“Random Notes on Pahlavi-ism, NIAC, and the Women-Life-Freedom Movement in Iran” by Michael Craig Hillmann, 11/10/22
(1) A recent open letter signed by scores of Iranian American academics condemns Iranian American women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad and her assertion of a leadership role in the Women-Life-Freedom Movement. Alinejād, an VOA and Radio Farda personality, has drawn world-wide attention to Iranian women since 2014 through her “My Stealthy Freedom” Facebook page where they have been posting photos of themselves without hijab. (2) Many Iranian Americans have condemned NIAC, founded in 2002, and its co-founder Tritā Pārsi for presenting the organization as speaking for the Iranian Americans for functioning as lobbyists for the Islamic Republic of Iran. (3) Iranian American supporters of Rezā Pahlavi (b. 1960), son of the late Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi who forsook his crown in fleeing Iran in January 1979, seek a return of the Pahlavi monarchy or at least a leadership role for Rezā Pahlavi in a post-IRI Iran. (4) Many Iranian Americans think that supporters of renewal of the 2015 JPOA (Joint Program of Action), the so-called “Iranian Nuclear Deal” as a concession to the Islamic Republic of Iran and contrary to the interests of Iranian. (5) Iranian Americans generally suppose that the Women-Life-Freedom Movement in Iran is a revolution seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and not merely a movement seeking euqal rights for women regardless of the government of the day.
The random notes that follow suggest, in my inexpert view, that IranianAmerican controversy surrounding the five numbered items above distracts and detracts from life-and-death issues in the Women-Life-Freedom Movement in Iran. The phrase “inexpert view” means that I have no expertise in the politics or history of either Pahlavi or Islamic Republican Iran. Rather, I study the Iranian culture of educated Iranians of the later Pahlavi Era who participate in the arenas of Persian literature and Iranian art. I also study the contemporary Persian language with an eye to what its syntax, registers, and turns of phrase say about the Iranians who speak and write it. For example, it interests me that Iranian poets routinely use a bookish/written register rather than a colloquial/spoken register in first-person, lyric poem. See http://academia.edu/michaelhillmann for illustrations of my writing in cited areas.
As for my presumption to write about Pahlavi-ism, NIAC, and the WomenLife-Freedom Movement in Iran, my notes are mostly responses to communications addressed or forwarded specifically to me via e-mail, text
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messaging, Facebook, and Internet groups. These “Notes” appear in a file at http:// issuu.com/michaelhillmann.
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In early January 2014, a series of Facebook posts reached me presenting images and commentary about the head of the “House of Pahlavi,” “Shāhzādeh” [prince] or “Vali’ahd” [crown prince] or “Shāh” Rezā Pahlavi, his daughters “Princess” Nur Pahlavi and Princess Iman Pahlavi, and expressions of support for Rezā Pahlavi as Iran’s future leader, monarch if things turn out that way. The Iranian American authors of these postings voice support for democratic principles, while arguing that Iran needs a strong leader, e.g., “Rezā Shāh Pahlavi II.”
These Iranian Americans also energetically mock the Muslim Prophet Mohammad (d. 632), his son-in-law ‘Ali (d. 661), and ‘Ali’s younger son Hosayn (d. 680), and ridicule the Koran. In short, they hold Islam responsible for the reprehensible behavior of the Islamic Republic in its four-decade history, years years longer than Mohammad Rezā “Shāh” Pahlavi’s post-Mosaddeq, Americasupported reign from August 1953 to January 1979). They further hope that Islam might disappear from Iran when the Islamic Republic there collapses. In fact, they would apparently legislate the faith of the vast majority of Iranians out of Iranian existence. More generally, they see people of faith, whatever faith, as ignorant, narrow-minded, and incapable of intellectual growth and impartial judgment. Among the many issues that the Facebook images and commentary and You Tube attacks on Islam raise, the one that seems most amenable to summary and analysis is the notion that Rezā Pahlavi should lead or rule a post-Islamic Republic Iran. Rezā Pahlavi (b. 1960), like his brother, his father, and his grandfather, is named after Emām Rezā (d. 818), the 8th Shi‘ite Muslim Imam who died and is buried in a city thereafter renamed because of him, the Arabic loanword mashhad denoting the burial place of a shahid or martyr. Some years back, the province in which Mashhad is located was divided into three provinces with these names: Northern Khorāsān, Razavi [= pertaining/belonging to Imam Rezā] Khorāsān, and Southern Khorāsān. The new name Razavi Khorāsān is particularly grating to antiMuslim Iranians for whom it is infuriatingly inconceivable that the Arab Rezā could be so honored instead of Ferdowsi (940-1020), author of the Iranian national epic called Shāhnāmeh [Book of Kings] (1010) who was born, lived, and died not far from Emām Rezā’s burial place.
