Ideology and Power in the Middle East: Studies in Honor of George Lenczowski

by Peter J. Chelkowski (Editor), Robert J. Pranger (Editor)

Overview

Scholars from the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East combine their talents and expertise to honor George Lenczowski, whose studies of the Middle East over two generations have made him a foremost expert on contemporary affairs in this most volatile and complex region.

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ISBN-13:	9780822381501
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/12/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	542
Lexile:	1570L (what's this?)
File size:	927 KB

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Ideology and Power in the Middle East

Studies in Honor of George Lenczowski

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By Peter J. Chelkowski, Robert J. Pranger

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1988 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-0788-4

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CHAPTER 1

IRAN

The Nature of the Pahlavi Monarchy

Gholam Reza Afkhami

The Pahlavi era began in Iran with the coup d'état of 1921, when Reza Khan, the first of the Pahlavis, moved into Tehran at the head of his Cossak forces. The king, Ahmad Shah Qajar, honored him with the title of "Sarda Sepah," commander of the armed forces, and after some negotiations named his political partner, Sayyid Zia al-Din Tabataba'i, as the new prime minister. Sayyid Zia al-Din had to resign his office and leave the country after three months. Reza Khan, however, became the minister of war in two months, prime minister in three years, the only candidate for the presidency of a briefly contemplated Iranian republic in four years, and, in less than five years, the first king of a new dynasty.

By the time Reza Khan assumed the title of shah on December 15, 1925, he was already acknowledged as the most powerful man in Iran. During the years that had elapsed between the coup d'état and his ascent to the throne, he had assured the integrity of the nation and established internal security by quelling a number of tribal revolts and revolutionary uprisings in various parts of the country. During the next sixteen years, before he was forced to leave Iran in 1941 under pressure from the Allied Occupation Forces, he not only reigned but also ruled over the country with an iron hand. The paraphernalia of constitutional government remained intact, but no one doubted that supreme power lay with the king. He used this power to initiate the construction of an infrastructure that would support Iran's subsequent progress toward modernization and socioeconomic development. He introduced new concepts in the management of Iranian society by modernizing the educational, legal, and administrative systems. He pioneered fundamental changes in communication by building roads, railways, postal services, and telephone, telegraphic, and wireless networks. He paved the way for the eventual admission of half of Iran's population into the country's social, economic, and cultural life by unveiling women. And he established the supremacy of the central government by building a modern army and extending its power over Iran's entire national territory.

Yet despite the qualitative importance of the changes Reza Shah initiated, their actual influence on Iranian society remained relatively limited during his reign. In 1941, when he abdicated his throne in favor of his son, over three-fourths of Iran's population still lived in the countryside, where traditional landlord-peasant and/or tribal relations prevailed, with all their economic, social, cultural, and political implications; no more than 10 percent of the population was literate; annual per capita income did not exceed $85; and the clergy retained its traditional sway over the great majority of Iranians. Iran, in short, was still predominantly a rural society whose interrelationships were basically affective and filial, dominated by a worldview that was a cross between Shiite Islamic universalism and local subnational parochialism.

Reza Shah's heir, Crown Prince Muhammad Reza, took the oath of office on September 1, 1941, in extremely precarious political conditions. His father's abdication had created a political vacuum, into which were now released a host of frustrated forces, previously held under his control. Traditional power groups—landlords, tribal khans, clerics, and bazaar leaders—and the few, but increasingly vociferous, representatives of modernism—intellectuals, professionals, bureaucrats, technocrats—began to compete for power in a political arena wanting in institutional capability. Men of stature in the pre-Reza Shah period, such as Zaka al-Mulk Furoughi, Ahmad Ghavam (Ghavam al-Saltaneh), Sayyid Zia al-Din Tabataba'i, Sayyid Hassan Taqizadeh, and Dr. Muhammad Musaddeq, as well as some younger men, mostly products of Reza Shah's bureaucratic and educational reforms, surfaced to take the helm and lead the country through the turbulent years of World War II and after.

