Page 324 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin 321

broke out in several cities, incited by the mullahs who stood to lose financially
from the alienation of the waqf lands. The worst rioting was at Qum, a city
noted for its theological schools, where the disturbances were led, if not
directly instigated, by a singularly austere and obdurate mujtahid, the ayatollah
(‘sign or token from God’) Ruhollah Khomeini. The riots were suppressed
with great severity by the army and police, and Khomeini was banished from
the country. From this time onwards, however, the mosque became more than
ever a forum for the articulation of popular grievances, particularly of the
urban masses’ dissatisfaction with the fruits of the ‘white revolution’ and their
resentment of the disorientation it had caused in their lives. As for the religious
classes themselves, they viewed the process of Westernization with abhor­
rence, fearing the introduction of alien moral and intellectual standards and all
that these implied for the reduction of their own influence. Whatever other
agencies and forces may have helped to stoke the fires of insurrection in Persia
in 1978, it was in the mosques that the basic tinder was fashioned. The rage that
vented itself in the streets of Tehran and other major cities in the winter of
1978-9 in a carnival of blood and destruction was not just the fury of a citizenry
in revolt; it was also the reverse side of the coin of Shii fanaticism, which
commonly expressed itself in the displays of hysterical grief and self-
flagellation seen at religious festivals such as that of to Muharram in the
Muslim calendar, which commemorates the martyrdom of Husain, the son of
Ali and the third rightful imam of the Shii succession.
These intense and deep-seated religious emotions fused readily with the
excitation aroused in the Persian masses by the seditious slogans and
revolutionary propaganda circulated before and during 1978 by agitators of
every stripe. The amalgam of Islamic fundamentalism and radical political
ideas, whether of Marxist or other provenance, is by no means a new
phenomenon in the Middle East: it has been observed before in this century,
most recently in countries as diverse as South Yemen and the Lebanon, where
in both cases the ideological alchemists have been the extremist factions of the
Palestinian movement, with the PFLP in the van. What part they and other
outsiders may have played in laying the powder train in Persia in 1978 has yet to
emerge with any clarity. So, too, has the identity of the revolution’s paymas­
ters. Uncertainties of every kind, in fact, cloud the tumultuous events which
brought the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty to an end in the winter of 1978-9, and
it is much too soon after its demise to hold the kind of inquest which might
determine with any finality the relative lethality of the numerous blows dealt
the Persian monarchy in its final months - by the Shii religious establishment,
by disaffected politicians and intelligentsia, by the merchants and guilds of the
Tehran suq, by the underground guerrilla organizations and their foreign
backers, by the swift collapse of the Persian armed forces, by Soviet intrigue,
French meddling or American vacillation, or by any one of a hundred other
contributory circumstances.