt European-style reforms in such areas
as the military and fiscal administration, much as the Ottomans were doing at
the same time. His European advisors
hoped that under ‘Abbas, Iran would develop into a strong and stable modern
state. Unfortunately, he shared his
family’s tendency towards dissipation, and he died shortly before his father. The throne thus passed to ‘Abbas Mirza’s
son, Muhammad (r. 1834-48). Muhammad
Shah showed little interest in continuing the reforms that his father had
undertaken, and relied on an incompetent prime minister, the ignorant and
superstitious Sufi Haji Mirza Aqasi.
Muhammad Shah’s son and heir, Nasir al-Din
(b. 1831, r. 1848-96), came to the throne as a teenager and ruled nearly half a
century. Nasir al-Din Shah had been
governor of Azerbaijan (the traditional post for the heir-apparent) under the
supervision of Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, who then became prime minister. Amir Kabir was an ardent reformer, who
sought to institute European-style reforms under an absolutist monarchy. For example, he established the first modern
institution of higher learning in Iran, the Dar al-Funun (“Polytechnic”). It was he who ordered the execution of the
Bab, apparently because he saw a charismatic and revolutionary religious
movement as a threat to the stability of the state. However, Nasir al-Din Shah soon tired of his brilliant and
overbearing prime minister, removed him from office, and had him killed in
1852. For the remainder of Nasir al-Din
Shah’s reign, Iran came under increasing pressure from the European
powers—political, military, and economic.
The Shah was himself interested in Western technology and methods, traveled
in Europe, and periodically attempted to carry out reforms. However, he lacked the intelligence and will
to follow through on these measures, not all of which were well-thought-out in
any case. His major achievement was
simply preserving the independence of Iran through the period when European
imperialist rapacity was at its height.
By the time of his assassination in 1896 at the hands of a supporter of
the Pan-Islamist Jamal al-Din Afghani, Iran was entering a crisis.
The
Constitutional Period. Both Nasir al-Din Shah and his successor Muzaffar
al-Din Shah were perennially short of foreign currency to pay for imports of
foreign goods and travel in Europe.
They developed the practice of selling concessions—monopolies on some
part of the economy—to raise funds.
These concessions caused great resentment in the Iranian public, for not
only did the resulting monopolies force Iranians to pay unnecessarily high
prices, but they often led to the ruin of sectors of the traditional
economy. In 1890, the Shah sold a
monopoly on the sale of tobacco to a British businessman. An outcry resulted, the clergy banned the
use of tobacco, and the Shah was forced to withdraw the concession. A few years later the discontent
crystallized in the form of a demand for a constitution. An alliance of modernist intellectuals (some
of whom were secretly Azali Babis), bazaar merchants, and reformist clergy
forced the dying Muzaffar al-Din Shah to agree to a constitution and a parliament,
the Majlis. When Muhammad-‘Ali, the new
Shah, tried to dissolve the Majlis, a civil war resulted in which the
Constitutionalist forces eventually triumphed.
Though the next decade was marked by unstable government and economic
depression caused by World War I, the ideal of constitutional parliamentary
government became firmly rooted in Iran.
The
Pahlavi Dynasty. In 1921 Reza Khan,
the head of a Russian-trained cavalry regiment that was the most effective
military force in the country, seized power in Tehran and was proclaimed prime
minister. He was a resolutely secular
and absolutist reformer who sought to modernize Iran from above on the model of
Atatürk in Turkey and Mussolini in Italy.
Though measures such as the forced unveiling of women and the curtailing
of the authority of the clergy caused resentment, under his rule Iran rapidly
developed a modern state apparatus and economy. He proclaimed himself Shah in 1925, deposing the powerless Ahmad
Shah Qajar. The symbol of his
achievements was a railroad he built from the Persian Gulf through Tehran to
the Russian border. It was this
railroad, together with his fascist sympathies, that proved his undoing. When Germany invaded Russia, the Allies
occupied Iran in order to be able to send supplies to Russia. Reza Shah was deposed and died in exile on
the island of Mauritius.
His son, Muhammad-Reza came to the throne
as a teen-ager and for some years was virtually powerless. During the 1940s political life flourished
in Iran as the Majlis was freed from the heavy hand of Reza Shah. By the early 1950s the Shah was attempting
to consolidate power. When Muhammad
Mosaddeq, a nationalist politician, became prime minister and nationalized the
Bristish-owned oil fields, the American Central Intelligence Agency engineered
a coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and brought the Shah to power. Like his father, Muhammad-Reza Shah
attempted to modernize Iran from above.
Paid for by steadily increasing oil revenues, vast changes occurred in
Iranian life. Education became widely
available, the country became firmly integrated into the world economy, and a
large middle-class grew up. The clergy
grew increasingly marginalized, particularly after 1963 when they were unable
to prevent a land-reform program from stripping them of the lands that
supported the religious institutions.