As for those other “Rezās” in Rezā Pahlavi’s immediate family, online reports announced the suicide of his younger brother ‘Alirezā Pahlavi in early January
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2011 (their younger sister had reportedly committed suicide ten years earlier). Rezā has another sister called Mahnāz/Farahnāz? and a half-sister called Shahnāz. Shahnāz is the daughter of Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi and his first wife, Egyptian King Faroukh’s sister Fowzieh. Mohammad Rezā and his second wife Soraya Bakhtiyari did not have any children, which is reportedly why Mohammad Rezā, who reportedly wanted a male heir, divorced her and married Farah Dibā (b. 1938), then a college student in Europe (the marriage permanently cut short her education), with whom he had four children. Mohammad Rezā apparently did not father any children with his mistresses.
Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi (1919-1980) famously fled from Iran in January 1979 after protests and mass demonstrations against his autocratic misrule caused him fear for his life, he and his supporters unwilling to confront oppositionists, his “Immortal Guards” immediately dissolving. Rezā’s grandfather, also named Rezā Pahlavi, had been forced by the Allies in 1941 to abdicate the Iranian throne, which he had usurped in the early 1920s, and to spend the last three years of his live in exile, as did Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi, who died homeless in Egypt where he is buried.
Parenthetically, Rezā Pahlavi’s grandfather chose the family name “Pahlavi” apparently to invent a connection between pre-Islamic Iran, “Pahlavi” a name for the Middle Persian language, and his family which had no history, much less a history of public service or other distinction. Grandfather Pahlavi, who ruled Iran autocratically from the 1920s to 1941, apparently had little or no formal education, while his son Mohammad Rezā had only a European high school education. His grandson Rezā Pahlavi, after coming to America in his late teens shortly before the flight of his parents and siblings, thereafter attended a liberal arts college in America for a year and reportedly later continued his education by correspondence.
Back to the family given name “Rezā” and what lies behind it, Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi made regular pilgrimages to Emām Rezā’s Shrine in Mashhad and likewise reported that he had visions of the 1st Shi’ite Emām ‘Ali, who he asserted once helped save him from an assassin’s bullet. As for Rezā Pahlavi, like his father Mohammad Rezā, he has made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and has written the following on religion in Iran in general in a book called Winds of Change (bold script added):
...a profound personal commitment to faith has been deeply rooted in Iranian culture and heritage. As one of the cradles of civilization, Iran has been a land of tolerance, a home to a multitude of ethnicities
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and religions. The respect for individual faith gained root and flourished in our land, and our forefathers were among the first to introduce the concept of a deity and of monotheism to mankind. In all these years, men of the cloth, regardless of which faith they represented, were respected members of our society.
On Islam in Iran, Rezā Pahlavi writes: “Since the advent of Islam, our clergymen have served as a moral compass. Spirituality has been an inseparable part of our culture.” According to Rezā Bāyegān in an article called “Reza Pahlavi and the Question of Religion” (Payvand online): “Prince Rezā Pahlavi is deeply attached to his Shi‘ite Muslim faith” and “believes that religion has a humanizing and ethical role in shaping individual character and infusing society with greater purpose.” Naturally, then, as Bāyegān observes, Rezā Pahlavi “avoids the Islam bashing that occurs in some circles of the Iranian opposition,” in particular many of his Iranian American supporters.
Recent online attention to Rezā Pahlavi has reminded me of facts of political life during my six years in Iran before the Iranian Revolution. Then and later, I met few Iranians whose families or whose acquaintances’s families did not include persons imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed by Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi’s government. MRP’s coronation ceremony in 1968 in which he crowned himself, his inculcation of fear among university faculty and students of my acquaintance in Mashhad and Tehrān through his SAVAK secret police organization, the system of bribes, kickbacks, and connections he fostered, his heavy-handed censorship of print media and publishing in general, the lavish celebration of 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy in the early 1970s, his inauguration of a single-party system in 1975 and compulsory membership in it on the part of Iranian educators and civil servants, and his subsequent institution of an Iranian Imperial Calendar are just a handful among scores of policy decisions that persuaded me that this man, known for womanizing, bad parenting, inadequate communication skills, and egomaniacal trust in his own ill-informed views, was unfit for public office. In short, merely on the basis of my personal observation of Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi’s public behavior and policies as they impinged upon my life in Mashhad, Karaj, and Tehrān, I saw him as incontrovertible evidence that monarchy could not serve as the basis for an effective system of government in Iran’s future.
After the Iranian Revolution, during which the Pahlavi dictator pusillanimously and ignominiously fled Iran with wealth accumulated at the expense of the Iranian nation, leaving behind colleagues and supporters many of whom the barbaric
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Islamic Republic of Iran proceeded to imprison, torture and execute, it further puzzled me that some Iranian Americans persisted in referring with royal titles to Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi’s third wife and their children whose family played no role in Iran society before the 1920s, who never worked in their post-Revolution years in Europe and America, and who never saw fit to return any of their unearned wealth to Iranians needing it. If Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi had listened to experts around him, had learned lessons from Iran’s history, had instituted any democratic reforms, or had at least paid lip service to the 1906 Constitution under which he nominally ruled and if he had resigned his position or delegated authority once he learned he was seriously ill, both his family and Iran would have had different futures. Ultimately, it makes sense to me that some Iranian Americans hold him personally responsible for the sad outcomes in his family and the tragic state of affairs in Iran ruled oppressively by Shi‘ite Muslim clerics. At the same time, it makes no sense to me that some other Iranian Americans consider Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi a competent and patriotic Iranian leader.
