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AWordsworth’s words found in Paris after 1789, the changes are very interesting. There is nothing braver, more selfless, more courageous, more ruthless than a revolutionary group. In addition, changes have changed the modern world. The European Union has been replaced by the overthrow of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe, while the recent revolution in Tiananmen Square in 1989 feeds the neuroses of the Chinese Communist Party to this day.
Yet in some ways it was a change 10 years earlier that has become more profound in our time: the fall of the shah in Iran. This, of course, was a real disaster on the model of 1789: barricades in the streets, crowds carrying old hunting rifles and kitchen knives facing tanks (made by the British, naturally); palaces, barracks and headquarters of the secret police were attacked and sacked, the uniforms of the so-called “Immortals” of the shah lay on the ground, left in utter terror. I came across a very transformative image: the body of the unfortunate policeman hanging from a lamppost. A return to the BBC in London meant that the shot was not used.
The overthrow of the shah’s dynasty had deep roots: the rich British and American rule began several decades ago, the great corruption created by the rise in the price of oil after 1973, the disintegration of the shah’s mind, the brutality of Savak (which, like the French and Russian revolutionaries, showed the disruption of the lunar regime).
When this revolution took place, it empowered Muslims everywhere: they saw that it was possible to stand up and overthrow the chosen instruments of Western policy. But Iran was a Shia Muslim country, outside of Sunni politics and ideology, and the revolution had a major impact on Shia groups, especially in Lebanon, where the Shia population in the south of the country was at its lowest point since the Christian wars. Suddenly they realized a new power, and Hezbollah was created to resist the Israeli attack. Half a century later, Hezbollah is one of Israel’s biggest enemies; while Iran itself has taken on the combined power of the United States and Israel and presented itself as a major enemy.
The history of Iran’s revolution has been written many times, but I have never found an account as clear and dispassionate as Homa Katouzian’s. Katouzian is a great historian, but also a polymath – economist, political scientist and respected author. Today he is an honorary man at St Antony’s College, Oxford, but what I enjoyed was the occasional moment when you felt you were in the presence of a young man who once was, watching, like Wordsworth, as the history that he would one day master was being made.
This business of being an observer is important. A large number of diplomats, British, American, French, German, were locked in their offices, listening to the encouraging information issued by the shah’s agencies. The only British diplomat I knew who understood the seriousness of the shah’s predicament was a young man who was allowed to live outside the embassy with his Iranian friend. Foreign journalists, who spent their days talking to ordinary people, foresaw the coming collapse with clarity. At the end of November 1978, several western diplomats, including British and American, were reporting to their headquarters that no matter what, the shah would be able to change.
But then, as Katouzian explains, the political upheaval in Iran did not align with Western thinking. Iran, he writes, “was a group in which change – even if it was a big and necessary change – was seen as a temporary event. Meanwhile, the West is facing a similar process in the United States of Donald Trump, where laws and policies must adapt to whatever Trump says should be at any time. But if there is a temporary similarity between the shah and Trump, the shah’s widespread insecurity has never been felt in the determination of Trump’s weapons that he is telling the truth, no matter how often he changes his mind and What unites these two men is that they can rule with contempt.
All changes are accompanied by self-deception: without this, it cannot succeed. Katouzian provides the best explanation I have seen of the odd alliance between the most critical religious leaders and the intellectuals of the Iranian left who managed to convince themselves that the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran would open the door to democracy, free speech and real socialism. “Why are you so optimistic?” I asked a former British-educated member of the Majlis, or parliament, who had just returned to his home, sweaty and excited, from welcoming the Ayatollah on the noisy streets of Tehran. “Anything is better than the shah,” he replied, “and Khomeini will be easy to navigate.”
When I met Khomeini outside Paris in Neauphle-le-Château a few weeks earlier and asked him questions, I was incredulous, and rightly so. My friend died in Evin prison a year or so later, in a way I don’t like to think about; Khomeini remained on the throne until his death 10 years later, and he delivered a system that has remained, unchanged and unquestioned, to this day. As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have discovered, simply cutting off the government’s head has never worked. His powers go deeper than that.
The Shah left Iran for the last time on 16 January 1979, tears streaming down his face as he boarded the plane that would take him to exile and a painful death from cancer. On 1 February, Ayatollah Khomeini flew into the same airport and established the Islamic Republic. The front was chaos, murder, insurgency and a terrible eight-year war (promoting the West) with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No one thought that the Islamic revolution would end as it has. During my regular visit to Iran I developed a formula that I thought summed things up: “the change is permanent but not permanent”. Of course nothing is permanent, but the Islamic revolution in Iran has outlived many others, from Gorbachev’s perestoika to Orbánism.
Katouzian is as clear about how the Iranian system has been for years as it is about to change, and her story of the girls who refused to accept the system is remarkable. Of course it will fall at some point, although Israel and the United States between them may have injected new temporary powers into it with their violence. Most regimes are eventually brought down by corruption, and this will be the fate of the ayatollahs and the revolutionary guards. The process has taken a long time because, unlike the shah, the government has been willing to use violence to stay in power. In any case, Katouzian’s warm, clear, accessible research will continue to explain the events long after.
