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G Mohammad Reza Shah’s Consolidation of Power
Although he had succeeded his father as shah in
1941, prior to 1953 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had been overshadowed by Mosaddeq and
other politicians and seemed destined to remain a passive,
constitutional monarch. Following the coup, however, he moved to consolidate
power in his own hands. With the help of the military and later a secret
police, the Savak, the shah created a centralized,
authoritarian regime. He suppressed opposition by former National Front
supporters and Communists, tightly controlled legislative elections, and
appointed a succession of prime ministers loyal to him. In 1961 the shah
dissolved the Majlis, instructing the prime minister
to rule by decree until new elections were held.
Initially, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
did not demonstrate the same enthusiasm for development and reform programs
that his father had shown. His early reforms were undertaken only with prodding
from the United States, which believed that dissatisfied Iranian peasants were
susceptible to influence by local agents of the USSR. In the early 1960s more
than 60 percent of Iran’s inhabitants were sharecroppers who received a
subsistence share (usually 20 percent) of the harvest from their landlords. A
land reform program implemented between 1962 and 1971 required landlords to
sell most of their land to the government, which then resold it to the
peasants. Although widely promoted as a major rural reform effort, only half of
the peasants obtained any land under the program, and about three-quarters of
those receiving land got less than 6 hectares (15 acres).
Mohammad Reza Shah took more interest in industrial
and public works projects, and between 1963 and 1978 numerous development schemes
contributed to an increase in industrialization and urbanization. The shah
presented his program as an integral part of a wider reform effort known as the
White Revolution, initiated to prevent a Red, or Communist, revolution from
originating at the grass roots level. The middle class expanded, but much of
the urban growth resulted from the migration of poor villagers seeking city
jobs. Consequently, slums proliferated on the outskirts of cities. Government
policy focused on the creation of modern industrial facilities but neglected
the development of social services. The construction activity under the White
Revolution stimulated expectations of political and social change. Oil revenues
tripled after 1973 due to higher prices and increased sales, providing ready
funding for the shah’s programs. However, economic success only caused the
shah’s regime to become more repressive as his confidence in his rule grew.
H Growing Opposition to the Shah
Because of his collaboration with the CIA to
overthrow Mosaddeq in 1953, the shah was never able
to overcome a popular perception that he was merely a tool for foreign
interests. Mosaddeq’s ouster had shocked the nation,
and over the years his image as a national hero had grown stronger despite the
fact that the shah’s government had banned any publications that mentioned his
name. Furthermore, because of the CIA’s role in the overthrow, most Iranians
saw the United States, even more so than Britain or the USSR, as a threat to
Iran's national interests. Strong relations between the United States and Iran
at the official level, especially an alliance whereby the United States
assisted in the buildup of Iran's military, fed the public’s fears. In the
early 1960s the shah's government drafted legislation granting diplomatic
status to U.S. military personnel stationed in Iran. Nationalists denounced the
bill as a reversion to the detested extraterritorial legal privileges accorded
to British and Russian citizens in Iran before 1925.
One of the shah’s most vocal opponents was the
leading Shia scholar, or ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini was arrested in 1962 after
publicly speaking out against the bill, and his arrest instantly elevated him
to the status of national hero. Although released the following year, he
refused to keep silent. He instead broadened his criticisms of the regime to
include corruption, violations of the constitution, and rigging of elections.
Khomeini’s second arrest in June 1963 led to three days of rioting in many
Iranian cities; the military suppressed the riots only after more than 600
people had been killed and more than 2,000 injured. Fearing that Khomeini would
assume martyr status if he were kept in prison or executed for treason, the
shah exiled him to Turkey in 1964. Khomeini eventually settled in the Shia theological center of An Najaf
in Iraq. From there he maintained regular contact with his former students in
the Iranian city of Qum. These students formed the
nucleus of a covert anti-shah movement that was growing among the clergy. In
1971 Khomeini published a book, Velayat-e faqih, that provided the religious justification for an
Islamic government in Iran.