Parenthetically, some Iranian Americans have intimated over the years that nonIranian-heritage Americans like me should perhaps avoid opining about Iranian politics or suggesting to Iranians how they should deal with political facts of life in Iran. My response, as an English-Irish-German American inexpert in politics and history, is that Iranian American demonstrations in American cities conducted in English are an implicit invitation to any interested American attendee or passerby to weigh in on the issues that the demonstrations broach. Ditto for Iranian American Facebook and blog posts in English. In response, I occasionally accept such invitations, albeit with a handful of logical and rhetorical constraints, i.e., avoidance of ad hominem, excluded-middle, whataboutist, and conspiratorialist observations and arguments, gratuitous assertions, and generalizations.
In any case, Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi’s legacy lives on in the person of his older son Rezā Pahlavi, who apparently and naturally embraces the Pahlavi legacy. Born and raised in the public eye in Tehrān, Rezā Pahlavi was presented to Iranians in the media as the best student and the best athlete and the best Boy Scout in his youth. As mentioned above, Rezā Pahlavi’s parents and siblings fled Iran in early 1979, never to return, and Rezā, already in America, attended college for a year. He also reportedly completed a U.S. Air Force Training Program in Lubbock (TX) to become a jet fighter pilot, for what reasons escaped me then. After his father’s death in 1980 and at the age of 21, Pahlavi declared himself shāhanshāh [king of kings], but later ceased to use that title for himself and now refers to himself as
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head of the “House of Pahlavi,” announcing himself as ready to serve as Iran’s leader should Iranians want him to serve as such. It is puzzling that some Iranian Americans would support as Iran’s leader a man who has never lived or worked as an adult in Iran and who, through no fault of his own, knows little about Iranian history and is probably not qualified even to talk about Iranian society and politics within the country.
During his decades in the States, the multi-millionaire Rezā Pahlavi has apparently neither sought employment nor served in any managerial or other professional capacities, but has written and spoken widely in support of human rights and democracy in Iran and has advocated civil disobedience as a means of blunting the oppressive policies of the dictatorial Islamic Republic of Iran. Some expatriate Iranians in the States view Rezā Pahlavi in terms such as these used by expatriate writer and Pahlavi supporter Rezā Bāyegān: “Rezā Pahlavi's vision of a secular government is not unlike the dream of another modern, progressive statesman in a different era and different country, John F. Kennedy.” This is an instructive comparison.
Born into money and attendant advantages, John Kennedy attended and graduated from an academically challenging high school and an academically challenging college, wrote a book on political history in his 20s, worked summers on a ranch and overseas at an embassy, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946 and served there from 1947 to 1953, and then won an election in 1952 to the U.S. Senate where he served from 1953 to 1960. Still, despite a record of twenty years of gainful employment and public service, many Americans thought him insufficiently experienced when he ran for U.S. President in 1960.
Now the cited “vision of a secular government” that Rezā Pahlavi supporters attribute to him has none of the specificity of Kennedy’s written and spoken views from his college days to his candidacy for the American presidency in part because Rezā Pahlavi has held no private or public positions and has not traveled anywhere relevant to a leadership position in Iran and has never been responsible for or to anyone outside of his family. Yet, Rezā Pahlavi’s Iranian American supporters hope for his return to Iran to lead a post-Islamic Republic society.
From an inexpert American outsider’s perspective, nothing problematic inheres in Iranian American expatriate support for Rezā Pahlavi’s views; in fact, support of any non-fascistic ideology or ideologue opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran seems commendable. In early November 2022, Reza Pahlavi opined that IRI
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oppositions should not focus on finding and following a leader, but rather work together to help Iranians in Iran democratize Iran, those Iranians in Iran responsible for charting Iran’s future course, while he stands ready to lend a hand from abroad.
Iranian American expatriate support would also include support for the now dormant Green Movement and support for Los Angeles Iranian-American oppositionist television personalities. But when Iranian individuals or groups or political platforms gain some recognition or traction, more serious scrutiny comes into play.
For example, that fact that one of those Los Angeles television personalities, Bahrām Moshiri, engages in constant denigration of the Islam that millions of Iranians practice can raise serious questions in the minds of some American observers who share Benjamin Franklin’s views on religion and who conclude that Iranian oppositionists like Moshiri support freedom from religion in Iran rather than freedom of religion. In addition, Moshiri’s diatribes against leading expatriate oppositionist activist Shirin ‘Ebādi can lead some observers to wonder if a streak of misogyny or envy might not figure in the mindset of some Iranian American oppositionists.
