Thank you very much. And it's an honor to be here. I'm very grateful to you
for bringing me here. A few years ago, I was having
coffee with some neighbors-- where we live in Cornwall
in the West of England-- when their teenage
son abruptly asked me why there had been the
revolution in Iran in 1979. He knew I was an historian
specializing in Iran and thought I should be able
to answer-- what was to him-- a very natural question. After a moment's
hesitation, I decided I should do my best to reply
rather than evade the question or laugh it off. So I did my best. Like many simple
questions, it's one that is quite difficult
and complex to answer. And it's capable of
many different answers. But any historian of modern Iran
has to take some kind of view on it. And the different views taken
by different historians often reflect, in turn,
the different sectors of opinion and
political groupings that were involved in 1979. I think I'm going to
shut that down, sorry. Because the revolution
was violent and divisive, so too the opinions of
Iranians and others about it are often strong
and intransigent. So the question invites
a complex answer that is likely to bring violent
disagreement down on it. Nonetheless, it's the duty of an
historian to make the attempt. I hope you may respond
with a little forbearance and appreciation for an
honest attempt, however flawed, at a balanced answer. To give an outline
account and set the scene for the
uninitiated, the bare facts of the revolution can
be quite briefly told. It began in the period
of economic uncertainty after the oil-fueled
boom of the early 1970s had begun to falter with rising
inflation and unemployment. In 1977, the Shah's
government relaxed some of its previous
repressive measures, permitting the reappearance
of some expressions of dissent from the liberal left. But an attack in a
government-backed newspaper on the exiled Ayatollah
Khomeini in January of '78 led to a demonstration
by religious students in the shrine city of Qom, in
which a number of demonstrators were shot and killed by police. Fueled by condemnations
from Khomeini outside Iran and from
other clerics within, a cycle of further
demonstrations and shootings followed after intervals
of 40 days each time. The demonstrations, mainly
involving young students and people from the bazaars,
got larger and more violent. And the number of
dead increased. Over the summer
and early autumn, workers frustrated at low
pay joined demonstrations and went on strike, the
strikes in the oil industry being especially damaging. On 8 September, afterwards
known as Black Friday, martial law was declared, and
a large number of demonstrators were killed in Tehran. After this, the Shah
lost whatever credibility he had left. And the general wish,
aligning with Khomeini's longstanding demand,
was for him to go. Strikes and demonstrations
continued and increased in intensity, especially in
the religious season of Ashura in December. Troops began to desert. And on 16 January, 1979, the
Shah flew out of the country. Khomeini returned home
on the 1st of February. Troops loyal to the
Shah's government gave up the struggle
10 days later. And at the end of March,
a nationwide referendum gave overwhelming support
for an Islamic republic. There you go. Those are some of the
bare bones of a narrative. It may tell us part of
the why, but only part. But narrative has its place. In his 2004 book, The
Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, Charles Kurzman
stressed the importance of understanding each
stage in the development of the revolution, of each event
and incident, because only then was it possible to understand
how a succession of actions and responses altered
the perspective of a whole population so
that it came to reject the authority of a
government it had previously accepted as normal. This process of
rejection is something that Ryszard Kapuscinski
also writes about, interestingly, in
his book The Shah. In my book,
Revolutionary Iran, I also followed a narrative
method and wrote about the 40-day cycle
between days of mourning that became days of protests
in the first half of 1979 as a revolutionary
lung breathing life into the revolutionary movement. Kurzman is a sociologist. And he called his analysis
an empty explanation. But one might more properly call
it an historical explanation-- indeed, the kind of
historical explanation that emphasizes the
reconstruction of pressures and attitudes acting
on individual people and on groups,
specific points of time when decisions are made. More specifically, it has
similarities to the kind of history advocated
and practiced-- albeit in a very different
context, in a different way-- by the British school of
20th-century historians like Louis Namier,
Herbert Butterfield, and Maurice Cowling-- ironic, because
Cowling in particular had little good to
say of sociology. But one could take the
term anti-explanation as a kind of
recognition of that. But that's a digression. One of the main points I'd
like to make today is that the revolution of 1979 was not
successful because all Iranians thought the same way, but
because, for a brief time, a large majority of Iranians--
despite differences between the social and ideological
groups to which they belonged-- came together, accepting
the religious leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini to
demand an end to the monarchy. It's important to grasp this. Because after 1979,
those groups again diverged and have had
their own partisan views of the revolution since
and what went wrong. There are many different
answers to the question of what happened in 1979,
as I said at the outset. Of course, there
was one group who never agreed with the revolution
and never accepted Khomeini, even for a short period. And that was the
supporters of the monarchy. One may take Gholam Reza
Afkhami and his book The Life and Times of the Shah as
representative of this group. But as I wrote in a
review of that book for Prospect Magazine in 2009,
Afkhami and other monarchists have a problem with
the 1979 revolution. Their view tends to
be that the Shah was a strong, competent king who
wanted the best for his people and did great things
for his country. He should not have been deposed. So why was he? Why did the revolution happen? In the title of an
earlier book from 1985, Thanatos on a National
Scale, Afkhami seemed to suggest that it was
attributable to a collective national death wish. Others-- and it seems the
Shah himself in his last days in exile-- believed that the
Americans and the British had somehow created
the revolution. The point is-- and one
can only have sympathy with this-- many people who
were supporters of the Shah before 1979, and
others, still have not worked out why it happened. One element in this-- and in the Shah's
view before 1979-- was that the Shah and
his regime had largely been looking the wrong way. In his biography of the
Shah, professor Milani makes this point. The Shah was focused on
the communist threat, on the remnants of Tudeh and
related underground groups, on the possible activities
of Soviet agents, and so on. His contacts in Western
governments, notably the US, tended to think that way
too and encouraged him. The clergy were
thought of either as part of the junk of the
past to be bypassed by secular modernization or
for what remaining influence they might have as
allies against the communists. It seems they were not
taken very seriously. The next group to consider
are the leftists-- broadly, people who supported the
revolution because they wanted a socialist or
communist revolution and regarded the
alliance with Khomeini as a temporary necessity
of realpolitik. This grouping contained
