An exploration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran(1)

Institute of historical review

An exploration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its meaning for the rest of the world can begin with three wide-ranging generalizations:
1. The Iranian Revolution showed that religion can still be a more potent mobilizer of mass political action than can secular ideologies;
2. The revolution challenges the cultural hegemony of Western ideas, not only as a religion but as an alternative social model and way of life;
3. The Iranian Revolution thus can be regarded as one of the most important happenings in modern history, comparable to the French Revolution in the 18th century and the Russian Revolution in this century.
In the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, and ongoing terrorism threats against aviation and other vulnerable points, Iran and its farflung adherents remain persistently in the world's eye. An exploration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran conveys two great truths with vast implications: religion can still be a more potent mobilizer of mass political action than can secular ideologies, and the longtime hegemony of Western social models has ended. The Iranian Revolution thus emerges as one of the most important events in modern history, on a par with the watershed French and Russian revolutions.
There are innumerable reasons for believing that the emergence of highly dynamic Islamic fundamentalism in Iran is a development of incalculable worldwide consequence. The Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had this comment:
"The Iranian Revolution has highlighted one of the principal religious and political developments of our time: the revival of Islamic fundamentalism from Indonesia to Morocco and from Turkey to Central Africa."[1]
Dr. Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, observes:
"The subject of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is one whose importance hardly needs underlining. With the passage of time, its importance will become even clearer, as being the most significant and profound event in the entirety of contemporary Islamic history. Already we see the impact of the Islamic Revolution manifested in different ways across the length and breadth of the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia, from Bosnia to the heart of Europe down to Africa."[2]
Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, London, offers this assessment:
"Since the revolution in Iran I have been moving around some of the Sunni countries, some of the most reactionary if I might put it that way; I can assure you that the people in those countries have been absolutely galvanized and their imaginations have been captured ... Some of them take the precaution of locking their doors before they talk about it. If national boundaries were taken away, probably Ayatollah Khomeini would be elected by acclamation by the Ummah as a whole as the leader of the Muslim world today."[3]
In 1979 the mullahs in Iran overthrew the Persian monarchy, one of the oldest in the world, while at the height of its power, replacing it with an Islamic republic dedicated to the implementation of the Sharia, a law of private and public conduct prescribed in the Koran.
Since then no day has passed without news involving Islam: an ongoing revolution in Afghanistan, troubles in several Soviet republics with Islamic majorities or minorities, endless conflict in Kashmir, terrorism all over Europe traced to Islamic sources in Algeria, to name a few.
Writes Amir Taheri, a former newspaper editor in Teheran:
"No one knows which Muslim state might fall to the fundamentalists next, or when. What is certain, however, is that fundamentalist activities have been able to mobilize substantial forces in some of the key Muslim states, notably Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt. Islam also is the dominant political force in Afghanistan and has exacted numerous concessions from governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Somalia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisa, Morocco and Jordan."[4]
Imperialism and Colonialism
In Iran, more clearly perhaps than elsewhere, it has been possible for the observer to isolate and study separately the major influences which have been at work in dramatically awakening an Eastern religion which long was thought to be in slow decay. In particular, we can see, step by step, how a purely religious set of ideas and values was able to inspire enough public support to topple a powerful regime backed by a great army and with virtually unlimited foreign support.
Three major factors need to be explored:
1. Islam in general as a faith;
2. Hostile influences which in Iran threatened the survival of Islam;
3. The hardened form of the Shi'ite sect of Islam with which the challenge was met.
About the broad putlines of the history of Iran during the last 150 years there can be no doubt. Foreign powers have heavily influenced the country's international affairs to suit their own economic and strategic interests, with scant regard for the opinions and interests of the citizenry. Until 1945 the foreign powers dominating Iran were mainly Russia and Britain. Russia was interested in territorial expansion, Britain in cornering the Iranian market for British trade, in securing the continental land bridge to India and later, of course, in controlling Iran's oil resources.
The Iranians continued throughout this period to demonstrate their hostility to foreign intrusion, with the clergy (ulama) invariably playing a leading role.
From 1952 the British were replaced by the Americans working in close alliance with the Israelis, drawing the Shah and the masses mobilized by the ulama into the final bitter and violent struggle. This culminated in the 1979 overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza, last of the Pahlavi dynasty which had been installed by the British shortly after the end of World War I.
Since what looked like a combination of America and Israel was actually something very much bigger and more complex, it is the motives and actions of the intrusive foreign powers that we need to examine before we can hope to understand what happened in Iran. Indeed, we find that what these powers had been doing in Iran was only another example of what they and other European intersts had been up to during the same period in many other parts of the world, all manifestations of the phenomena known as imperialism and colonialism.