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Iran
Consolidation of the Revolution
As the government eliminated the political opposition and successfully
prosecuted the war with Iraq, it also took further steps to consolidate
and to institutionalize the achievements of the Revolution. The
government took several measures to regularize the status of revolutionary
organizations. It reorganized the Pasdaran and the Crusade for
Reconstruction as ministries (the former in November 1982 and
the latter in November 1983), a move designed to bring these bodies
under the aegis of the cabinet, and placed the revolutionary committees
under the supervision of the minister of interior. The government
also incorporated the revolutionary courts into the regular court
system and in 1984 reorganized the security organization led by
Mohammadi Rayshahri, concurrently the head of the Army Military
Revolutionary Tribunal, as the Ministry of Information and Security.
These measures met with only limited success in reducing the considerable
autonomy, including budgetary independence, enjoyed by the revolutionary
organizations.
An Assembly of Experts (not to be confused with the constituent
assembly that went by the same name) was elected in December 1982
and convened in the following year to determine the successor
to Khomeini. Khomeini's own choice was known to be Montazeri.
The assembly, an eighty-three-member body that is required to
convene once a year, apparently could reach no agreement on a
successor during either its 1983 or its 1984 session, however.
In 1985 the Assembly of Experts agreed, reportedly on a split
vote, to name Montazeri as Khomeini's "deputy" (qaem maqam),
rather than "successor" (ja-neshin), thus placing Montazeri
in line for the succession without actually naming him as the
heir apparent (see The Faqih , ch. 4).
Elections to the second Majlis were held in the spring of 1984.
The IFM, doubting the elections would be free, did not participate,
so the seats were contested only by candidates of the IRP and
other groups and individuals in the ruling hierarchy. The campaign
revealed numerous divisions within the ruling group, however,
and the second Majlis, which included several deputies who had
served in the revolutionary organizations, was more radical than
the first. The second Majlis convened in May 1984 and, with some
prodding from Khomeini, gave Mir-Hosain Musavi a renewed vote
of confidence as prime minister. In 1985 it elected Khamenehi,
who was virtually unchallenged, to another four-year term as president.
Bazargan, as leader of the IFM, continued to protest the suppression
of basic freedoms. He addressed a letter on these issues to Khomeini
in August 1984 and issued a public declaration in February 1985.
He also spoke out against the war with Iraq and urged a negotiated
settlement. In April 1985 Bazargan and forty members of the IFM
and the National Front urged the UN secretary general to negotiate
a peaceful end to the conflict. In retaliation, in February 1985,
the hezbollahis smashed the offices of the party, and
the party newspaper was once again shut down. Bazargan was denounced
from pulpits and was not allowed to run for president in the 1985
elections.
There were, however, increasing signs of factionalism within
the ruling group itself over questions of social justice in relation
to economic policy, the succession, and, in more muted fashion,
foreign policy and the war with Iraq. The debate on economic policy
arose partly from disagreement over the more equitable distribution
of wealth and partly from differences between those who advocated
state control of the economy and those who supported private sector
control. Divisions also arose between the Majlis and the Council
of Guardians, a group composed of senior Islamic jurists and other
experts in Islamic law and empowered by the Constitution to veto,
or demand the revision of, any legislation it considers in violation
of Islam or the Constitution. In this dispute, the Council of
Guardians emerged as the collective champion of private property
rights. In May 1982, the Council of Guardians had vetoed a law
that would have nationalized foreign trade. In the fall of 1982,
the council forced the Majlis to pass a revised law regarding
the state takeover of urban land and to give landowners more protection.
In January of the following year, the council vetoed the Law for
the Expropriation of the Property of Fugitives, a measure that
would have allowed the state to seize the property of any Iranian
living abroad who did not return to the country within two months.
In December 1982, the Council of Guardians also vetoed the Majlis'
new and more conservative land reform law. This law had been intended
to help resolve the issue of land distribution, left unresolved
when the land reform law was suspended in November 1980. The suspension
had also left unsettled the status of 750,000 to 850,000 hectares
of privately owned land that, as a result of the 1979-80 land
seizures and redistributions, was being cultivated by persons
other than the owners, but without transfer of title.
The debate between proponents of state and of private sector
control over the economy was renewed in the winter of 1983-84,
when the government came under attack and leaflets critical of
the Council of Guardians were distributed. Undeterred, the council
blocked attempts in 1984 and 1985 to revive measures for nationalization
of foreign trade and for land distribution, and it vetoed a measure
for state control over the domestic distribution of goods. As
economic conditions deteriorated in 1985, there was an attempt
in the Majlis to unseat the prime minister. Khomeini, however,
intervened to maintain the incumbent government in office (see
The Consolidation of Theocracy , ch. 4).
These differences over major policy issues persisted even as
the Revolution was institutionalized and the regime consolidated
its hold over the country. The differences remained muted, primarily
because of Khomeini's intervention, but the debate threatened
to grow more intense and more divisive in the post-Khomeini period.