various elements in 1978-79. There were supporters
of the old Tudeh Party. There were left-leaning elements
of the Jebha-ye Melli-e, the National Front,
the coalition that had backed Mosaddegh. And there were more
radical groups like the Fedaiyan-e-Khalq-- who, after the disillusion
of the Mosaddegh episode, had taken a more radical and
militant, or Maoist, approach since the late 1960s-- also the Mujahideen-e-Khalq. There were generational
and social differences between these groups also. The more militant
and radical ones tended to have a
younger membership. And they have sometimes
been characterized as the university-educated
children of older, middle-class leftists or liberals. This group, the
leftists, was the one the Shah had been
most worried about and whom his secret
police, the SAVAK, had targeted most
energetically to such effect that, by the late '70s,
most of their overt activity was in exile. Maziar Behrooz has
documented that story. But they revitalized
themselves within Iran once the revolution
gained momentum. After Khomeini had consolidated
his position of supremacy, the leftists generally
felt bitter resentment that their revolution had been
stolen from them by the clerics and their followers. One of the books that shows
this anger most clearly is the formidable
collection Women of Iran, published in London in 1983,
with the contributors using pseudonyms for the most part. The annulment of the Shah's
family law and the imposition of hijab in 1979 were two
of the clearest signals early on that the leftist and
feminist expectations were not going to be realized. Another book written from
this perspective-- vivid, if delivered at another level-- is Marjane Satrapi's
graphic novel Persepolis. More important though,
for our purposes today, are the writings of
Ervand Abrahamian, and especially Iran
Between Two Revolutions, which indeed began as a project
to explain the social origins of the Tudeh Party. One might say that it
ended-- at least largely-- as an attempt to explain
why the revolution in 1979 was not a Tudeh or a
leftist revolution. And that question is
addressed squarely in Abrahamian's
conclusion to the book. Broadly speaking, his
answer is the personality and the unique
position of Khomeini, the ability of the clergy to
connect with the urban poor, and the failure of the left
to engage the rural poor. But in addition, he
also makes plain-- in this and other books-- that because of the devastating
persecution by SAVAK, the left were in no state to
offer coordinated leadership in Iran in the late '70s. I hesitate to argue
with Abrahamian. I once introduced him
at our conferences, the [INAUDIBLE] of historians
writing about modern Iran. His books are
generally excellent. And I've used them extensively
both in my own research and for teaching. But it's a little odd to start
from a position of material determinism, saying that
ideological and political phenomena are merely a
reflection of underlying economic structures
and developments, only to end by acknowledging
the power of charisma and the grip on popular
thinking of a spiritual leader. Houchang Chehabi has
written an excellent book on the Freedom Party. Personally, I probably
sympathize with liberals, like Mehdi Bazargan and
Ebrahim Yazdi on the one side and Shapour Bakhtiar
on the other, more than anyone
else in this story. I have an underlying view
that human history is, in the broadest terms,
the story of the expansion and development of human
consciousness, self-awareness, and understanding of
the world over time and, correspondingly, the
expansion of human autonomy and freedom to shape
our existence over time. Accordingly, I would
like to be able to say that the Iranian
revolution should have been a liberal revolution, following
on from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to 1911
and the period of Mosaddegh's prime ministership,
with the goal of realizing political
freedoms, the rule of law, properly representative
democratic government, and so on. Undoubtedly, a lot of Iranians
were hoping for that in 1979. And one could make a case
that Mehdi Bazargan came surprisingly close to achieving
that kind of leadership as prime minister in that year. But ultimately, it won't wash. Whatever it was in
the 1950s, the level of support for the liberals
in 1979 was not sufficient. And Bazargan only had such
power as he did because Khomeini gave it to him. Perhaps today-- after Khatami,
and after 2009 and Rouhani-- perhaps it's getting closer. But it's still not here yet. Well, there we have a range
of ideas about the revolution and why it happened, from
various quarters, but none-- to me anyway--
entirely satisfying. What about religion? In my view, we need to look at
the Iranian Revolution as if religion mattered-- a phrase taken from my old
mentor in Cambridge, Maurice Cowling-- rather than always
pushing it to one side or explaining it away in
terms of something else as many Western
academics do, even those who do not consider
themselves Marxists. The Iranian
Revolution took place at a time when the
standard expectation among westernized elites in the
Middle East and in governments in Western countries-- the working assumption,
if you like-- was that the Middle
East in general, and Iran in particular, were
developing and would continue to develop in a secular,
Western direction towards industrialization,
urbanization, secularization, greater inclusion in world
economic markets, greater material prosperity, and
possibly Western-inspired forms of democratic government. The Shah, in
particular, believed that economic growth
and material prosperity would drive out dissent. The Islamic Revolution
overturned those assumptions and reasserted the importance
of religion and indigenous traditions. For many secular-minded
people in the West-- and not just the West-- that still seems bizarre
and hard to accept. This is, I think, the
question behind the question my neighbor's son asked. Revolutions are supposed to
be radical and progressive, pushing aside older
structures like religion. In this one, religion
returns to dominate. Why did it happen? A main part of
the explanation is the position of the
clergy in Iranian society. Under the late Safavids in
the late-17th, early-18th centuries, the clergy had
been close to the monarchy and ended up being
powerful in politics. This position was broken by the
Afghan's destruction of Safavid rule in 1722 and the decades
of civil war and trauma that followed. The clergy were blamed by some
for the fall of the Safavids and suffered loss of
property, as well as sharing in the general
suffering of the country. Some emigrated to Iraq, to
India, or the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. But through the latter part of
the 18th century and the 19th, while the Qajar monarchy
remained relatively weak, the Shia clergy
grew stronger again. They developed a hierarchy
of appeal and guidance on the one hand, supported by
a hierarchy of money payments on the other, with money
and appeals rising up to senior clerics considered to
be specially qualified to give guidance based on the Sharia. This meant that clergy became
important authority figures, especially in villages and
smaller towns where there was little or no sign
of central government, but also in larger
towns and cities where they developed
strong and close links with the bazaari class of
merchants and artisans. Often, clerical and bazaari
families intermarried. The clerical network was
almost a government-in-waiting with a cohesive hierarchy
of authority and deference, arrangements for handling
large amounts of money, connections to even the most
remote parts of the country, and social connections too that
