Page 323 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

320 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

regime. Like so many rulers of Persia before him, the shah considered the
Persian people to have only one political function, viz. to offer him unquestion­
ing obedience. Popular participation in government, as he was so fond of
pointing out to Western visitors, inevitably led to instability, unrest and the
kind of moral decadence he professed to see in the Western world. Having
denied his people any kind of representative political institutions, and there­
fore the chance to acquire even the rudiments of a political education, he could
scarcely complain if they turned elsewhere for guidance and release.
Where they turned, in the main, was to the mosque and to the Shii religious
establishment, which had its own bones of contention to pick with the shah and
his regime. In the view of the Shii mullahs, the prime duty of a Persian
sovereign is to uphold the sharia, and to govern according to the interpretation
of the sacred law handed down by the Shii mujtahtds, the jurisconsults. While
the sovereign is regarded as the visible head of the Persian Shia, he is also
considered as no more than a locum tenens for the ‘Hidden Imam’ - the mahdi,
andriwholyaS1n1eed-nne r C°ming iS eVer awaited bY the Shii community
shared b Q ™ nghL Thou§h belief in the mahdi is also
Se mLTn "r Knm ^UShmS’ they d° nOt 3CCOrd to the belief’ to the
theconvicrin " °f mahdl> the same fervent significance as do the Shia. It is

tion which n ° Sa vau°n’ along with the concepts of martyrdom and redemp-
fanarical t' y Present in Shii Islam, that gives Shiism so decided a
mnr? k n&e- e re gious authority of the Shii mujtahids, moreover, is far
MudimiSt!<ntJa J113" 0131 °f theif counterParts, the Sunni ulama, in other

'pi_m 3n S’ w efe the/ are regarded primarily as servants of the state.
6 t° 1 e Shi mujtahids to influence the actions of the Persian
*
wn,^reign a een on tbe wane since the latter half of the nineteenth century.
• reas in 1 eory t e edicts and ordinances of the monarch were subject to the
, ,nmatur 0 emujtahids, in practice successive shahs increasingly spurned
eir pronouncements, even to the point of permanently silencing the more
o streperous vines. The declining importance of the religious establishment
m nation e was in direct proportion to the progressive introduction of
estern practices and ideas into Persia, against which the mullahs and muj-
ta i s were constantly inveighing. They were treated with contumely and
sometimes with brutality by Reza Shah, whose attempted relegation of Islam to
the sidelines of Persian life outraged the ranks of pious Shia to the core of their

emg. His son seemed determined to continue the tradition, to forge even
closer links with the infidel West than his father had done, and to introduce

e7lth„^hiTVaTn;.?’hiCh Werc anathema 10 murids.
citipc nf P ' erC- 3 ^en outbrea^s °f religious disaffection in the major
cities of Persia at intervals since the Second World War, the first concerted
upsurge o protest agaipst the shah’s modernizing programme came in 1963. It
was set o y is and reform programme and more particularly by his forcible
appropriation and distribution of waqf, i.e. religious endowment, lands. Riots