As another example, for some observers, support for Rezā Pahlavi speaks to a traditional Iranian patriarchal orientation that leads some politically minded Iranians to look first for a leader instead of first developing ideas and positions in groups and then letting spokespersons for the groups to emerge, not as leaders necessarily, but as representatives. Of course, in Rezā Pahlavi’s case, the platitudinous and unspecific political commentary in his writing, combined with his lack of training in law, business administration, the economy, or any other relevant field, and his lack of work experience of any kind, not to mention managerial experience, and his already asserted likely lack of intimate acquaintance with Iranian history, culture, and contemporary Iranian society, make it difficult for observers to visualize him as an effective voice in Iranian politics, much less as a potentially competent leader of any Iranian organization.
In late December 2013, an Iranian visitor to the States much involved in cultural entertainment in Iran surprised me both with his declaration of support for Rezā Pahlavi as the leader of a post-Islamic Republic government of Iran and with his assertion that a not insignificant number of people in Iran cite the name of Rezā Pahlavi as a desirable successor to Ruhollāh Khomeini, ‘Ali Khāmeneh’i, et al. Then, in early January 2014, an Iranian-American friend, who regularly posts antireligion and anti-Islam messages, photos, and video clips as part of his anti-Islamic
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Republic of Iran stance started posting links to Rezā Pahlavi’s web site and You Tube videos of his talks and interviews.
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In recent years, understandable divisions among Iranian American opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran have surfaced, the already cited Pahlavi faction vis-à-vis Iranian American groups and individuals who want no vestige of the Pahlavi monarchy in a post-IRI Iranian nation-state. Then there is the controversy over the National Iranian Advocacy Council, a relatively large and well-organized, self-proclaimed representative of the Iranian American community founded in 2002. NIAC’s opponents accuse it of lobbying on behalf of the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response, NIAC’s website offers this statement:
We [NIAC] support regime change led by the Iranian people inside Iran and the fundamental right of the Iranian people to decide their own future. Self-determination is a central principle of democracy that is core to NIAC’s values, and the current movement in Iran shows mass discontent with a system that has refused to meet the demands of Iranian civil society. It is the inalienable right of the Iranian people to decide their government, and NIAC has and will continue to always support them.
Historically, regime change has often meant the overthrow of a government by an outside force, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which we do not support.
Lasting and just change can only be led from within. Successful and sustainable change of governance can only succeed if it is led by, reflects, and achieves the goals of Iranians.
We do not support the U.S. government or any outside influences pushing their own agenda or imposing regime change from the outside. We know what U.S.- led regime change looks like and that is not what the Iranian people are asking for.
Our job is to amplify the voices of Iranians, identify how best we can work in solidarity to support them against brutal repression, and make sure their movement does not get hijacked by outsiders....
...When Bush threatened war, NIAC was the people’s voice in advocating for peace. When Ahmadinejad stole an election, NIAC elevated the people’s demand for reform and justice. When Trump passed the Muslim ban, NIAC fought for our people’s freedom to travel. And now, when the gasht-e ershād murdered Mahsa and women are leading a movement for change, NIAC shouts with them:
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woman, life, freedom.
In the period leading up to the JCPOA,… NIAC worked diligently with our community to support it and ensure it was grounded as much as possible in the needs of the Iranian people and their diaspora community here in the U.S. Today, U.S. negotiations on the JCPOA are on pause, and NIAC supports the Biden administration’s view that right now the priority should be on protests in Iran and events that are unfolding on the ground.
Our position on this and all other issues are based on the votes of our members. Any support for engagement is based on ending broad sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians and undermine human rights and democracy movements; we believe these must be targeted at bad actors, not the whole society. And we do not want Iran, or any country, to have nuclear weapons….
While our views are not ideologically bound and changing events on the ground must always be taken into account, NIAC’s values of peace and policies that do not harm ordinary civilians are not up for debate.
NIAC is a community-led and funded organization that is… independent of ...governments. The role of civil society organizations like ours is to hold governments accountable to the communities they represent, not to take marching orders from any government.
Over two-thirds of our funding comes from ordinary members of the Iranian-American community and non-Iranian Americans who support peace and civil rights. The other one-third of our funding comes from...charitable organizations, and all of this is public. All of the information about our funding and tax returns are publicly available and featured on our website.
Bearing in mind that NIAC sees itself as representing those Iranian Americans who support it, but not as representing Iranians in Iran, I see no reason not to take NIAC at its word here and in its critiques of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the years, my inexpert view influenced by sociologist Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s analysis of the organization and Iranian American individuals and organizations who accuse it of lobbying for IRI interests. * * * * *
Fast forwarding to 2022, the remarkable Women-Life-Freedom Movement protesting compulsory hijab surfaced in mid-September and grew, and quickly morphed into a “Down with the Islamic Republic of Iran” movement, especially among Iranian Americans. Impressive anti-IRI demonstrations in various
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American cities have taken place with organizers stressing that factional politics not play a role in demonstration support for the Women-Life-Freedom Movement. But, for example at an October 2022 demonstration in Austin, Iranian American Royalists carrying Pahlavi-Era flags of Iran, voiced their support for Rezā Pahlavi. In response to such partisan politics, this new slogan appeared online:رهبرباشهشاهستمگرمرگ [death to despots, whether monarchs or supreme leaders].