broadened its class base so as to make its influence dominant
in many urban centers, small or large. Roy Mottahedeh and
Said Amir Arjomond are good to read on that. Repeatedly since the
late-19th century, when secular government
faulted, ordinary pious Iranians had turned to the Shia
clergy for leadership. They were the other
authoritative institution in Iranian society. This happened in 1892,
in 1906, in 1953-- at least to some extent-- and 1963. Up to the 1960s and
'70s, the clergy, faced with the challenges of
social change, economic change, and Western influence, had as a
body been divided and uncertain how to respond-- sometimes siding with
liberal intellectuals, sometimes with the monarchy. Traditionally, most of them
disdained and avoided politics. In the first Iranian
revolution of the 20th century, 1906 to 1911, one leading
cleric, Fazlollah Noori, was executed by
resurgent revolutionaries after he sided with
the monarchy in a coup. In 1953, the defection
of another cleric, Ayatollah Kashani from the
coalition behind Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh,
weakened Mosaddegh and prepared the way
for a coup planned by the British and the US. Familiar with this
history, by 1979 Khomeini was determined that,
having achieved success in the revolution, the
clergy would not again be pushed aside or
exploited by more secularized leftist or
pro-Western elements in the country. He understood the
essentials of power in Iran. And he was he was ruthlessly
determined to stay in control. Khomeini's adamant position from
the early '70s that the Shah had to go-- although it looked extreme
and improbable initially-- meant that as the
rest of the country lost trust in the Shah's
government, he and his position moved from the periphery
to the center of politics, much as Russians had rallied
to Lenin's adamant insistence on peace in 1917 as the
Kerensky government weakened and faltered. Allied to that was a
resurgent enthusiasm for Islam in opposition
to westernization and foreign interference
in the country. Since the early '50s
and the shipwreck of liberal politics in
the Mosaddegh episode, many intellectuals,
like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, had turned away from Tudeh
and Marxism back towards Islam as the focus for
identity and resistance to political and cultural
encroachment from the West. This was taken further
by Ali Shariati, who was very popular among
young student demonstrators in 1978 and '79. Khomeini never acknowledged
Shariati but never denounced him either. And in some of his
speeches, he seems to have lifted some ideas
and slogans directly. In his book on the
Shah, Professor Melani points out the way that
the number of seminarians grew in the 1960s and
1970s and the difficulties the Shah and his government
had in comprehending that phenomena. Even without the additional
revolutionary emphasis that Ali Shariati put on it,
Shiism gave plenty of scope for popular protest
and unjust rule. The sect originated in a dispute
after the death of the prophet Muhammad over who
should succeed him as the rightful leader
of the Muslim community. It has remained forever
imprinted with the grief felt by the followers of the Imam
Husayn, Muhammad's grandson, who failed in a revolt
against the Caliph Yazeed and was killed at
Karbala in 618 AD. One could say that
distrust of authority and an expectation that it
will be corrupt and tyrannical is built into Shiism. In addition, the marches
and other rituals associated with Ashura, the commemoration
of Husayn's martyrdom, provide what one might
call a practical template for popular collective protest. A major part of the revolution
was a powerful, popular urge towards national independence
and national reassertion against the
humiliations of the past and against cultural
encroachment in the present. Islam became the focus for that. I have a poem by Forough
Farrokhzad that expresses this. "I have dreamed that
someone is coming. I have dreamed of a red star. Someone who is like no one, not
like father, not like Ensi, not like Yahya, not
like Mother, and is like the person
who he ought to be. And his name is just as
Mother says at the beginning and the end of her
prayer, the 'judge of all judges', the 'need
of all needs'. Someone is coming, someone
who is in heart with us, and his breathing
is with us, someone whose coming can't be stopped or
handcuffed or thrown in jail." Strikes were crucial to the
success of the revolution in the latter part of 1978. But few of the rural poor, and
perhaps not even a majority of the urban working
class, were actually involved until perhaps the
very last stages in December 1978 and January 1979. The revolution was led
by the middle class. I would suggest that the
rural population were important because,
even if not especially active in the
revolution, the clergy knew they had their
allegiance, at least more than anyone else did. The Shah had hoped to swing
them behind him with the land reform of the White
Revolution program as a kind of
Napoleonic peasantry-- small landowners, nationalistic,
and loyal to the monarchy. But they didn't trust central
government, especially not this one that seemed to
be secular-minded and Western-minded. Perhaps they didn't
trust anyone very much. But the mullah was at least
familiar and a known quantity. It was predominantly a
middle-class revolution in which the new middle class-- Western-looking, secularized,
leftist or liberal-- were eventually outmaneuvered
by the old middle class-- clerics, and bazaaris,
religious conservatives. It's the irony of a
conservative revolution. In Lampedusa's famous
words, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].. "If we want everything
to stay the same, everything has to change." Why were the clergy and
their mosque network in a position to
assume leadership in 1978-79 when the left
and the liberals were not? Fair enough, the
leadership of the left had been persecuted almost
out of existence by SAVAK, whereas the clergy had
largely been left alone. But why did the Shah
leave the clergy alone? Because he thought
they supported him? Because he thought they
were out of the picture and becoming more so? Or perhaps because
they were too powerful. And perhaps, even
only subliminally, he feared to persecute them
or, perhaps, for a combination of these reasons. As it turned out, Khomeini
was a cleverer politician than the liberals and
leftists had expected. With the help of
others, like Beheshti, he outmaneuvered them. It may be that he
had originally hoped to rule with a light hand. But in the course
of 1979, and then over the period of
the Iran-Iraq War, he consolidated his control. I'm inclined to think
that he was driven to-- he was driven to
that by events and by his ruthless
determination not to allow the prize
of Islamic supremacy in the state to slip away
rather than that he planned an autocratic, ideological
Islamic state of the kind that came to be with [INAUDIBLE]
and the intelligence ministry and the mighty Revolutionary
Guards Corps from the start. But the price has been that
religion has been hollowed out by power just as
ideology was sidelined by the necessities of power
in the French and Russian Revolutions. The Shiism of the
Islamic Republic today is different from Shiism
as it was before 1979. And many Iranians
have rejected it, at least in the form
offered by the regime. But that is again
straying beyond the scope of what I wanted to say here. Something else
arises from this-- the sense of urgency
and importance we have about the revolution
and attitudes to it. I think it's fair to take it
as understood that the 1979 revolution is
generally recognized as an important and
