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INTRODUCTION
Stephanie Cronin
In the two decades between the coup d’état of 1921 and the abdication of Riza Shah, Iran underwent a profound transformation. Some aspects of this transformation are well known. A new state of considerable apparent strength was constructed, capable of asserting its power, if not always its legitimacy, throughout the country and over the entire population. This new state developed as an agent of change, implementing and enforcing the agenda of the nationalist elite without the help, and sometimes against the wishes, of traditional intermediary layers such as the ulama, the guilds and the tribal khans and aghas, and incubating a society Europeanized in appearance and modern in modes of cultural and intellectual expression and discourse.
The primary and most fundamental task of the state-building effort of the early Pahlavi period was the creation of a modern army, based on universal and compulsory military service. Many other measures of centralization and modernization followed. The new regime reorganized Iran’s fiscal system and raised state revenues through taxation, banking and customs reform, mobilizing resources for major public-spending projects, including massive weapons-purchasing programmes, road-building and the Trans-Iranian railway. In addition to the army, another pillar of the new order was the civil bureaucracy, which was expanded and reorganized while the administration of the country was highly centralized with an official hierarchy tightly controlled by the interior ministry. The judicial system was secularized and centralized within a reformed ministry of justice; and legal codes based on European models were introduced, a commercial code in 1925, a criminal code in 1926 and a civil code in 1928. Foreign influence was curtailed and autonomous tribal groups and provincial magnates were brought under state control. A secular system of national primary and secondary schools was set up and in 1934 the University of Tehran was founded. The second decade of the new regime saw an acceleration of the participation of women in education, the economy and public life. The period enjoyed substantial overall population growth, with a shift to the urban centres – six cities possessed a population of 100,000 or more by 1940. All these processes of change seriously undermined the political and economic bases of clerical power, while precepts derived from Islam were challenged by the increasingly hegemonic official ideology of secular Persian nationalism with a strong monarchical component. In each of these measures separately, as well as in their overall direction, Riza Shah gave effect to longstanding demands of Iranian constitutionalism, and his regime accumulated much goodwill on this account, the activism of the new state contrasting sharply with the passivity and helplessness of its Qajar predecessor.1
However, the transformation of Iran which took place under Riza Shah contained other aspects. In tandem with the consolidation of the regime, the flourishing intellectual life which had drawn vitality and impetus from the constitutionalist and nationalist struggles of the first two decades of the century was gradually stifled. As the new regime grew in confidence and assertiveness, it declined increasingly to permit space for independent activities or institutions. The press was tamed, newspapers either being brought under state control or shut down completely. Political parties were banned or dissolved, interrupting the transition then underway from fluctuating factions organized around personalities to modern ideological parties. The practical disregard for the Constitution spread cynicism while the control over elections exercised by the army and the interior ministry and the reduction of the Majlis to futile impotence robbed the population of the greater experience of democratic and electoral politics which it had been acquiring painfully and slowly since the elections for the first National Assembly in 1906. The suppression of independent political and social organizations, notably women’s associations and trade unions, deprived these and other groups both of any voice of their own and of the opportunity to develop more sophisticated skills of organization and advocacy. By the late 1920s the new state had obliterated civil society in Iran and had reduced the clamour of the first quarter of a century to a pall of silence.
During the two decades between 1921 and 1941, therefore, were laid, for good and ill, the foundations of the modern Iranian state and modern Iranian society. Yet despite its centrality, the period has remained relatively neglected. This has been due partly to the responsiveness of academic Iranian studies to the vicissitudes of Iranian politics. As long as the Pahlavis remained in power, Western scholarship was content to paint Riza Shah in broad brush strokes, largely uncritical of the ‘reform’ and ‘modernization’ implemented under the aegis of the new state, and preferred not to dwell on some of the regime’s more sinister aspects. The success of the Islamic revolution, on the other hand, eclipsed completely any interest in the secular dimensions of Iran’s modern history.2
Recently, however, there has been a marked revival of interest in the period.3 Nostalgia for an imagined era of order and stability has led to a reawakening of curiosity about Riza Shah. For those who regret the passing of the monarchy, Riza Shah’s incarnation of the virtues of determination and decisiveness contrast with his son’s vacillation and weakness in the face of the Islamic revolutionary movement, while in Iran itself, after many years of factionalism and chaos within ruling circles, there is again a yearning for strong leadership. As well as a renewed political interest in the formative years of modern Iran, there has also been a maturing of the discipline of Iranian studies, a result of the work in exile of a generation of Iranian-born historians. Largely critical of the monarchy, but also distanced from the current regime, the work of these historians has facilitated the emergence of a more nuanced and sophisticated view of Riza Shah. These revisionist historians, some of whom are represented in this volume, have looked with new eyes both at the broad features of the period and at the nature and impact of specific changes.