In these years of conflict, power tended to gravitate to those whose bases were either traditionally sanctioned (crown, clergy), organizationally efficient (army, Tudeh), or socioeconomically commanding (landlords, tribal chiefs, bazaar leaders). Religious groups, led by Ayatollah Kashani, and political movements reflecting the full range of the ideological spectrum, from the extreme left to the extreme right—Tudeh, Third Force, Iran, Workers and Toilers, Democrat, National Will, as well as ultranationalist and pseudofascist parties—clashed in urban arenas in the hope of achieving political power. None emerged totally triumphant.

By 1963, the year of the White Revolution, Muhammad Reza Shah had emerged as the nation's supreme leader. The White Revolution was the springboard that launched Iran's economic and social development. In fifteen years it transformed the character of Iranian society. In the countryside, its basic objective was to liberate the peasant by transforming the legal and traditional rules that governed his relationship to the land and the landlord. On the labor front, it proposed to allow labor to share in the profits resulting from increasing industrial productivity (based on the development of modern technology) as well as to provide labor with new incentives for the promotion of productivity. In the area of women's rights, suffrage became the basis for a widespread and concerted effort to transform the archetypal image of woman as man's mother, wife, and sexual companion to that of a citizen with equal rights and privileges.

Between 1963 and 1976 Iran's average annual industrial growth exceeded 20 percent, while the number of industrial plants and the size of the industrial work force doubled. The GNP increased thirteen times, from $4 billion in 1961/1962 to $53 billion in 1975/ 1976. Annual per capita income went up eight times in the same period, from about $195 to about $1,600. By 1978 it reached $2,000. Comparing Iran's overall economic picture in 1976 with what it was at the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty's ascent to power, we see that by 1976 the GNP had grown 700 times, per capita income 200 times, domestic capital formation 3,400 times, and imports almost 1,000 times. It is clear that by the time of the Khomeini assault most economic and social indicators had shown appreciable progress, from education to labor, from production to consumption, from infrastructure to social welfare.

Both Pahlavis were obviously modernizing kings. The father and son, however, were considerably different in terms of their personal backgrounds, temperaments, and vision. Reza Shah was a rough soldier who had fought his way up through the ranks and become the master of the country by the sheer force of his personality. He had lived a lower-middle-class life and could not help but know the basic characteristics of his countrymen simply by looking inward into his own soul and mind. Except for one trip to Turkey, he had never set foot outside Iran, had no firsthand experience of other cultures, and had no vision of a future drastically different from what he and his countrymen already knew.

He realized, however, that in some respects Iran had to change, and that those changes would entail not only the adoption of new techniques, but possibly new ways of thinking. He knew instinctively that a progressive future was unimaginable unless the country was freed from superstition and the forces that fed on superstition and ignorance; hence, his efforts to break the clergy's hold on society by initiating the modernization of the educational and judicial systems, unveiling women, and limiting the use of clerical garb to bona fide clerics.

Muhammad Reza Shah's background was quite different. By the time he was born in 1919, his father, under whose shadow he would grow up, was already well-placed in the military hierarchy, ready to plunge into the coup d'état. Early in life the son was introduced to democratic precepts as a student in Le Rosey in Switzerland. Unlike Reza Shah, he was by nature mild-mannered and relatively shy. Growing up in the shelter of the palace, he was physically separated from the ordinary people. Even more important, his lifestyle, his education, and his travels separated him culturally from the majority of his countrymen. As his familiarity with the world far exceeded that of his father's, so also did his vision of Iran's future. Reza Shah was a nationalist reformer whose model was Ataturk's Turkey. Muhammad Reza Shah fancied himself as a nationalist revolutionary, and dreamed of a "great civilization," a remarkable facsimile of a modern, Westernized, socialistically inclined welfare state, to be reached by the implementation of the principles he called collectively the "White Revolution."

In spite of its tremendous achievements, the Pahlavi regime proved politically fragile and vulnerable. Both shahs met with tragic ends. Reza Shah fell in the face of the obviously superior power of the British and Soviet forces. Muhammad Reza Shah, however, succumbed to a series of events that could, at least with the benefit of hindsight, have been averted and/or overcome if the Iranian political system had been structurally better conceived and organized.