formative event, and that it's necessary to
have some understanding of why it happened. It changed our world. People of our generation
think differently about things like politics,
and development, and progress, and religion because of it. It matters. History matters. As with 1979, so with
history more broadly-- or so I believe, at least. But some people are skeptical
about the value of history. I'd like to conclude with
some comments about that. Sometimes I use the
parallel of human memory when justifying
histories to students. Would you try to go about your
daily tasks with all memory of what had happened to you
in your childhood and previous life-- up to, say, last week-- permanently erased? The idea is absurd. Memory is essential. It makes us what we are-- similarly with
history, collectively. History is not primarily
about dates and names. It's about the
imaginative projection of the self into the
position of others, as with novels and films also. This is vital because
otherwise we are restricted to our own narrow
experience of life, vital because we need to
be able to put ourselves in the position of others and
to understand their perspective if we're to cooperate with them
and avoid conflict with them-- just as important for
neighbors over the garden fence as it is for the US and Iran,
to choose just two examples. And history is vital because,
unlike novels and films, it's about what
actually happened. Perhaps some people are wincing. I'll say again, what
actually happened. [SPEAKING GERMAN] "How it actually was," the
famous dictum of Leopold von Ranke. What actually happened
has been out of fashion. It fell out of favor maybe
10 or 15 years before I went to university-- also truth. Oh dear, sharp intake of breath. But if we abandon or
pretend to abandon-- because in fact, almost
all scholarly writing still does pursue the truth. If we as academic historians
abandon the idea of truth, firstly, we cut away any
serious justification for anyone to pay our wages. We make ourselves irrelevant. Secondly, more importantly, we
leave the field open for others to tell lies, fake news. How often have we heard Donald
Trump invoke history recently? The worst deal in history. This is serious stuff. It's not fanciful to suggest
that the fashionable disdain for truth, and some of the
adventures of postmodernism passed on to students over
three or four decades, have helped to open the way in
our political and media culture more widely-- predictably enough-- to those
for whom, in various ways, it's useful to be able to lie. And there are plenty of them. History, like nature,
abhors a vacuum. If we as academic historians
detach our idea of history from the pursuit of
what actually happened and disappear off into
safe, dark corners to absorb ourselves
in historiography or the sub-most modern
consideration of sources solely as texts, we abandon the
field to would-be, wannabe, or bad historians
and outright liars. I'm not arguing for
objective truth in history. I read my RG Collingwood
as a student. Objective truth will probably
lie always beyond our reach. I'm arguing rather for something
more like scientific method which approaches the truth by
excluding error and postulating more accurate hypotheses. I'm not sure if I'm
allowed to say this. I will anyway. Truth is like a shy nymph,
always slipping away to hide in a thicket. But somehow, she still
wants to be found. Or perhaps that's
just what her pursuers like to tell themselves. Enough of that
metaphor, perhaps. Finally, history is natural. People want to
know what happened. They want to know it accurately. And they want to know why,
like my neighbor's son. If we don't respond,
then others will. And they won't do it properly. So let's do our job. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] I'm open to questions. Gentlemen here. Mr. Axworthy, thank you
for your presentation. I look forward to
actually getting the book and reading it. Thank you. As an Iranian, I think
most of the audience here has expended your
time, at various levels, to understand the reasons
for the revolution. What I'd like to give
to you is in response to your neighbor's son. What is it that you
were able to answer that perhaps differentiates
your narrative of the reasons behind the 1979
revolution and why it should be a compelling
reason to relook at the reasons from your perspective. It's really the
point about religion. I think that, I
think it's easy-- it's easy to go off down rabbit
holes in different directions in explaining what
happened or explaining why the revolution happened. In particular, to
say, well, it was a period of economic stress. The economy rose. And there was a
hesitation, and people were uncertain and disappointed. And the economic disruption
affected a wide range of people across society. That was all, of course, true. It's also true, of
course, that there had been very rapid urbanization. A lot of people had arrived
in Tehran and other cities from the countryside. Many of them suffered more than
others in that economic slump. That's another
contributory factor. It's another element
in the story. But for me, it doesn't
answer that crucial question, which I think is the
one behind the question that my neighbor's
son posed, which is why did the leadership of
the revolution go to the clergy? I think that's the thing
that people don't understand. If the left had
taken the revolution and it had been a
communist revolution, that would have been
relatively understandable because they had a model for
that in the Russian Revolution and, to some extent,
the French Revolution. If it had headed
in that direction and then sort of gone wrong
and the military dictator had taken over, they
could have understood that because that's the model
of the French Revolution. It would have been
relatively similar. But this one, suddenly you
have these conservative clerics in control. What's that all about? That's the thing people find
difficult to understand. And that's what I've
tried to explain. Do you believe that that
question has not been addressed in other works on this topic? No, it has. Some, I mentioned. I mentioned Said Amir
Arjomand and Roy Mottahedeh. But I think a lot of people-- I think, honestly,
a lot of people are still in denial
about the revolution. There are some people who-- I mean, I was talking
to someone just two weeks ago who
really couldn't believe that the clerics were the people
who masterminded it and took control-- really couldn't believe
that and believed that it must have been the
British or the Americans or someone else,
because they couldn't have done it for themselves. They're ignorant people who
just know about theology. How could they run a revolution? I'm sure you've met
people who think that way. But there's that,
and then there's also from the left side-- from the left-wing
Iranians, exiles after the revolution, but
also left-wing academics with a Western background
who look at it and say, well, of course,
religion is just a fig leaf for something else. And I don't think
that's right either. I think we have to
treat history as if religion actually mattered. And I'm not the
only one to do that. That's right. But I think that's the point. Yeah? I want to thank you
also for your good talk. I have two questions. [INAUDIBLE] said that Khomeini
had not actually intended or did not-- wasn't consciously trying to
format the religious theocracy. Did he not write in
the 1970s something saying that the Iranian state
should be a religious kind of-- that it should be
governed by Sharia? And does that kind of
apply in theocracy? And the second-- continuing
what you were just saying-- so it seems that, right
after the revolution, there is a critical moment