As well as revisiting some of the key episodes of the period in an attempt to reassess their general historical significance, the chapters which follow have another objective. Taken together, they aim to rectify the imbalance in much older scholarship resulting from too great an emphasis on the high politics of the urban elite of the capital. The preoccupation in much of the literature with the Tehran regime and its elite supporters has typically been accompanied, as the other side of the same coin, by an almost complete silence regarding other interests and perspectives. Little attempt has been made to elucidate either the historical narrative or the perception of their own experience of, for example, non-elite groups such as the Tehran crowd, of non-metropolitan elite groups including the guilds and the bazars of the provincial cities, or of any social category in the countryside. In challenging this imbalance, several of the chapters attempt to redirect attention towards the actual experience of different layers of Iranian society, in an attempt to represent the ‘history from below’ of these years. The contributions discussing gender relations, for example, try to understand and articulate the experiences of women themselves, not merely as objects of state policy, but as active participants in their own history. The chapters on the tribes also refocus attention, looking not just at the regime’s pacification drives but at the internal dynamics of the tribal confederations and their own role in the tribe-state equation, redressing the tendency to imagine the state as the sole initiator and agent of change. Rather than positing an eternal and unchanging conflict between tribal chaos and state-imposed order, the chapters emphasize the variety and differentiation of tribal life, and the importance, when discussing the period as a whole, of distinguishing between the various tribal groups, their locations, their structures, their aspirations, the degree and nature of the threat they represented to the central power, and the sometimes conflicting responses of their leaderships and their rank and file.
These novel departures have highlighted serious methodological difficulties. Indeed, one of the reasons often put forward to account for the paucity of research into the Riza Shah period in general relates to difficulties arising from the unavailability or sparsity of both archival and published material. The British archives, although rich for the 1920s, certainly offer little for the subsequent decade and, until recently, the only available Persian material was a small number of old and well-known published texts. Now, however, opportunities have improved greatly and the chapters which follow reflect a new range and availability of sources. The British Foreign Office files, although exhaustively exploited for the high politics of the period, are still capable of yielding useful information regarding provincial and tribal history in regions of especial imperial concern and are a major source for Stephanie Cronin’s chapter on the Bakhtiyari (Chapter 14). The USA, although in the Riza Shah period still only marginally involved in Iran, possesses archival material of some importance, used by Michael Zirinsky and Rudi Matthee. The press is also a valuable source. Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi (Chapter 9) shows how much a solidly pro-government publication such as Alam-i Nesvan can be made to reveal, while Afshin Marashi makes original use of the Turkish press for his account of Riza Shah’s visit to Turkey (Chapter 6). Over the past decade much new material has appeared in Iran, including collections of historical documents, memoirs and diaries, as well as scholarly research. Rostam-Kolayi and H.E. Chehabi, for example, both cite the collection of official documents published by the Iranian National Archives on forced unveiling. Oral sources are also sometimes essential for complementing archival and published material or for trying to reconstruct events where almost no records survive. Richard Tapper (Chapter 13) has collected some of this type of material for his discussion of tribal settlement in the 1930s, giving a voice to the Shahsevan tribespeople themselves. However, much work still remains to be done. The archives of other states, especially Turkey and the former Soviet Union and also France, remain to be properly investigated but will almost certainly prove to contain valuable resources. Perhaps most importantly, little work has yet appeared in the West based on Iranian archival material.4
The broad template of modernization adopted in Riza Shah’s Iran was one which had achieved widespread and largely unquestioning acceptance throughout the region in the inter-war period. Governments of the left and of the right, monarchies and republics, including such diverse regimes as Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Afghanistan under King Amanallah, Central Asia under the Bolsheviks, even Iraq under the Sharifian officers, all embarked on programmes of authoritarian modernization, characterized by rapid social change and etatiste economic development. These two decades were, par excellence, an era of authoritarianism, and the successful rise of apparently dynamic dictatorships across Europe and in Japan exercised a considerable attraction for the nationalist intelligentsia throughout the Middle East. All the models of change and development available to Riza Shah were therefore authoritarian in both the spirit and the letter.
If the effect of the regional environment was intense, the impact of Iran’s own history on its twentieth-century development was also profound and has sometimes been underestimated. Rather than seeing the early Pahlavi era as a discrete, self-contained and wholly novel period, the newer scholarship has tended to shift its focus towards examining the context which produced Riza Khan, and the impact of this context on Pahlavi rule itself, seeking to explain its key features by reference to its historical and political environment. Increasingly efforts have been made to understand the links between the constitutional and early Pahlavi periods, and to stress the significance of the post-constitutional and Great War years as a crucible for Pahlavi authoritarianism. As is clear from the chapters in this volume, not only did the traumatic first two decades of the twentieth century predispose the Iranian political class towards a strong and charismatic personality, but these decades also produced the agenda for reform. Riza Shah’s policies, which so transformed Iran, were essentially those formulated by the modernizers of the earlier period.