Muhammad Reza Shah was forced to leave Iran on January 16, 1979, under the pressure of one of the most extraordinary revolutionary upheavals in the history of the Third World. In one year's time, between 1977 and 1978, power, so palpably apparent in the shah's person, imploded, as it were, creating a vacuum that was filled, step-by-step, by the ferocious intensity of a group of passionate, vengeful mullahs. The Pahlavi regime, which had fathered the most phenomenal period of transition in Iranian history, yielded to what is conceivably the most backward of possible alternatives: a theocracy, a milder prototype of which the country had already rejected more than seventy years before in its days of poverty and superstition.

To understand the nature of the Pahlavi monarchy, we must look at the contradictions behind the mission the two Pahlavi shahs undertook—namely, the transformation and modernization of Iranian society. Discussion of the following questions may shed some light on the reasons for the phenomenal progress of Iranian society under the Pahlavis and the weakness of the political system the Pahlavi regime represented: (1) What were the institutional characteristics of Iranian kingship? (2) What have the effects of historical forces on political power and political leadership been in modern Iran? (3) What were the contradictions involved in the role of the king as political leader in modern Iran? (4) Was it possible or not to resolve the contradictions under the Pahlavi monarchy?

By the time the Iranian monarchy passed to the Pahlavis, it had become the repository of three general conceptual trends. Of these, the first was essentially of a metaphysical nature and derived from the ancient idea of khvarnah, which bound not only the king and the priesthood but all Iranians of Zoroastrian faith to the benevolence of their God Ahura Mazda, and charged them with the responsibility of waging war on behalf of the Ahuran light against the forces of evil. In that the Ahuran conception of the universe foresaw periodic ascendance of the "Ahriman," the evil principle, implicit in it were also the notions of renewal and regeneration. Therefore, as Pio Fillipani-Ranconi suggests, "the essence of the Iranian kingship was not mere enhancement of the human function on earth, but rather supernatural power aiming at 'renewing' the world after a celestial pattern." "We have seen that such a renewal, religiously expressed by the adverb frash—apparently derived from the stem fra-ank 'proceeding forward,'—'advancing to completion,'—is a recreation that, in the case of the king's work, does not abide in the realm of abstraction; rather, it must appear as embedded in a physically visible mold."

According to the mythology of ancient Iran, a king was bestowed with divine glory as long as he followed the Ahura's path by working for the betterment of society. Jamshid, the most glorious of the Shahnameh's mythical kings, was so blessed until he strayed from the right path, as a result of which the country plunged into Zahak's millennium of the rule of darkness.

The special relationship between the king's divine farr (glory) and the nation's felicity remained an essential pillar of the Iranian political culture during the Achaemenid (559–330 B.C.) and Sasanian (A.D. 224–651) periods. But it was also carried over into the Islamic era and was regenerated anew with the Safavid dynasty. Isma'il, the first of the Safavid kings, was considered by his followers, mainly the qizilbash, tribes of Turkish origin, as being divinely ordained. He was called Vali Allah, the vicar of God, a title that in Shiism has been traditionally reserved for the first imam, Ali. As both shah and murshid-i kamil, or perfect spiritual director, he combined in his person the functions of both the temporal and the spiritual leader. The idea was handed down, albeit in the more nebulous concept of Zill Allah (God's shadow), through the Safavids' successor dynasties, particularly the Afshars and Qajars, which, as constituent tribes of the qizilbash, were the main pillars of Safavid power.

The sacral connotations of Iranian kingship were a basic reason why the doctrinal contradiction between religious and secular concepts of legitimate authority in Shiism did not affect the institution of kingship but were in fact reconciled in it, until the Pahlavi era, when the king personally became the embodiment of the thrust toward secularism and modernization.

This point is particularly germane to our discussion. In the universes of Ahuran and Islamic thought, the world and the law were, and are, essentially given. In Zoroastrian Iran, they were seen as embodied in the accepted traditions of society, in its division of classes and division of labor. Justice was doing that which was the accepted norm. History was seen as cyclical in its movement, and regeneration meant essentially beginning the cycle anew. Thus, Khosrow Anushiravan, one of the most powerful Sasanian kings, would remain the epitome of justice even though he slaughtered the Mazdakis by resorting to what by modern standards are patently dishonorable methods. He had brought the cycle of history back onto the right path by ridding the world of nefarious and antitraditional influences. In Islam also, the word, the law, and indeed the world, are given in the Koran. In Shiism in particular, bid'at, or newfangledness in matters pertaining to religion, has been traditionally considered a sin, the work of the devil. And as Islam encompasses nearly every dimension of social and moral existence, the implications are clear: authority is not justified in approving, let alone spearheading, structural change. If the world moves off the path ordained by the word, it must be set aright. Thus, as long as the crown operates within the framework accepted by the religious authority, its sanctity is respected. If it sides with the world, it becomes practically profane, and falls into conflict with the religious concept of legitimacy.