when those people who hold the police power, the
military power, that someone tells them, you're fired. Not Donald Trump in this
case, but someone says, we don't need you anymore. And who-- is it clerics
that are telling them? Is there a group
of lawless waiting in the wings and their henchmen
waiting in the wings to expel-- How did that happen? --from the leaders in power? Yeah, maybe I'll
deal with that first. Really, what happened
over the winter 1978-79 was not that suddenly the
clerics arrived and took over and said, right, it's got
to be like this, like that. You get off the streets. You come on the
streets, whatever. It was more that
the normal pattern of authority and control
just had broken down. And I think one of the books
that explains that most clearly is the Misagh Parsa book. Across the whole
country, police-- let alone SAVAK, and even
the army by the end-- just didn't want to go
out on the streets anymore because the crowds
and the demonstrators were there already. And they were too
strong, not particularly because people were attacked. There wasn't actually an
awful lot of violence. It's just that they just
didn't turn up anymore. And so you had these
revolutionary committees, the Committee, set up
all over the country-- really very like what
happened in Russia in 1917. And they took over ordinary
functions, everyday functions, of local or central government--
well, the essential ones, traffic policing,
distribution of food because distribution of food
had broken down by that point. And that was happening
through mosques. It's that mosque network
I was talking about, the government
waiting to happen. And revolutionary
committees set up in each little locality that
just started doing that with-- where necessary-- armed students
turning up at street corners to make sure the traffic did
go the right way or whatever. And that's the beginning
of some of the institutions of the Islamic Republic,
notably the Revolutionary Guard. It's formed out of those
people-- some of those people-- later. So it's not that Khomeini
and/or other clerics turned up and said,
right, those people have got to stay at home. These people have
got to take over. It's that those people
already had stayed at home. And before the clergy
turned up, actually, or before Khomeini returned,
these local committees were actually already
doing the job. So sort of the other question,
the first question was-- just remind me. Did Khomeini not-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] He had a program, yeah, yeah. He had a program. In the early 70s
when he was in Iraq, he gave a series of lectures. And eventually, it turned
into a pamphlet or a book called Islamic Government. And this explained the theory
of [NON-ENGLISH] the principle of the supremacy of the
jurists, of the clerics-- that in the absence
of the hidden imam, they were the ones
with the authority to say what should
happen because they were the ones who understood
religious law, the Sharia. And it's that point that he's
saying that the monarchy has to come to an end. In 1963 when he was
giving his speeches, before he was exiled
in '64, he wasn't saying the monarchy had to go. He was saying the Shah should
do things in a different way, and so on. But he wasn't saying
an end to the monarchy. That developed while
he was in exile. So yes, there was a
kind of a program. And he was calling for
Islamic government. But at that stage, he
wasn't very well known. And his books weren't
very well known. And that book, it wasn't
actually at all precise about how this would work. I think it says something
about a group of people to decide how Sharia
should be applied in various circumstances and
then a small planning body. But no idea about a
parliament, or representation of the people, or
governments and ministers, how they would be appointed,
none of that is there. So that was all
waiting to be resolved after Khomeini returned
and after he took power. It was left up in the air. So people had maybe some hope. I mean, people knew that
Khomeini was calling for the Shah to be removed. That was the central message
they knew about Khomeini. In the autumn of 1978
while he was in Paris, he made noises about
democratic government. It was a phase in which
people from the old National Front and the Freedom
Party were coming to him. And they were sounding
out whether they could work with him in a
coalition against the Shah. And so he made positive
noises about democracy and representation of
the people and so on. But really, I think
even in his mind, there wasn't any great
clarity about the forms that would emerge. And I think, if anything, he
had perhaps an idea a little bit further on from the
Constitution of 1906, which had said that the
religion of the country would be Shia Islam and there
should be an advisory council to check that legislation
was in accordance with Islam. And I think his thinking was
a bit further on than that. That it should be an
Islamic government. It should rule according to
the principles of Sharia. That there should be a figure-- him, obviously--
who was the one that was going to make sure
that that all followed the principles of
Islam and that wasn't going to be pushed aside or
marginalized-- as I said-- by any other political group. But beyond that, I don't think
he had a very clear idea. And I think, initially, he hoped
and thought that someone like Mehdi Bazargan, a party
like the Freedom Party-- that was both
liberal and Islamic-- could serve the political
function in the middle and do all that
nitty-gritty stuff. But as time went on, it
became clear to him and others around him-- and I don't think we
should underestimate how important those
others around him were, particularly Beheshti. They came to the
view that they had to take more of a direct role. In a way, I think that's
symbolized by the fact that initially when he
returned, he went to Qom and was living in
Qom for some time. And then later in '79-- I think a year later in '79-- he came back to Tehran
and stayed in Tehran. I think it was a
process of realization that if the clergy were
going to stay in control, there had to be a tighter grip. Does that answer? Yeah, it sure does. OK. Yes? Thank you for your
paper and lecture. It might sound cynical,
but is there any insight you could give to-- maybe some reasons or
how they might just be-- the contract between Ayatollah
Khomeini's government and Ronald Reagan and George
Bush, Sr. for their exchange of arms and whether or not
that's a prior establishment. Yeah, you're thinking of
Iran-Contra and so on. I think all of that
is very interesting. And involved in that, as
well, is the role of Israel because Israel was central to
the whole Iran-Contra thing. And Trita Parsi has
written a very good book called Treacherous Alliance
about the relationship between Iran and Israel. Because for the first 10, even
for the most of the first 20 years of the Islamic
Republic, Israel and Iran were not in the sort of
relationship they're in now. Through the period
of the Iran-Iraq War, after Syria, Israel was probably
Iran's most reliable supplier of weapons and
weapon spare parts. And that today is
almost inconceivable, but it's the case. And apparently,
immediately after-- you'll see it in the
Parsi book if you get it. Immediately after the outbreak
of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 while the hostage crisis was
still going on, Moshe Dayan gave an interview-- I think in Vienna-- where he said the
United States now absolutely has to
sort out and resolve this problem of the hostages and
get itself behind Iran in order to fight Saddam Hussein. Again, Moshe Dayan,
one of the great heroes of the early history of Israel. In my view, Iran-Contra shows