Moreover, while in 1985 Montazeri appeared slated to succeed Khomeini
as Iran's leader, there was general agreement that he would be
a far less dominant figure as head of the Islamic Republic than
Khomeini has been.
* * *
The projected eight-volume The Cambridge History of Iran
provides learned and factual essays by specialists on history,
literature, the sciences, and the arts for various periods of
Iranian history from the earliest times. Six volumes, covering
history through the Safavid era, had been published by 1987.
For the history of ancient Iran and the period from the Achaemenids
up to the Islamic conquest, R. Ghirshman's Iran: From the
Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest and A.T. Olmstead's
History of the Persian Empire are somewhat dated but
continue to be standard works. More recent books on the period
are Richard Frye's The Heritage of Persia and its companion
volume The Golden Age of Persia. For the early Islamic
period, there are few books devoted specifically to Iran, and
readers must consult standard works on early Islamic history.
A good study to consult is Marshall G.S. Hodgson's three- volume
work, The Venture of Islam. Much useful information,
for the early as well as the later Islamic period, can be culled
from E.G. Browne's four-volume A Literary History of Persia.
Ann K.S. Lambton's Landlord and Peasant in Persia is
excellent for both administrative history and land administration
until the 1950s. For studies of single Islamic dynasties in Iran,
the following are interesting and competent: E.C. Bosworth's The
Ghaznavids, Vasilii Bartold's Turkestan to the Mongol
Invasion, Bertold Spuler's Die Mongolen in Iran,
and Roy P. Mottahedeh's study of the Buyids, Loyalty and Leadership
in an Early Islamic Society. On the Safavid and post-Safavid
periods, in addition to the excellent pieces by H.R. Roemer and
others in The Cambridge History of Iran, volume 6, there
is also Laurence Lockhart's The Fall of the Safavid Dynasty
and the Afghan Occupation of Persia and his Nadir Shah
and Roger Savory's Iran under the Safavids. Said Amir
Arjomand's The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam focuses
on the relationship of the religious establishment to the state
under the Safavids. The Zand period is covered in straightforward
fashion by John R. Perry in Karim Khan Zand. For the
modern period, Roots of Revolution by Nikki R. Keddie
provides an interpretative survey from the rise of the Qajars
in 1795 to the fall of the Pahlavis in 1979; Iran Between
Two Revolutions by Ervand Abrahamian is a detailed political
history of Iran from the period of the Constitutional Revolution
of 1905-1907 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Ruhollah K. Ramazani's
The Foreign Policy of Iran, 1500-1941 is factual and
comprehensive on foreign policy issues for the period from 1800
to the abdication of Reza Shah. On nineteenth-century economic
history, Charles Issawi's The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914,
a collection of documents with extensive commentary, is still
unsurpassed.
For the period of Reza Shah, A History of Modern Iran
by Joseph M. Upton is concise and incisive. Modern Iran
by L.P. Elwell-Sutton, although written in the 1940s, is still
a useful study; and Amin Banani's The Modernization of Iran,
1921-1941, covering the same period and along the same lines,
looks less at political developments under Reza Shah than at the
changes introduced in such areas as industry, education, legal
structure, and women's emancipation. Donald Wilber's Riza
Shah Pahlavi, 1878-1944 is basically a factual but not strongly
interpretative biography of the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty.
J. Bharier's Economic Development in Iran, 1900-1970,
as the name suggests, provides an economic history of the late
Qajar and much of the Pahlavi period. For the period of Mohammad
Reza Shah, in addition to books by Abrahamian and Keddie (cited
above), Iran: The Politics of Groups, Classes, and Modernization
by James A. Bill and The Political Elite of Iran by Marvin
Zonis are both studies of elite politics and elite structure.
Fred Halliday's Iran: Dictatorship and Development is
a critical account of the nature of the state and the shah's rule,
and Robert Graham's Iran: The Illusion of Power casts
an equally critical eye on the last years of the shah's reign.
More sympathetic assessments can be found in George Lenczowski's
Iran under the Pahlavis. Relations between the state
and the religious establishment for the whole of the Pahlavi period
are covered in Shahrough Akhavi's Religion and Politics in
Contemporary Iran. Iran's foreign policy is surveyed in Ramazani's
Iran's Foreign Policy, 1941-1973.
The United States-Iranian relationship in the period 1941-80
is the focus of Barry Rubin's Paved with Good Intentions.
The United States-Iranian relationship in the period following
the Islamic Revolution is covered in Gary Sick's All Fall
Down. The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic is covered
in Ramazani's Revolutionary Iran. Reign of the Ayatollahs
by Shaul Bakhash is a political history of the Islamic Revolution
up to 1986. The State and Revolution in Iran, 1962-1982
by Hossein Bashiriyeh is an interpretative essay on the Revolution
and its background. Roy P. Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the
Prophet is at once a biography of a modern-day Iranian cleric,
a study of religious education in Iran, and an intriguing interpretation
of Iran's cultural history. (For further information and complete
citations, see Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1987
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