The shah also failed to win mass support among the
secular middle class of professionals, bureaucrats, teachers, and intellectuals.
This social group, created as a result of his father’s reforms and expanded
during the 1960s and 1970s due to the shah’s own development plans, tended to
be highly nationalistic and looked back nostalgically to the Mosaddeq period as an era of genuine democracy. Like the
clergy and the religiously inclined traditional middle class of merchants and
artisans, the secular middle class resented the lack of meaningful political
participation and the close ties the shah had established with the United States.
They criticized the shah's promotion of Iran beginning in the late 1960s as
America’s security pillar in the Persian Gulf region. Despite their commonality
of views, the secular and religious groups had distrusted one another in the
1950s and 1960s. The growing severity of political repression during the 1970s
gradually brought them closer together, however, and by 1977 various secular
and religious opposition movements were prepared to cooperate against the
shah's regime.
I The Islamic
Revolution
The spark that ignited the revolution was a
pro-Khomeini demonstration in
By October the strikes and demonstrations were
becoming a unified revolutionary movement. From the security of his exile in
Iraq, Khomeini continued to denounce the corruption and injustices of the
shah's regime, as well as its dependence on the United States. His sermons were
recorded, duplicated on thousands of cassette tapes, and smuggled into Iran.
The tapes appealed equally to religious Iranians and members of the secular
middle class. Alarmed by Khomeini’s growing influence, the shah persuaded the Iraqi
government to expel him. Khomeini immediately found asylum in France, where
access to the international media made it even easier for him to communicate
with supporters in Iran. In November the shah realized that the army could not
indefinitely contain the mass movement, and he began making plans for his
departure from Iran. He left the country in mid-January 1979. Two weeks later,
Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph after more than 14 years in exile. On
February 11, 1979, the royalist government was overthrown, and in a referendum
on April 1 Iranians voted overwhelmingly to establish an Islamic republic.
J Islamic Republic
In February 1979 Khomeini
asked Mehdi Bazargan to
form a provisional government. By spring the national solidarity that had been
so crucial to the ultimate success of the revolution had begun to erode as
various political groups competed for power and influence. The secular parties
had no leader of comparable stature to Khomeini and soon were marginalized. Of
the many religious groups, the most influential was the Islamic Republican
Party (IRP), formed by former students of Khomeini. Its principle opponents
were two nonclerical religious parties, the moderate
Liberation Movement of Iran, to which Bazargan
belonged, and the Mojahedin-e Khalq
(MK), which espoused radical programs for the redistribution of wealth and
tended to be anticlerical.
Bazargan resigned in November 1979
in protest over the hostage crisis. In December voters approved a new
constitution. Khomeini, as faqih, or supreme
spiritual leader, held the highest authority in the country. In January 1980
voters elected Abolhassan Bani-Sadr
as the first president of the republic. Following parliamentary elections in
March, the Majlis and Bani-Sadr
could not agree on a presidential nominee for prime minister. In August Bani-Sadr reluctantly accepted the IRP candidate, Mohammad
Ali Rajai, as prime minister. The president and prime
minister clashed often, and in June 1981 the Majlis
dismissed Bani-Sadr. Rajai
subsequently was elected president and chose IRP head Mohammad-Javad Bahonar as his prime
minister.
In June 1981 the MK, which had clashed frequently
with the IRP throughout 1980, launched an armed uprising against the
IRP-dominated government. The MK succeeded in killing more than 70 top IRP
leaders by bombing the party headquarters in late June. Two months later the MK
assassinated both Rajai and Bahonar.
By mid-1982 the government had suppressed the party through severe measures
that included mass arrests and summary executions of more than 7,000 suspected
MK members. In 1983 the government dissolved the communist Tudeh
Party, leaving the Liberation Movement of Iran as the only officially
recognized party in opposition to the IRP. As internal political stability
returned, distinct ideological factions emerged within the IRP. These internal
rifts eventually would cause the IRP to dissolve itself in 1987. Meanwhile,
elections in October 1981 brought Seyed Ali Khamenei, one of the founders of the IRP and a member of
the Majlis, to power as president.