something quite interesting and quite important,
which is that there is an underlying natural
alliance, I think, between the United
States and Iran. The natural position is
one of shared interests and, to some extent, with
Israel as well, in my view. The problem between
Iran and Israel, and Iran and the United
States, is its politics. There's no border. There's no territorial dispute. There are no refugees
seeking a right of return. It's all political. It's all rhetoric. It's all this. And of course, that's
not a small thing. It's proven very
difficult to get over. But if it could be
got over, I think actually everybody
would be surprised how trivial a lot of the
other stuff might be. But it's on both sides. It's not just the American side. It's the Iranian side as
well, making it difficult. I think Iran-Contra-- I think Iran Contra showed that. It showed that-- I mean, a major part of the
Reagan administration's effort was based on the idea that
after Khomeini had gone, there might be-- or
there should be-- more moderate Iranian leadership
that they could do business with and they should
start to get in position for that to happen. And they weren't entirely wrong. I mean, Rafsanjani
on the Iranian side would have quite liked
that, I think, in principle. But of course, it
all went wrong. Either there's
the whole business of the October surprise
as well and the delayed-- possible delayed--
release of the hostages, possible involvement of
the elder Bush in that. We'll never really know. But the way the hostages were
released, the timing of it-- in my view-- is very suggestive. I don't normally go for
conspiracy theories. I always go for a cock-up
rather than conspiracy. But I think in
this instance, it's more than just a coincidence. Yeah? If I may, there's a documentary
[INAUDIBLE] written-- I'm sorry. It's [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, I know one or two people
who've gone into that as well, in Canada too. And-- [INAUDIBLE] Yes. What I've been told
about it is that it's a bit like one of these things,
like the Kennedy assassination, that there are so many
ramifications and people saying this about what so-and-so
said to somebody else. And it's terribly complicated. It's the kind of thing
that can get people in a dangerous mindset,
a mental breakdown. And also, there are
some fairly nasty things have happened to one
or two people involved in that kind of
investigation as well. So it's an area that I've
been interested to observe from a slight distance. Oh, sorry, yes? If you look at the history
of [INAUDIBLE] they return to 1953. And he signed a oil contract
with a consortium companies in December of 1953,
which was for 25 years. And it puts us into
December of 1978 expiring, and Shah left two weeks after. Could his removal have
to do anything with it? Because two years
earlier-- there is a video clip on YouTube
that he was clearly saying, I'm not gonna sign
this because we want to send our oil and oil
products directly to the war as we decide. So he was just getting,
probably, too haughty. Well, it's an idea. But the thing is that
really the relationship between Iran and
the oil companies and the West generally over oil
had already been transformed at the beginning of the '70s. And was it 1973, the
oil price went up fourfold in a
single year, mainly because the Shah got
alongside Saudi Arabia, and then they made an
agreement about the price and the production level. So really by that time,
the Shah and his government are in a quite
different relationship with the oil companies. And so I think the
question of the expire of the agreement from 1953 is
not so important as all that. That would be my view. Anybody else? Yeah, sorry, OK. What other countries or what
other parts of the world do you think might experience
the same kind of thing that Iran experienced
for the same reasons? A revolution like the
Iranian revolution. When the Arab Spring began,
some people pointed to that and said-- I mean, people in Iran. The Iranian regime pointed to
it and said, this is like 1979. This is the people
of Tunisia and Egypt, and all the other countries,
rising up and demanding that they rule themselves and
that they should have more Islamic government, and so on. They didn't say that
so much after what happened in Syria, of course. And it sort of stopped. And of course, other
people outside Iran were saying what
happened in 2009 in Iran was actually the beginning
of the Arab Spring, looking at the other way
up, that you had a rising-- the beginnings of something,
at any rate-- in Iran for similar reasons
to the Arab Spring, which was repressed by an
authoritarian regime much as other demonstrations in other
countries in the Arab Spring were oppressed in
Egypt and elsewhere. So I think, overall,
the nature of-- the nature of Iran, the way
religion is important in Iran, was important before 1979. The position of the clergy
makes it rather unusual and rather different. So I'd say probably not. But in some other
revolutions, there have been quite strong
conservative elements. And so for example, in
the French Revolution, one feature of the
French Revolution was that peasants got the land. There was a land reform
associated with it. Actually, the peasants, in many
cases, just took the land over. And that actually led,
in the 19th century, to really rather
conservative consequences. The peasants never
gave up their land. In France, that's
still the case. And in general,
the peasantry were quite conservative
in the way they voted, the way they behaved. They were great
supporters of Napoleon. They were supporters
of Bonapartists later in the 19th century. So you can see something like
some of the developments, at any rate, in Iran
and in other countries. But I don't anticipate
anything quite the same happening anywhere else. All right, you were next, yeah. So I'm just wondering
whether there's an analogy between what happened
in Iran and, for example, what happened in Egypt in 2011-- that the Egyptian revolution
or the Egyptian revolt was started by white
liberals, by young people, by secular forces. And then when it
came to the election, the parliamentary elections at
the end of 2011, early 2012, was that one thing
was anticipated-- it was, of course,
the Muslim Brotherhood because it was
organized, because it had an 80-plus-year history,
that it would do well in those parliamentary
elections. But what was a much
bigger surprise was Hizb al-Nour,
the Salafis, the fact that they would take a quarter
of the seats in the parliament. And the reason was because they
were not visible in the cities. And when I went
into the villages, I found that Hizb al-Nour
was the only show in town. And it's sort of a
similar thing with Iran with the surprising
strength of the clergy. My second-- No, I think that
this is interesting. And I think, also,
some of the ways the Mubarak regime tried to
stay in control in Egypt, by sending their own groups
of thugs to go out and break things up and to-- I mean, that in the
last phase of the Shah's government in November-December
'78, they were doing that too. There are, yeah--
there are parallels. And then on the other side is
the role of the left in Iran. Because my contact with
it was with the students here in the United
States and in India. And so in 1970, for example,
the ISA, the Iranian Students Association, was the largest
left organization in the US with 50,000 members. By 1978, they had broken up into
five major factions nationally. So the left was fragmented. And not only that, but
the Iranian students who were involved in the
embassy, the Iranian embassy takeover in Washington, DC,
they were considered left. But they were also aligned