The
Islamic Republic. Under the
Pahlavis political reform failed to keep pace with economic and social
change. When uncontrolled inflation
created havoc in the economy in the mid-1970s, the Shah began to lose his
popularity. In 1978 an alliance of
Islamic, leftist, and bazaar groups, united by the prestige of the Ayatollah
Khomeini, forced the Shah into exile.
Khomeini’s own Islamic supporters, the best organized of the
revolutionary groups, seized power.
Despite a bitter campaign of terrorism by leftist groups and a long war
with Iraq, the Islamic regime was able to consolidate its power, uniting the
country in hostility towards the Western powers, especially the United
States. Despite a dismal human rights
record and near economic collapse caused by war and mismanagement, the regime
continued to enjoy wide support due to the reforms it was able to carry out and
its genuine independence from foreign influence. Moreover, the fact that a modicum of democracy was maintained
allowed the Islamic Republic to lay claim to both the nationalist and the
consistituionalist political legacies.
After the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the death of Khomeini, the regime
gradually became more democratic.
3. Culture
The best way to make sense of the
complicated history of Iran is to see it as the interplay of a set of cultural
patterns and tensions, some of them going back to ancient times.
Iran and Islam
A continuing theme in Persian culture is
whether Iran should be primarily Iranian or primarily Islamic. As early as the eighth century Persian
Muslims had begun to reassert their identity as Iranians against the prevailing
Arab chauvinism of their Arab Muslim rulers.
The greatest expression of this attitude is Firdawsi’s Shah-Nama, the “Book of Kings,” an
eleventh-century poetic adaptation of a pre-Islamic national history written in
Sasanian times. Thus, Iranian rulers
and officials through the last thousand years have tended to identify with the
heritage of pre-Islamic Iran, an identity reinforced by the Persian
language. This Iranian identity was
closely linked with a cult of monarchy, in which pre-Islamic ideas about the
divine right of kings, elaborate court ceremonials, and administrative traditions
were resurrected. It was the administrative
classes, the most permanent element of the government, who clung most
tenaciously to the pre-Islamic Iranian heritage. Thus, Bahaullah’s family, which had a tradition of government
service, proudly asserted their pure Iranian descent from the last Sasanian
king.
On the other hand, pre-modern Iranian
Muslims also saw themselves as citizens of the Islamic or the Shi‘ite
nation. Thus a Persian Shi‘ite would be
quite willing for his daughter to marry an Arab Shi‘ite but would on no account
allow her to wed a Zoroastrian Persian.
In most cases the Iranian and Islamic identities co-existed. Sometimes they were fused, as when the
mother of the Imam Husayn was identified as the daughter of Yazdegerd III, the
last Sasanian emperor. The fact that
Iran was the only Muslim state with Shi‘ism as the state religion tended to
smooth over potential conflicts between Iranian and Islamic identities, since
it set Iran apart from other Islamic countries.
In modern times the conflict between these
two identities has sharpened. The
Pahlavi Shahs, seeing Islam and the Shi‘ite clergy as barriers to the
modernization of Iran and the consolidation of state power, appealed to a
specifically Iranian nationalism.
Outward symbols of Islamic allegiance such as traditional headgear were
outlawed, and symbols of the glories of ancient Iran were brought forward to
replace them. Thus, the Zoroastrian
calendar replaced the Islamic calendar in official use. A campaign was launched to rid Persian of
loan-words from Arabic—a nearly hopeless task, since Arabic words are as
prominent in Persian as French, Greek, and Latin loan-words are in
English. Parents were encouraged to
give their children names from the Shah-Nama. Postage stamps portrayed the royal
family, the monuments of ancient Iran, and symbols of modernization, like
trains and telegraph offices, but they almost never portrayed the Islamic side
of Iran. This program of Iranization
reached absurdity in 1971 when Muhammad-Reza Shah held a lavish celebration
(thirty-five years late) at Persepolis, the old Achaemenid capital, of the
2500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy. At the same time he revised the calendar to
date from that event. The year 1355 was
followed by 2536. (The change proved
extremely unpopular and was reversed two years later.)
The clergy naturally resisted such
measures. Khomeini, for example,
insisted on signing his name “al-Khomeini,” a small act of rebellion that
converted his name from Persian to Arabic.
After the Islamic Revolution the new Islamic rulers appealed once again
to symbols of pan-Islamic identity, replacing, for example, the Persian
national symbol of the Lion-and-Sun with the Arabic name of God, Allah, on the Iranian flag. The study of Arabic, the language of Islam,
was once again made mandatory in Iranian schools. However, soon the country was locked in a desperate war with
Iraq, and the Islamic leadership was forced to once again invoke the symbols of
Iranian national unity to rally the nation to the fight. Nowadays, visiting foreign delegations are
once again taken to see the monuments of the ancient kings at Persepolis, where
they are treated to a thoroughly Iranian and monarchical sound-and-light show.
Shi‘ism and Islam.
Somewhat comparable to the conflict between
Iranian and Islamic identity is the conflict between Shi‘ite and Islamic
identity. Shi‘ites see themselves as
both part of and separate from the larger Sunni Islamic world. Ancient resentments born of the persecution
of the Imams separate Shi‘ites from other Muslims, but both parties see the
Shi‘ites as part of the larger Islamic nation.