In early November 2022, this Facebook post reached me: “To all Iranians, please, if you see the slogan, or hear some one say murder to leader, or, Shah, be aware that he is working for Islumic Republic in fake name. In such a critical timing, No on should curse any of opposition groups Mojahedin, Fadaie, Shahie, Kommunist, Socialist, all must come together against Mullas. After when combined people win, then majority decide a coalition government, not yet.”
My FB response to that post was: “You write: ...if you hear some one say murder to...Shah, be aware that he is working for Islamic Republic in fake name.” The gratuitous assertion in this demonstrably false generalization is less troublesome to Americans like me than its citation of the term ‘Shah’ and later mention of ‘Shahie’ in the post. The pusillanimous and ignominious flight of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi from Iran in early 1979 and autocratic behavior from his founding of SAVAK in the late 1950s onward should preclude any Royalist presence in opposition rhetoric and activism in the Women-Life-Freedom movement in Iran.” * * * * *
Some Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran object to that government because of its basis in Islam for which they have no sympathy. Some other Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran reject the government of current officials, but argue that upright Muslim leaders could help create and maintain a just society and state. There are other views in opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, the notion that an Islamic state that does not give equal voice to non-Muslim elements and values in Iran’s essentially dualistic [dogāneh] culture cannot serve as the context for a vital Iranian culture.
Those Iranian Muslims who practice their faith, subscribe to ommat [community] and the notion of dāroleslām [realm of Islam (Muslim lands)] and dārolharb [realm of strife (non-Muslim lands)] and who adduce in good faith
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arguments for an Islamic government from the Koran, Traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and other sources of Islamic law presumably and naturally would favor an Islamic state.
For all of these Iranian Americans, even for devout practicing Muslims, a better case against an Islamic state exists: (1) Power residing in a small clerical and potentially or actually patriarchal group, even if the clerics in question are good, upright people who mean well would seem inevitably to lead to violations of human rights (e.g., application of the principle of ‘amr be ma’ruf va nahy az monkar [prescribing good and proscribing evil]; (2) The historical case for an Islamic state, even when pluralistic, does not provide sufficient data for governing a multicultural society to the satisfaction of minority groups; (3) No requisite expertise in world affairs, world history, contemporary politics, or diplomacy inheres in the education and experience of clerics or devout Muslims in governmental leadership position; e.g., Mahmoud Ahmadinezhād’s views on European history during the first half of the 20th century or on individual freedoms in Canada and the United States or Ruhollāh Khomeini’s views of the Jewish people(s) and their history; (4) Rule in the name of Islam will lead to #1, which redounds to the discredit of Islam in the contemporary world. If a goal of universal daroleslām is a goal of devout, practicing Muslims, rule in the name of Islam cannot lead to it unless it does not involve mardomsālāri [rule by the people]. Then, (5) for those Iranians and Iranian-Americans who practice Islam and who like America, there is the example of America. The US Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were deists, not Christians, and exhibit a non-religious basis for the society that has survived for 200+ years in large measure because of their principles.
But suppose Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, et al. had been good-hearted and caring Christians and consequently authored a good-hearted and caring Christianity as the religion of their nascent country. In such a good-hearted and caring Christian country then and now, how would or could good-hearted and caring deists, agnostics, atheists, religious Jews, et al. have felt and feel at home? In another words, an officially Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or Confucian nation may seem a contradiction in terms of pluralist, republican, and democratic ideas.
Here, the subject being only the “Islamic” governments of the Safavid (1501-1622), Afshārid 1736-1790s), Zand (1751-1794), Qājār (1795-1921/5), and Pahlavi (1921/5-1979) monarchies in Iran, and of the Islamic Republic of Iran
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(1979- ), logic suggests that Muslim Iranians should have the right to seek guidance from and abide by shari‘at law ‘except for any parts of it that affect the life choices of secular-minded or otherwise non-Muslim Iranians–Iran’s whole heritage was non-Muslim for the first half of its national history–and that those secular-minded and otherwise non-Muslim Iranians likewise should have the right to seek guidance and abide by the precepts of their own religions.
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Some years back, in a review of Andrew Scott Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran (2016) in The New York Times (5 August 2016), Azadeh Moaveni makes the following statements: (1) “...the Islamically inflected writings of figures like...Jalal Al-e-Ahmed [sic: Ahmad]...shaped the politics of so many articulate young people [in the Iranian 1970s]”; (2) The ayatollah [Ruhollah Khomeini] kept his political vision conveniently obscure, and his real designs became clear only months after his return, when it was too late”; (3) “The real question to pose about 1979 is why so many Iranians with everything at stake in the [Pahlavi] system saw no reason to defend it”; (4) “The numbers of the shah’s victims were far more modest than what [US President Jimmy] Carter claimed...the seminarian-turned-dissident Emad alDin Baghi discovered that instead of 100,000 alleged deaths at the hands of the shah, only a few hundred names could be found”; (5) “…Westerners were rather too fascinated with Khomeini when he first came to power”; (6) “Farah Diba [is] a figure desperately deserving of a proper biography. Trained as an architect, Farah was educated, cosmopolitan and ambitious, a first lady unlike any the Middle East had ever seen….She rescued lepers, bought Warhols, built museums and turned Tehran into a global hub of artistic and cultural activity. Down to earth, compassionate and clever, she could connect as easily to a cleaner as a courtier, and was the real star of the Pahlavi family.”
