The Beginning of the End
October - November, 1978
Sitting in his Tehran estate and hearing the news broadcast from the radio of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's freak murder in Iraq, the elderly Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari turned off the radio and began to weep. He knew exactly as much as the throng of demonstrators on the streets of Tehran knew that Khomeini's murder was no random petty criminal drive-by as widely reported by state news, but an assassination that likely had the tacit approval or backing of the Shah. Very much unlike Khomeini, Shariat-Madari was not one to rock the boat regarding the autocratic powers of the crown. He was very much of the quietist tradition of Shi'i clerics like the late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi, who believed that the clergy should by and large avoid involving themselves in state affairs. Of course, Borujerdi had his qualms with some of the Shah's policies, such as his close though discrete relations with Israel. Yet even with that, Borujerdi criticisms were always tame and delivered in a circumvented manner so as to avoid targeting the Shah directly. Men like Borujerdi and Shariat-Madari were in many respects products of their time, a time in early and middle 20th century Iranian history characterized by violent disruptive upheavals followed by repressive consolidations of power. The Iranian Constitutionalist Revolution of 1906 had pitted clerics against each other, between those advocating for a more democratic constitutional system and those loyal to the absolutist powers of the Qajar shahs. The decades which followed that revolution saw its gains undone by the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (born Reza Khan), who ousted the Qajars and instituted some of the harshest measures against clerical and religious influence of any Iranian monarch, to the point of outright banning the wearing of the hijab/chador in public, something which wasn't even pursued by the arch-secularist Mustafa "Ataturk" Kemal in Turkey at the height of his power. Shariat-Madari long held the view that his successor, Mohammad Reza Shah, however autocratic his rule had been since the 1953 coup, had brought both stability and a degree of freedom to the clergy that it had not possessed in quite some time. That was until now.October - November, 1978
As he wiped with a soft tissue the tears from his eyes, his grief began to turn into a seething rage, an emotion the shy introspective mullah was rather unfamiliar with. He knew Khomeini as a deeply spiritual if a bit austere and agitated lecturer at the Shi'i seminary schools of Qom. The two men would sometimes discuss issues ranging from the Islamic philosophy of Mullah Sadra to the poetry of Hafez, with discussions lasting long into the night, fueled only by lamp oil. He saw in Khomeini a man discomforted by a world seemingly slipping into an abyss of materialism, secularism, and hedonism, all of which he saw as emanating from the young Shah and his refusal to abide by the wisdom of clerics learned in Islamic jurisprudence. Khomeini's political radicalism reached its boiling point in the early 1960s, as the Shah began his land reform program informally known as the White Revolution (a top-down "white revolution", in that its aims were ultimately to abort the threat of a red revolution from below) which redistributed some parcels of land from large landholding families to landless peasants. While its true that many high-ranking Shi'i clerics came from these large landholding families, and that their income generated from ground rent of peasants helped finance Shi'i seminaries and other institutions, the Shi'i clergy by and large did not protest. But Khomeini, who came from an otherwise relative humble background, did, as he saw the reforms as undermining the influence the clerics had in guiding the peasantry and contributing to growing atheistic materialism. It was only by Shariat-Madari's personal intervention in expediently making Khomeini a Grand Ayatollah, which saved him from a likely execution in 1963 by the Pahlavi regime. And as Shariat-Madari thought longer and longer about the memories he shared with the spirited, rebellious, and perhaps a bit stupid Ruhollah Khomeini, his anger and hatred towards the Shah's arrogance only intensified. He then heard with even greater intensity the chants emanating from outside his window, of "marg bar Shah"! For the first time he truly agreed with that sentiment, but as he looked out his window he saw the chanting men holding such alien and fanatic symbols as the communist Hammer and Sickle or the flag of the revived Fada'iyan-e Islam, the one time radical Shi'i fundementalist movement of late Navvab Safavi. He realized that the Shah's fall was inevitable, but that Iran would suffer perhaps a worse fate under any of these crazies. He knew that if Iran was to survive the revolution, he would have to play his part in its the transition back to constitutional rule.
...meanwhile, several miles away...
In the living room of a somewhat luxurious north Tehran apartment unit, sat in a circle a group of political intellectuals: Islamic liberals, secular liberals, social democrats, and perhaps a few shy lingering constitutional monarchist. These were the members of the National Front and Freedom Movement of Iran parties, long driven underground by decades of state repression following the ousting of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. In fact, the last governmental position most of these men had was under the Mossadegh premiership. Men such as Karim Sanjabi, now party head of the National Front, whose home only a couple months prior was bombed by the Shah's goons to intimidate him. Within the time span of less than a year, Sanjabi's views had radicalized somewhat spectacularly ("radical" perhaps in the context of a once reformist liberal), going from advocating for a constitutional monarchy still under the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, to calling for the Shah to abdicate in favor of his more liberal oriented son, to now in light of Khomeini's assassination, finally recognizing that the game was up. "The monarchy is finished, and good riddance for it" he said to his colleagues. "We've sacrificed too much of our political and moral credibility to continue trying to accommodate this bankrupt regime. How could it be that in the year 1357 (1978) we are not as brave in our demands and our actions as Dr. Mossadegh was in 1331?" No one in the group was more thrilled by this political turn than Mehdi Bazargan, leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran, the Islamic liberal party made up of more religious oriented democrats, which was founded in 1961 with the tacit support of Mossadegh, and which had already adopted republicanism as a core element of its politics. Bazargan praised Sanjabi for his brave step in the right direction, but reminded him and the rest of the men that that step had already been made by the throngs of millions out on the street calling for not only the overthrow, but the execution of the Shah. "Men, you all know that I am not a radical at all, I do not want guillotines befalling down on the heads of every petty bureaucrat of the regime. But if we do not seriously organize and mobilize the masses of our countrymen for a free, democratic, and dare I say virtuous Islamic republic, we will lose out to communist extremists like the Feda'iyan-e-Khalq or far-right theocrats like Beheshti." Suddenly the door bell rang. An aura of dread hung over the men there. Bazargan rose from his seat and gestured with his hand for the men to relax. He approached the door and slowly opened it, revealing the kindly, bearded man in front of him. "Mr. Bazargan", Shariat-Madari said with a smile, "let us discuss the future of Iran".
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