J1 The Iran-Iraq War
In September 1980,
J2 Recent Developments
Since the end of hostilities with
The death of Khomeini in 1989 may have contributed
to the competition among the political elite. During the initial ten years of
the Islamic republic, Khomeini did not involve himself in routine governmental
affairs but rather served as an arbiter who suggested compromises when the
executive and legislative branches could not agree. Because of his charisma and
authority as leader of the revolution, politicians always deferred to his
suggestions. In the absence of a political figure of comparable stature,
political debates became more protracted, and compromises were more difficult
to achieve.
The Assembly of Experts chose Khamenei,
who would complete his second term as president that year, to succeed Khomeini
as faqih. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had been speaker of the Majlis from 1980 to 1989, won the 1989 presidential
election and was reelected in 1993. As president, Rafsanjani supported the
"alternative thought" movement, which advocated official tolerance of
more diverse cultural and political views, especially in the press. Mohammed Khatami, who served as minister of Islamic guidance and
culture under both Khamenei and Rafsanjani beginning
in 1982, crafted this policy. In 1992, after a more conservative Majlis was elected, Khatami
resigned, but he continued to serve as cultural advisor to President
Rafsanjani. Khatami's opposition to censorship and
arbitrary government had wide popular appeal that helped him win almost 70
percent of the vote in the 1997 presidential election. As president, Khatami continued to advocate political reform and freedom
of the press as essential for the creation of a civil society. Khatami’s liberal policies have met with opposition from
conservatives who distrust popular government. The intense political
competition between liberals and conservatives has been reflected in the press
and in street demonstrations. In 1998 two liberal politicians and three liberal
writers were killed in separate incidents that the Khatami
government blamed on conservatives in the Ministry of Information.
In February 2000 Iranian voters favored proreform candidates in elections to the Majlis. The elections appeared to provide a popular mandate
for Khatami’s reform efforts, although sweeping
changes were not expected.
In the 1990s Iran also sought to improve its foreign
relations. The protracted hostage crisis with the United States had brought
international disfavor upon the Islamic republic. As a result, it had received
little international support when Iraq invaded in 1980 or during the long years
of war. Furthermore, in 1989 Khomeini issued a fatwa that absolved of sin anyone
who killed British novelist Salman Rushdie, whose
book The Satanic Verses (1988) many Muslims considered offensive to Islam. The
fatwa, which Rafsanjani said could not be revoked, strained relations with
Britain and other Western nations. Nevertheless, Iran achieved normal relations
with most countries under Rafsanjani and Khatami,
although there were intermittent periods of political tension with European
countries such as Britain, France, and Germany. In 1998 Iran’s foreign minister
signed an agreement promising that the Iranian government would not implement
the fatwa. This prompted Britain to restore full diplomatic relations with
Iran.
Throughout the 1990s Iran's leaders continued to
distrust the United States, which they perceived as hostile to their
revolution. Likewise, the United States remained deeply suspicious of Iran's
regional intentions, believing that Iran was developing weapons of mass
destruction and supporting international terrorism. The two countries had
unofficial contacts in the early 1990s but failed to resolve their differences.
In 1993 the United States, viewing Iran as a threat to U.S. interests in the
Middle East, adopted a policy to prevent Iran from gaining too much regional
power. In 1995 the United States banned all U.S. trade with and investment in
Iran, and in 1996 it drafted a law placing sanctions on non-U.S. companies that
invest in Iran. The 1996 legislation became a source of friction between the
United States and its own allies. Iran exploited the discord to expand its economic
ties with Canada, European Union countries, and Japan
Following
Khatami’s election as president in 1997, the
Contributed By:
Eric Hooglund
Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation..
Abbreviated by Ehsan Ghafoorian.
All Rights Reserved .
Website: www.geocities.com/ehsan_ghafoorian
Email: [email protected]
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