My response (MCH): (1) Among works that Pahlavi censorship banned were a handful of books by Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad (1923-1969), whose writings Moaveni calls “Islamically inflected.” Fortunately, four of his chief writings are available in English, which means readers can judge for themselves how Islamically inflected Āl-e Ahmad was: The School Principal, Weststruckness, Lost in the Crowd, and A
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Stone on a Grave (an autobiographical essay in which God plays no role). MCH (2): Ruhollāh Khomeini’s three books, published before the mid-1970s, clearly voiced Khomeini’s anti-America, anti-Israel, and medieval social views, the aims of one of which being to nullify the anti-clerical dictates of Rezā Shāh Pahlavi (ruled 1921/25-1941) MCH: (3) For some students of the Iranian 1970s, “the real question to pose about 1979” is how could Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi not have known enough to delegate authority and to reveal facts about his health? At the same time, (4) what blinded Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi to the inevitable upshots of oppression of non-establishment university students and intellectual and of the terroristic behavior of his SAVAK secret police organization. For example, four students in my Mashhad University freshman English class in the Fall 1966 semester suddenly stopped attending class. Months later, their pictures appeared on the front page of a national newspaper as having been executed for sedition. If Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi ordered and or approved the executions of fewer than a thousand educated young people and et al., tens of thousands of others whom he cowed into silence were arguably no less victims of his dictatorial ignorance and arrogance.
MCH: (4) Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the Shāh ordered the execution without impartial due process of “only a few hundred” fellow Iranians for political reasons. What should the penalty have been for each execution? Let’s say “six months jail time” for each murder. What would the Shāh’s total sentence have been? Shouldn’t the execution of even a single unarmed university student, unless one counts books as weapons, for example, each of the four cited freshmen students of mine, have disqualified MRP from holding public office? MCH: (5) As for Ruhollāh Khomeini, the leader of arguably the most successful revolution in 200 years and the subject of constant talk among Iranians in Iran and abroad from the late 1970s until today, one could argue that no fascination with him from 1977 to his death in 1989 could be excessive. If Iran had had any openness in its oversight of journalist and academic writing in the 1960s, useful fascination with Khomeini’s activities in 1963 and 1964, which arguably almost led to the fall of the Pahlavi monarchy then, would have taken place. For that matter, (2) Ruhollāh Khomeini never “kept his political vision politically obscure,” as anyone who had
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read his three books published before the mid-1970s realized. But Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi understandably did not allow those books on the market, and most literate Iranians never read them.
MCH: (6) Farah Dibā Pahlavi (b. 1938) reportedly spent a year or a year-and-ahalf in college where she reportedly attended several lectures by an architect. In contrast, the first lady of Jordan, Lisa Najeeb Halaby (b. 1951) received a B.A. degree in Architecture from Princeton University in 1973 and thereafter served as Managing Director of Arab Air Services and worked for Royal Jordanian Airlines until she married King Hossein of Jordan in 1978. Thereafter, she was active in social causes in Jordan and, after her husband’s death, abroad. In 2015, she received the Woodrow Wilson award for public service in 2015. Yes, Farah Pahlavi played a leading role in the establishment of the Tehran Museum of Modern Art, which houses the most valuable collection of modern Western art in the region, including Andy Warhol’s portraits of herself and her famous, womanizing husband whose views of her influence in Iranian affairs Oriana Fallaci recorded in a famous interview. During the later Pahlavi years, Tehrān was a hub of establishment artistic and cultural activity and a non-establishment hub of arrests and incarceration of writers and other intellectuals. * * * * * Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi (ruled 1941-1979) had specific and revealing views on his role vis-à-vis Iranians, individually and collectively, and women, in particular. In Oriana Fallaci’s famous interview with him (New Republic, 30 November 1973), MRP says: (1) “Where there’s no monarchy, there’s anarchy, or an oligarchy or a dictatorship...To get things done, one needs power, and to hold onto power one mustn’t ask anyone’s permission or advice. One mustn’t discuss decisions with anyone…; (2) …a force others can’t perceive accompanies me. My mystical force. Moreover, I receive messages. I have lived with God beside me since I was five years old. Since, that is, God sent me those visions...It is common knowledge that I’ve had visions...I have been chosen by God to perform a task. My visions were miracles that saved the country. My reign has saved the country, and it has done so because God was on my side…; (3) Women, you know… Look, let’s put it this way. I don’t underestimate them, as shown by the fact that they have derived more
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advantages than anyone else from my White Revolution. I have fought strenuously to obtain equal rights and responsibilities for them. I have even incorporated them in the Army, where they get six months’ military training before being sent to the villages to fight the battle against illiteracy. Nor should one forget that I’m the son of the man who removed women’s veils in Iran. But I wouldn’t be sincere if I asserted I’d been influenced by a single one of them.”