On the whole, the experience of Iran, often at war with neighboring
Sunni states, has predisposed its people to see themselves primarily as a
distinct community surrounded by nations hostile to their faith. Thus, Shi‘ism can be invoked to rally the
Iranian nation against enemies, real or imagined. The propaganda of the Iran-Iraq war drew on ancient memories of
the persecution of the Imams in Iraq, especially of the Imam Husayn. On the other hand, the official policy of
the Islamic Republic has been to stress the commonalities between Shi‘ite and
Sunni Islam. In practice attitudes vary
considerably among individuals. In the
Shaykhi school, for example, and also in the writings of the Bab, Shi‘ite
particularism is predominant. On the
other hand, Bahaullah had little interest in Shi‘ite/Sunni differences.
Class structure of Iranian society.
The fundamental class structure of Iranian
society has its roots in pre-Islamic times, when Zoroastrian clergy tried, not
very successfully, to enforce a caste system something like that of
Hinduism. Although class lines have
never been rigid in Islamic Iran, there are distinct class patterns
characteristic of medieval and even modern Iranian society.
Peasants: The largest portion of the Iranian
population until very recent times consisted of peasants living in small
agricultural villages. Their situations
could vary considerably, depending mainly on whether or not they owned their
own land. Typically villages and their
agricultural land were the property of absentee landlords, usually civil or
military officials. Villages sometimes
belonged to charitable foundations—in effect to the clergy—or to wealthier
merchants. The rent was paid in kind,
and the crop was divided according to traditional formulae among the landlord,
the cultivator, and the individuals who supplied irrigation water, animals for
cultivation, and seed. As in other
pre-modern agrarian societies, the whole of Iranian goverment and urban culture
was dependent on the surplus extracted from the peasants. Due to a number of factors the economic
situation of the peasants became steadily worse in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, leading many peasants to migrate to the towns and cities.
Nomads: Most of the area of Iran is mountainous,
arid, or both, and agriculture is usually only possible in oases at the feet of
mountain ranges. Thus, at one time
nomadic tribes constituted nearly half the population of Iran. The nomadic peoples, or at least the chiefs
of the major tribes, enjoyed considerable wealth and political power. Nomad soldiers were the backbone of the
traditional Iranian army, and many of the Iranian dynasties of Islamic times,
notably the Qajars, were of nomadic origin.
The tribes were often not Persian-speaking or even Iranian. Turkish tribes were important in the north,
Kurds in the west, and Baloch in the southeast. Under the Pahlavis the power of the tribes was broken, and most were
forced to accept a sedentary life.
Since the Islamic Revolution, some of the tribes have been able to
resume a nomadic life.
The
Bazaar: Traditional urban economic
life in Iran is based on the bazaar, an amorphous physical, social, and
economic entity that is at the heart of Iranian cities. The bazaar as a social class included
shopkeepers, apprentices, craftsmen, wealthy wholesale merchants,
moneychangers, peddlers, porters, and other participants in the market, great
and small. The bazaar tended to be
allied to the clergy against the government, whose taxes, exactions, and
interference was usually the bazaar’s chief problem. The pious bazaar merchants supplied the money and the bazaar’s
gangsters and mobs supplied the power in the streets that maintained the
worldly influence of the clergy. In the
twentieth century new sorts of economic activity based on Western models
destroyed the bazaar’s monopoly on economic life, but the bazaar still remains
important, both economically and politically. It was critically important in the outcome of the Islamic
Revolution. Socially, the Bab’s family
belonged to the bazaar.
The
“Men of the Sword”: Ruling was normally the prerogative of
soldiers, who were often non-Persian invaders or tribesmen. The highest posts in government were
normally occupied by members of this military ruling class.
The
“Men of the Pen”: The continuing administration of government
was the prerogative of an educated bureaucratic class, mainly Persian in
origin. The bureaucratic families
maintained specialized skills in such areas as accounting, tax collection,
official correspondence, and record-keeping.
Thus, while a provincial governor in Qajar times would most likely be a
Qajar prince whose place was owed to his family connections and his tribe’s
Turkish military traditions, his secretary and his chief accountant would most
likely be Persians whose families had monopolized these skills for
generations. Bahaullah was from such a
family and would thus have been expected to assume his father’s administrative
position. The cultural and
administrative traditions of these bureaucratic families went back far into
Sasanian times, and this class was the most loyal supporter of pre-Islamic Persian
traditions of nationalism and culture.
Paradoxically, as an educated class they also tended in recent times to
become Westernized, so they also played critical roles in the emergence of
modern Iran.
The
Clergy: The Shi‘ite clergy
constituted a small but important social class. To some extent, the profession of cleric was hereditary like most
other occupations and crafts in pre-modern times. However, the class and professional boundaries were not rigid,
and there was a steady flow of talented young men of other backgrounds entering
the clergy, while the