with the Iranian section of the embassy and Muslim
Students Association. And so it's a very
mixed picture. In a way, I'm not surprised
that the left couldn't put it together. No, I mean, that's
another side of the story is the fissiparous nature
of left-wing politics. But that's not just Iran. That's the left generally,
isn't it, in the 1960s and '70s, and Maoism, and so on. Yeah? Yeah, oh, sorry. Did you have a question too? Yes, I have. Can I go to you
first and then-- yes. In discussing the causes
of the Iran Revolution, I don't think we can dismiss the
huge American presence in Iran. We [INAUDIBLE] Iranians
have a tendency to underestimate the
role of religion in Iran. But why did it
reach such a frenzy in '78 and '79, late '70s? And then what do
you think it had to do with a presence
of American [INAUDIBLE].. And it says that the
cultural identity of Iran was being eroded. It's huge past and present. Yes, I mean, I agree with that. I mentioned cultural
encroachment a couple of times in a probably in a
rather passing way. But I think it is important. And I remember that
too when I was there. I was there as a
teenager in '75 to '78. And I didn't understand anything
about what was going on, really, at that age. But I did-- that American
presence and the advertising and the newspapers, the
TV, it was very apparent. It was very brash. It was aggressive. [INAUDIBLE] with any
[INAUDIBLE] like that, base. And American soldiers,
coming from Vietnam, racing through the streets
on their motorcycles. That was a-- Yes. I'm trying to remember his name. There is a book that
does write about that. I can't remember the
guy's name right now. But, yeah, on that
point actually about people coming
to Iran from Vietnam in the '70s when, after
the fall of Saigon, people moving out of one
expatriate life into another. And in a way, so carrying
over [INAUDIBLE] perhaps from the previous experience. Yeah, I think all of those. You're absolutely right. Yeah? So in your narrative,
my impression is that you downplay
the conspiracy theories. Yeah. You don't subscribe
to those theories. No. In general, not. But you understand that a
large segment of Iranians do subscribe to that view. Yeah. Let's put that
aside for a moment. But in a related
topic, you've spoken about the reasons for why
the revolution occurred. And you try to remain
true to the reasons and will discount conspiracies. But in order for the revolution
to have been successful, there is this other element
which is the Shah's regime's willingness to remain in power. And that is the element
that I think the conspiracy element comes in. And from my understanding--
and I'd like to get your views on it-- is that there was a great
deal of communication that was going back and
forth between the Shah and the ambassador of the
US, and the ambassador of the British, and the military
attaches, and General Huyser. He's kind of become
a name by itself-- by himself in influencing the
leadership of the military to stand down and
to not engage in any likely coup
d'etat of any sort and, probably more
importantly, in encouraging the Shah to leave Iran. Which to most Iranians, it's
believed that had he not left, that he had
the will to stay, and if he had not gotten the
sort of encouragement to leave, the outcome would
have been different. So there is this
requirement, I would imagine, between those that were-- by plan or by accident-- were
moving this revolution forward to be combined with
an opposition, which in reality was the
existing power, to also not have the
willingness to clamp down and to serve himself. OK, well, there are a number
of different things involved there. One thing about General Huyser,
I think General Huyser was-- from his book-- actually
more interested in the idea of a military crackdown. Who's General Huyser? General Huyser went
to Iran towards-- yes, towards the end of December '78. NATO, and he worked at NATO. General, and it was a
NATO general back then. Yeah, he was a US general. He had been in Iran previously,
I think, two years before-- or something-- helping the Shah organize staff,
high-level staff, planning, and so on, in the military. And the Carter
government sent him. So the Carter administration
sent him back to Iran at the end of '78 with,
as I understand it, a sort of twofold mission. Firstly and overtly, to liaise
between the Iranian military and the Bakhtiar
government to make sure that the military supported
the Bakhtiar government. Secondly, less overtly, to
facilitate, if necessary, a military crackdown
if that were possible, if that were required. And as I recall in the
book, he arrived in Tehran to discover that
Ambassador Sullivan had very different ideas on this. And I mean that Ambassador
Sullivan was actually following more the
line of thinking that you're talking about-- that actually it was
too late for the Shah, and that the United
States had to start thinking not about the
Shah anymore but about what was going to replace him
and about the relationship with the incoming Islamic
government, if that's what it was going to be. And so Huyser had a bit of a
readjustment after he arrived. He claims-- as I understand it-- even as he left
and after he left, he still believed that
a military crackdown was possible. But I think in my
book I say what happened on the
10th-11th of February '79, when the military
did have to have a confrontation
with demonstrators and with armed insurgents, it
showed that the military still had some will to do
that, to attempt that. But it also showed that
the time had passed, that it was no longer possible. And-- in my view-- for a military crackdown
to have worked, it probably would have had
to have happened sometime in the spring of '78. And that would have
been analogous with what happened in 1963 when
Asadollah Alam masterminded a crackdown of that kind. And it was pretty bloody. But it was, from that
point of view, effective. It worked. Maybe if that had happened
in the spring of '78, it would have been effective. I don't know. But what about convincing
the Shah to leave? Yeah, well, I don't-- I mean, you might
take a different view. I don't think the Shah leaving
was so crucial, to be honest. I think by the time he
left, the game was lost. And he left because
the game was lost. And he realized
it, to be honest. And I think he realized
that November-December. Yeah, really, and I accept
that it's interesting to read the reports, the to-ing
and fro-ing between him and the ambassadors, between
him and Nicholas Parsons-- not Nicholas Parsons. Antony. Antony Parsons-- sorry for
that-- and Ambassador Sullivan. It's plain-- it's
interesting to me because I think in
that last phase, the Shah somehow reverts
to where he was in 1953. He's lost his
confidence, really. I think in the early '70s, he
had a huge burst of confidence, partly because of
the success of oil and the massive amounts of
money that were coming in. He felt a lot more confident. That really all
ebbed away in 1978. And of course, he
was ill as well. But I don't believe his
illness was actually crucial because I think the
crucial thing is to think, well, how could
he have acted differently? And this is what I try
and say in my book. What would he have had to do to
bring about a different result? He could have ordered
a military crackdown. Possibly that would
have worked if it had been done early enough. But he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to be seen as
the kind of Shah that would stay in power above a sea of blood. And in a way, he was
a bit too nice maybe. His father was not so. He didn't have
the same scruples. Here we are. I don't see the problem as