Now, many Iranian Americans who look back at the autocratic Pahlavi monarchy from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s understandably view the era as one in which Iranian women made strides vis-à-vis the male-dominated patriarchal order in Iran and rightly view the four decades of theocratic rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran as oppressive of Iranian women. But a non-Iranian-heritage American like me, who lived and worked in Iran during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s period, can have had a different impression of the rule of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, who, no longer trusting in Emām ‘Ali’s protection or his often self-described popularity among Iranians of classes and groups, fled Iran in January 1979 rather than stay to support Iranian women and who had presided over a society in which the following facts of everyday life arguably prevailed: • Women needed the permission of husbands to travel abroad. • Women needed to accede to husband’s decisions about moving family residences. • Men could legally marry a second wife, whereas women could not marry a second husband. • Men could contract for a temporary marriage, but women could not. • Women were granted divorces, while men granted divorces. • Women were granted the right to vote in 1960, but had no significant open elections thereafter in which to participate. • Women, for example college students, could not express any political views in conflict with official government policy, unless they were prepared to be detained, questioned, incarcerated, and sometimes worse. • Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s misogynist statements about women (e.g, the Fallaci interview) and his womanizing complicated women’s attempts to achieve pariety with men. • Some educated men would introduce their brothers to other men of their acquaintance on the street, but not their wives. • Male teenagers and adult males routinely rode bicycles, but teenaged girls and women did not. • Male teenagers routinely participated in pick-up volleyball and footballs games in lanes and parks, whereas
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teenaged girls did not. • Males received double the inheritance that females received from the estates of deceased parents. • Women were expected to observe hijab in specific places and on specific occasions when and where parallel dress codes did not exist for men. • Teenaged girls and young-to-middle aged women on the street unaccompanied by men were routinely subjected to suggestive or lewd comments by men looking at them. • If a teenaged male and a teenaged female or an unmarried young man and an unmarried young woman walked down a city street or attended a movie together, the female would likely suffer a loss of reputation in most neighborhoods. • Female students were not allowed to wear chadors on school campuses. • Unmarried female university students who dressed expressively or individualistically at most universities would, at the very least, prompt raised eyebrows. • Many office, retail, and service industry positions open to men were not open to women. • A double standard existed with respect to parental support of higher education for their male and female children. • A double standard existed with respect to the minimal age for marriage of male and female students. • Female virginity constituted an expected or required pre-condition for the marriage of females, but not for males. • Reader reaction to the depiction of romance and sex in prose fictions and lyric verse differed with respect to male authors vis-à-vis female authors. Females in the entertainment industry were often suspected of immorality solely because they were actors or singers. In short, to the American living and working in Iran then, life there seemed much more difficult for women in Iran than for men. Of course, the same American could compile just as lengthy a list, with different items, about life in American then for American women. But whataboutism doesn’t excuse or mitigate relevant facts in either society.
* * * * *
Some supporters of the Women-Life-Freedom Movement in Iran and abroad have labelled female protesters modern-day Gordāfarids, touting their courage as paralleling that of Ferdowsi’s character. But there’s more to it than that.
In Ferdowsi’s “Story of Sohrāb,” having raised an army, Sohrāb sets out for Iran to find his father Rostam and attacks the White Fortress, where Hojir challenges him to one-on-one combat. Sohrāb overcomes Hojir, demonstrating martial skills
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central to his later combat with Rostam. Then, in response to Hojir’s plea for mercy, Sohrāb lets him live, this action also presaging Sohrāb’s reaction to Rostam’s later successful deceit when facing death at Sohrāb’s hand at the end of their second combat. Sohrāb then faces a challenge from Hojir’s sister, the female Iranian warrior Gordāfarid. Although acquitting herself bravely, Gordāfarid is no match for Sohrāb, who “bore down on her again and snatched her helmet from her head; HER HAIR streamed out…Sohrāb saw that his opponent was a woman, whose HAIR was WORTHY OF A DIADEM” (adapted from the Davis translation). Sohrāb is smitten by Gordāfarid’s beauty, which emotional state allows her to trick him and save the Iranians at the White Fortress from capture. At this point, 70+ among 1,040+ couplets in Ferdowsi’s “Story of Sohrāb” devoted to her, Gordāfārid disappears from The Shāhnāmeh, which contain’s 50,000+ couplets in toto.
Fast forward to the real Iranian world of Fall 2022, before which the Islamic Republic of Iran for four decades held sway over Iranian women, whose Hojir-like menfolk could do nothing about it. Then these Iranian women, no physical match for the IRI, removed their head coverings and thus threatened the latest incarnation of patriarchy [pedarsālāri] rule in the land that has never had people rule [mardomsālāri] rule. And women elsewhere in the world see the Women-LifeFreedom Movement in Iran as relevant to their own situations in which metaphorical compulsory hijab of one sort or another obtains and in response to which they may also let their hair down.
