MONGABAY.COM
Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development (more)
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
|
|
Iran
Index
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
|
|