being so much influence on him from outside. It's more about him, I think. Yeah? Good points. As far as Mr. General Huyser-- as far as he's concerned--
the Ebrahim Yazdi's biography which was published some
four months ago or so, he claims that he talked to
the prime minister of Japan because Yazdi was
the prime minister. And he was told he
may have informed the prime minister of Japan. He was told that the
Americans informed Japan that General Huyser was
sent to Iran not to engineer a crackdown or a coup but to
ensure that there would be a smooth handover of
power to the clergy so that presumably to force the
leftists a radical revolution. And apparently different
impression that the [INAUDIBLE] they're so inefficient
and incompetent that, within a
couple of years, they would have to leave the scene a
la Egypt, which ceases takeover because they allowed the
Islamists to come to power. And they proved to be quite
incompetent, so that it was status quo once again. So that's what Yazdi claims. Yes. I mean, there's a
lot of-- all I would say about that, there's a
lot of links in that chain, aren't there? Yazdi heard the Japanese
were told by Huyser that-- you know. As I say, I think
something like that may have been more in Ambassador
Sullivan's mind, not so much Huyser. And there was-- but I
think that just reflects that, in the American
government at the time, people were thrashing about. They didn't know what
the hell was going on. And I've read in
the British archives where the British Foreign
Office people talked to-- I think I actually
talked to Gary Sick who was with Brzezinski in the NSA. And Sick said to him, we
are beyond the ability to understand, let alone
to try to influence what is going on in Iran. And that was in December of '78. And I think that's
probably pretty much as it was, to be honest. As far as causation
with the revolution, it looks like you're taking
the ideological cause to be the prime source of
the revolution as opposed to the economic, the
political, social, whatnot. And yet, the most conservative
elements of Iran society resided in the conscious side. And we have a near total
absence of any protests or demonstrations
with the peasantry. So and there are other
problems with the ideological, as Kurzman goes
over it in detail. So that still remains
somewhat enigmatic. So what caused the
Iranian Revolution, given that it was the largest
revolution in the world. Kurzman claims that it
was a 10% participation. And the French
Revolution was under 2%. And the Russian Revolution was-- Even less. --even less. So is it just that it sort of-- I don't know-- over-determined
that nobody ever was gonna know? Or that there may be a
single source of causation? I'm not saying that
there was a revolution because every part
of Iranian society wanted desperately to
get rid of the Shah and that was the sole factor
or the driving factor. What I'm saying is, along
with everybody else, that there was an economic boom
which then faltered and caused uncertainty, unrest. And like, as Kurzman
says, the Shah had taken control
of the economy, taking credit for the boom. And so who are you going to
blame when there's a bust? They blamed the Shah. That was unavoidable. If you have a more diffused
system of government, there are other people to blame. But the Shah was plainly
in the frame for that. This was more of a recession. This was not a
catastrophic breakdown. Yeah, it's true. But then there was enormous
inequality in the country. And a mild recession can
have quite big effects if you're not actually
earning very much and if your job is insecure. There are figures
about how rents went up in Tehran in those two years,
businesses failing, and so on. I mean, I'm not an economic,
of course, historian. But most of that,
what I've read, seems to be quite convincing. It's not so much
that the ideology was driving everything. It's that when things
started to go wrong, who did people turn to? And did the Shah have a
solid base of support that would carry him through that? He didn't. He'd alienated too many people. And he hadn't-- this is
a line you take, I think, and Abrahamian as well. There was no safety valve. The Shah had not allowed
enough political participation over the preceding period,
permitted mechanisms to be put in place through
which people could express their political feelings. And so when it came, it
was sudden and impulsive. And it went in an
unexpected direction. That's my thought of it. I think probably that would
have to be the last one of you. [INAUDIBLE] May I ask
your opinion on that-- A little louder, please. Yes, may I ask your opinion? I forget which source
it was that noted that maybe 70% or 80% of
the newspapers in Tehran had been purchased by foreign-- not to actually name one or two
particular national origins. But certainly something like
70% or 80% of the newspapers had been publishing
stories that exaggerated the protests in relation to
the Shah and the crackdowns as well. Right, I wasn't aware of that. Something is often said is
that the broadcasts from BBC and Voice of America were
important in disseminating information about what
Khomeini was saying in Paris and were taken to be-- taken to support this
view that actually that the Americans
and the British were trying to get
rid of the Shah. In fact, I don't know so
much about Voice of America. But the BBC-- it's always
difficult to say this because no one
ever believes you. But the BBC have an
independent editorial line. And it seems that in 1978,
there were people there who were quite
anti-Shah or became so. But that wasn't that the
British government was trying to push them in that direction. It was from Kinzer's
All the Shah's Men. Right, OK. 70%-80% of newspapers
foreign-owned? Just 1953, I think. Right OK, OK, yes,
that's a bit different. No, the Kinzer book
is, that's about 1953. So that's an earlier phase. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Disconnect of power. Was that at all possible
he had it still present? I don't know about that. In the late '70s,
I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised if
they were foreign-owned. I don't think so. I think the Shah had things
a bit under better control. Just doubted whether there
was sort of support to that. Andrew Scott
Cooper's recent book also suggests that the
statistics once factually researched on a [INAUDIBLE] Statistics about? About the number of
casualties related to the Shah, the imprisonments,
and how much information actually he might be full aware. Yeah, I mean, the Kurzman
book makes a similar point, I think, particularly
about the number of people killed on Black
Friday in Jaleh Square. That at the time, the Shah-- the Shah's government
put out that it was about 70 or 80 people. And nobody believed it. And now apparently under
the Islamic Republic, because they wanted to
give money to the people, the families of the
people who were killed, they went out and found out
how many people actually were killed on Black Friday. And it was actually
something about 70 or 80-- quite a lot more, a much
larger number injured. And the people there
at the time probably had the impression
that a lot more had been killed than 70 or 80. Nonetheless, the figures that
were bandied around at the time were thousands. People were saying
thousands had been killed. And there were stories
about helicopter-- people being machine-gunned
from helicopters and stuff which, as far
as I know, is all made up. So part of it is
that, by that phase, it's a bit like
in Soviet Russia. People just, when they heard
an official announcement from the government, they just
assumed the opposite was true. They no longer believed it. Thank you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