The nationalization, Persification, and centralization policies of the Pahlavi Monarchy (1921/25-1979) arguably impeded the development of strong local governance, social systems, and community development infrastructure agt the
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local level. That may have meant, in my inexpert view, that the chief cohesive force in Iran’s 60,000 villages and smaller municipalities as of 11 and 12 December 1978, when a sort of plebiscite sealed the fate of the Pahlavi Monarchy, was the 12er Shi’ite clerical communication and community.
With an arguably typical (white) American youth, before my late teens, I had experienced life in an American village in mid-Coast Maine (all white population) and in a suburb of a larger American city (segregated). Both environments, at least since the World War II years, featured democratically elected local political councils (electees including second-generation immigrants) answerable to their fellow citizens at meetings open to the public. The council and discrete local agencies, among them planning committees and, in the case of the village, a volunteer fire department, published annual reports discussed at public meetings, church and grange/service clubs that engaged in community development activities, community athletic teams (for boys), locally maintained athletic fields, swimming pools, and the like. Both the village and neighborhoods in the city organized Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day ceremonies, celebrations and activities, mostly for children and youth. Parents’ committees reviewed and supported local elementary and secondary schools. The village had schools since its incorporation in 1814 and a village library with a children’s section and activities for children. I don’t recall ever running into or hearing about a school age child of school age not attending school.
In the neighborhood of the city I cite above, organized sports teams for boys eight to fifteen years of age have existed since late 1940s, while coeducational private and public schools have had after-school sports, music, and theatre programs, and school newspapers and student government at least since after World War II (the suburb neighborhood in question was established in the 1930s) and had neighborhood drum and bugle corps.
The village I cite above has had Selectmen for 200 years who see fellow villagers almost on a daily basis, all decisions about local facilities and services, as well as local taxation and allocation of resources made locally. The city in question has had a mayor for more than two centuries who visited the neighborhood occasionally and whose assistants were in regular touch with neighborhood
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associations, while an elected neighborhood representative sat on the city council. The city in question has had a dozen local colleges and universities since the middle of the 19th century, while a handful of private colleges and a state university have been located within fifty miles of the village for more than a century. Churches in both the village and the city have long had community service and educational programs. In short, should drastic changes take place in the American central or federal government, no disruption of life in the village or urban neighborhood in question would necessarily take place in the short term. At the same time, if the American national government were to advocate and finance some new program, a local structure and infrastructure is in place with village and neighborhood experts and groups ready to implement the program, even and especially programs and policies designed to accelerate local democratic behavior. Some Iran experts think that Iranian village, town, and urban neighborhood communities do not have significant parallel traditions and structures that would help those communities weather a revolutionary change in the national Iranian government during a transitional period.
For this reason, it strikes me, as an inexpert observer of the Women-LifeFreedom Movement in Iran, that activists in Iran might focus in the near term on specific causes on behalf of which to mobilize and to move from Cause 1 to 2 after achieving #1. Cause # 1: persuading IRI authorities to cease enforcing compulsory hijab, i.e., no reaction to or fining or detaining girls and women who do not observe hijab. Cause # 2: persuading IRI authorities to release women in detention or jail merely because they participated in peaceful protest against compulsory hijab. Cause #3: persuading IRI authorities to release from detention or jail defense attorneys and journalists whose only “crimes” were advocacy of justice for individuals or accurate reporting and unjaundiced commentary on instances of civil disobedience. Cause #4: persuading IRI authorities to review cases of current political prisoners who did not engage in violent activity or activity contrary to Koranic prescriptions and proscriptions. Cause #5: persuading IRI authorities to establish free speech zones in cities where protestors can voice their views and grievances short of calling for revolution or condemnation of Islam. Causes #1 to #5 give IRI authorities an exit ramp that presumably would not cause them to feel
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that they were losing face or that their government was losing its way.
Causes #6 to #16 consist of persuading IRI authorities to rescind specific Pahlavi policies, cited above, that perpetuate unequal status of women vis-à-vis men. Cause # 16: persuading IRI authorities to rejoin JPOA, if a majority of the Iranian voting population so wishes, in order to reduce economic stress on middle class Iranians through the removal of specific, related American sanctions on Iran. Iranian Americans opposing a renewal of JOPAC will have to turn their attention to other issues if a majority of the voting population in Iran wants such a renewal.
Cause #17: persuading IRI authorities to desist from aiding Syria and reallocating resources to domestic programs for the poor. Cause #18…. Cause #19....etc.
For an expert view of foregoing issues, there is Kian Takbakhsh’s Creating Local Democracy in Iran: State Building and the Politics of Decentralization (2022). In a recent Iran1400.org talk, Kianbakhsh also reminded his audience that millions of Muslim Iranians may support compulsory hijab and the existence of theocratic body politic.
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