The conflict between the Pahlavis and religious authority in Iran was inevitable. Reza Shah came to power and ascended the throne when the conflict between the religious and secular concepts of legitimacy had already been exacerbated as a result of changes brought about inside the country by prevailing international conditions. The crown as an institution was already torn between the forces of the future and of the past. And the only way Reza Shah could have come to power was to side with the forces of the future, for the past had already been preempted by the reigning Qajar dynasty. Indeed, by the early 1920s, under the influence of the Turkish events, certain modernizing forces in Iran, which Reza Khan also represented, were seriously entertaining the idea of a republic. The crown was retained, however, because the Shiite establishment believed that it was still the best guarantor of traditionalism.

A second characteristic of Iranian kingship, in addition to its sacral quality, resulted from the exigencies of power. Iranian tradition always placed a premium on valor. The Shahnameh's heroes, among other things, were men of razm and bazm, valiant in battle and in feasting. In practice the tribal origin of Iranian dynasties meant that both the achievement and preservation of the throne required the ability to wage war against enemies outside and to use cunning against enemies at home. Most of the Iranian dynasties came to power as a result of victory on the battlefield, and they also lost their thrones in wars. From Cyrus to Reza Shah, glory had belonged to the strong and warlike. Justice and power were seen as the two edges of the king's sword. If nothing more, the king had to be strong enough to prevent his servants from plundering the country.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Ideology and Power in the Middle East by Peter J. Chelkowski, Robert J. Pranger. Copyright © 1988 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Foreword Gardner David Pierpont
Preface Chelkowski Peter J. Pranger Robert J.
The Life and Work of George Lenczowski Chelkowski Peter J.
A Bibliography of the Publications and Lectures of George Lenczowski Chelkowski Peter J.
Introduction Ideology and Power in the Middle East Pranger Robert J.
Part 1 Royalist Authoritarianism
Iran The Nature of the Pahlavi Monarchy Afkhami Gholam Reza
Saudi Arabia Traditionalism versus Modernism—A Royal Dilemma? Eilts Hermann Frederick
Jordan Balancing Pluralism and Authoritarianism Gubser Peter
Labor Politics, Economic Change, and the Modernization of Autocracy in Contemporary Bahrain Lawson Fred
Part 2 Radical and Reformist Military Regimes
Approaches to the Understanding of Egypt Springborg Robert
Ba'thist Ethics and the Spirit of State Capitalism Patronage and the Party in Contemporary Syria Sadowski Yahya M.
Iraq Its Revolutionary Experience under the Ba'th Marr Phebe
State-Building and Political Construction in the Yemen Arab Republic, 1962–1977 Burrowes Robert
Part 3 Marxist Movements and Governments
The Non-Communist Left in Iran The Case of the Mujahidin Zabih Sepehr
Ideology versus Pragmatism in South Yemen, 1968–1986 Wenner Manfred
The PDPA Regime in Afghanistan A Soviet Model for the Future of the Middle East Magnus Ralph H.
Part 4 Challenge to Democratic Practices and Principles
Israel The Politics of the Second Generation Gutmann Emanuel
Turkey Democratic Framework and Military Control Landau Jacob M.
Lebanon The Role of External Forces in Confessional Pluralism Azar Edward
Part 5 Islamic Fundamentalism
Ex Oriente Nebula An Inquiry into the Nature of Khomeini's Ideology Savory Roger
Part 6 Liberation Movements
The PLO Millennium and Organization Amos John
Kurdish Nationalism Turner Arthur Campbell
Part 7 Problems in Strategy and Security
The Persian Gulf Stability, Access to Oil, and Security Anthony John Duke
The Dimensions of American Foreign Policy in the Middle East Pranger Robert J.
Notes
Index
About the Editors and Contributors