Yet Iran’s history in these two decades clearly had many features specific to itself. To what extent, it may be asked, was early Pahlavi Iran shaped by Riza Shah himself? What was his specific contribution and what was the impact of his character and personality, of the experiences he brought with him, of the way in which he constructed his regime and of the people with whom he surrounded himself? To what extent may he, and the regime he built, be explained in terms of environment? Were any alternatives, both theoretical and actual, available, and if so, at what stage? What was the nature of his appeal? What were the mechanisms by which he rose to power and how did he maintain and enforce his regime’s control across such a large, diverse and fractious territory? Why did many of his reforms, long advocated by the constitutionalist and nationalist elite, provoke such intense opposition? How may the disastrous collapse of his power in 1941 be explained?
No attempt has been made to harmonize the views represented in this volume. On the contrary, the contributions have been chosen precisely in order to illustrate the diversity and complexity of interpretations to which recent scholarship has given rise. Three chapters deal with the nature of the new state and the extent and character of support for Riza Shah, two contributions discuss the international orientation of the new regime, two examine developments in the fields of culture and ideology, three look at changes affecting the position of women, and three examine the experiences of tribal groups.
The collection begins with Homa Katouzian’s discussion of the different periods through which the new regime passed in the two decades of its life and his analysis of the waxing and waning of support for Riza Shah. Katouzian argues that Riza Khan’s suppression of tribal rebellion and his promise of peace, prosperity and modernization won him widespread popularity in the first half of the 1920s, to the extent that at the moment when he made himself Shah he enjoyed the broadest social base of his career. Katouzian then charts the establishment, first of dictatorship, when, however, the Shah still accepted some limited participation from the political and administrative elite and still retained some support among the modern middle classes, and then, from 1931, of a rule not just absolute but arbitrary. The consolidation of his arbitrary power went hand in hand with his loss of support among all social classes, both high and low, modern and traditional, leaving him alone by 1941. Katouzian’s general thesis, that Iranian revolts have typically led to chaos which ended only when one of the contestants for power succeeded in overcoming all the others and going on to establish its own all-powerful rule, has powerful echoes for contemporary Iran.
While Katouzian focuses on the nature of civilian support for Riza Shah, Stephanie Cronin looks at attitudes to the new state within the army. The army is often described as a linchpin of the new order in Iran, yet Cronin questions both its political reliability and its military effectiveness. Although the creation of a modern unified army was the work of Riza Khan, he constructed this army out of material bequeathed to him by the past. Although Riza Shah’s old comrades from the Cossack Division remained loyal to him throughout the life of his regime, none the less, from the moment of its foundation Pahlavi rule was subject to challenges from elsewhere within the new army. In the first half of the 1920s, before the consolidation of his dictatorship, Riza Khan experienced a number of challenges from constitutionalist and nationalist officers. By mid-decade, conditions within the new army were provoking a different kind of opposition, whereby political disaffection fused with material hardship to produce armed mutinies among the junior officers and the rank and file. In the late 1930s a more modern ultra-nationalist group of officers, from provincial middle-and lower-middle-class backgrounds, seemed to be a harbinger of an Iranian ‘Free Officers’ movement, raising the possibility that the regime might, then or in the future, be at risk from a military coup. Cronin also concludes that the army’s professional competence was in fact extremely limited, citing as evidence its failure to overcome many of its early organizational weaknesses, the Shah’s encouragement of large-scale corruption as a mechanism for buying support and ensuring control over senior officers, its over-reliance on imported military technology, its incompetence in tribal operations and the scandalous behaviour of its officer corps during the Allied invasion in 1941.
The gravest threat to Riza’s ascendancy within the army throughout the two decades of his power came as a result of his sponsorship of the republican movement in 1924. In their opposition to this movement sections of the army, fearing a dictatorship, were echoing civilian opposition. Vanessa Martin (Chapter 4), describes the course of Riza Khan’s attempt to introduce a republic in Iran and the frustrating of this attempt by his political enemies in Tehran. She discusses the secular constitutionalist opposition but concentrates on the role of Sayyid Hasan Mudarris and of the Tehran bazar, his principal power base.
Although Riza Khan’s rise has often been attributed to his skills in political manipulation, the republican movement was a fiasco and its defeat a key turning point. This was a time when republicanism was in vogue among modernist elements and it was the first preference of Riza Khan himself, harmonizing most closely with his inclinations which, although not democratic, were strongly anti-elitist. Unlike his contemporary, Mustafa Kemal, however, he was unable to prevail against the opposition. None the less, when thwarted, he had no qualms about resorting to dynastic change and the institution of the monarchy for the most complete realization of his personal ambition. His accession to the throne fundamentally altered the trajectory of Iran’s political development. It illustrated his victory over both his brother officers and over all other civilian political forces, setting the stage for his increasingly individual and autocratic rule. It produced in him an obsessional fear for the continuity of the new dynast...
