Well, now that I
am fully wired, I
have to be careful
about what I am saying.
And therefore I should start
by thanking all of you who
joined us this evening.
My thanks are also to
Roma for the introduction,
very welcoming introduction.
And to Dr. Abbas Milani, who not
only invited me to take part--
Very sorry.
I need to double check
if your audio is working.
Sure.
Solid red light?
This good?
Sorry.
So I need to repeat
what I just said?
No?
OK, fine.
All right, then.
And Dr. Abbas Milani,
not only for inviting me
to Stanford University and to
the program in Iranian studies,
Mogahadam Program
in Iranian studies,
for which I'm very thankful,
but also as he told me,
he has actually reviewed this
book that I'm very much hoping
soon is going to appear
in a very prestigious
American publication.
He was also very
generous in his review
in Persian of my earlier book,
The Pivot of the Universe,
for which I am also thankful.
I would start by a lecture
of probably about hopefully
40 to 50 minutes,
though I do not
promise you that I would be
able to stop at 50 minutes.
Anytime the necessary warning is
necessary, please let me know.
Afterwards, I'm
going to show you
some slides as a kind
of a trailer of what
you would find in this book.
And afterwards, there will
be a question and answer,
and eventually if you are
[? kindness ?] you may
want to buy copies of the book.
OK.
Let me start with a
verse, as is often
customary in any kind of
a Persian presentation,
with a verse this time by Rumi.
And it just happens
that they have actually
used three verses from
his eternal, really,
epilogue-- prologue
to his Masnavi.
And as you will see, he seemed
to have had some preoccupation
with how to organize his
six books of Masnavi.
So the first one
that corresponds
to what my challenge
is ahead of me
in this talk, in this writing
of this book, is a verse.
First I read it in Persian.
Then I translate it in English.
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
"If you pour the ocean
in a jug, how much
does it take but
a daily portion?"
So although the
size of this book
may seem very thick and big,
actually, it may just be a jug,
perhaps it's a little
bit larger jug.
But still, it does not take
the whole ocean of 500 years
that I've tried to put together
or try to cover in this book.
And the daily portion
or the daily ration
that Rumi refers to, or
Persians, we call him Mawlana,
would refer to, as
a matter of fact,
perhaps it's my
portion if you consider
that a day in the biblical
sense could be a year.
But as a matter of fact,
it's much more than one year.
It took me a while.
I don't want to reveal much,
perhaps two decades or more.
But as far as the
reader is concerned,
hopefully it consist
of four chapters parts.
And seasonally, each part
can be read in one season.
So you hopefully will be
able to finish it in a year.
So that's as far
as the actual task
of trying to put as much as
possible into one volume.
When I first started,
or when I first
negotiated with my publisher,
Yale University Press,
the editor told me, we
want a book from you
that in some 300
pages or so, so it can
be actually used as a textbook.
To answer one
essential question--
why there was, in
1979, a revolution
with a very strong religious
Shi'i Islamic militant coloring
when Iran went through more
than seven decades or more
of a process of secularization?
How you would interpret, how
you would address this question?
Well, that was my initial
task, but in the process,
of course, as historians
love to go back and look
at deeper roots of any
question or any problematic,
I actually started
looking further backward.
And it was probably
not an accident
that I started with 1501, 1, the
beginning of the 16th century,
the rise of the
Safavid Empire, as
this departure point for
the writing of this book.
As I hope I will
be able to explain
in the course of the
next 40, 50 minutes as
to why it is
important to go back,
a simple answer, of
course, is that most
of the studies
about modern Iran,
including Michael Axworthy,
who is going to next speak--
Next week, is it?-- who is
going to be your speaker,
actually puts me in a more
embarrassing position,
because I'm competing
with him in terms
of what he has written.
He has written one
volume very ably,
a history of Iran,
mostly modern Iran.
But most of the
histories of modern Iran,
or most of the
interpretation of modern Iran
really starts with
the 20th century
with the constitutional
revolution.
Earlier on, it was with the
Pahlavi Dynasty, establishment
of Pahlavia Dynasty in 1921.
Then a little bit earlier with
the constitutional revolution
of 1906 onwards.
And if some historians wanted to
be a little bit more generous,
they would go back usually
through the mid-19th century,
early decades of
the 19th century
with the famous Qajar
reformer, Prince Abbas Mirza
and his military reforms.
Perhaps also with
the more tragic end
to the story of modernism in
the mid-19th century with Amir
Kabir and Nasreddin Shah too,
with which I'm sure many of you
are fairly familiar.
And certainly there is plenty
in this book about both
these episodes of reform.
However, the task of
starting at an earlier age
was an attempt to try to
detect or trace some long term
trends in Iran's history, that,
at least I believe, and I hope
convincingly I have
argued in this book,
has a certain bearing
on the way that Iran,
in the 19th and 20th century,
evolved, and why in a sense
Iran has gone through this major
convulsion in the latter part
of the 20th century.
In effect, as I was
writing this book
and I was trying
to summing it up,
the other question, perhaps
more long term question,
what European
historians would like
to refer to as the longue duree,
the history of a long period
of time, came to my
mind and preoccupied
me is that why in effect--
it's a more existential
question, if you like--
why Iran actually survived as a
country over the past 500 years
and remained on the
map of the world
pretty much more or less, with
some losses in its frontiers,
intact.
And that by itself is
an important question,
since many countries in the
world who had this long history
or long memory of
their own past never
managed to survive into the
20th century or the latter part
of the 20th century.
A very good example of
that is the Ottoman Empire,
the neighboring empire of Iran.
Much more powerful, much
more resourceful, much better
populated, much more
powerful economy than Iran.
And nevertheless, if you look
at the map of today's world,
Middle East, or they don't
want to call themselves as part
of the Middle East, anyway.
But if there is no
Ottoman Empire, what
disappeared is what you
see on the map as kind
of a portion of
that massive empire,
is today's Republic of Turkey.
The same probably can be said
about the eastern neighbor
or southeastern
neighbor of Iran.
That is what in English
language is referred to
as the Mughal Empire of India.
In Persian, the Gurkani Empire.
That again was far more
powerful, far more prosperous,
one of the most prosperous
empires of its own time
in the early modern times.
And that also, in the
process in the 18th century,
disappeared and turned
into a fragmented--
into many principalities,
and eventually was
the victim of
British colonialism,
that indeed wiped out the very
existence of the Mughal Empire
and took the history of
the Indian subcontinent
in a very different direction.
So Iran could have been the
same kind of experience,
the same kind of a
process of disintegration,
certainly in the early
decades of the 20th century,
in the period of
the First World War,
that nowadays many Iranians
or non-Iranians don't pay any
attention to--
They even don't know that
Iran was somewhat involved
in the First World War--
could have brought Iran
to or indeed brought Iran
to the verge of fragmentation
and dissolution,
however, somehow,
miraculously, or at least
on the surface miraculously,
managed to survive.
And that's not the only example,
if you look further back,
the presence of the
two great empires that,
in the course of the 19th
and early 20th centuries,
dominated the northern and
southern frontiers of Iran,
that is the Russian
Empire in the north
and the British Empire in the
Persian Gulf and southeastern
Iran, they're far more
powerful, far more
resourceful in every
possible respect,
military, economic,
technological, than Iran.
And they could have, in
effect, at some stage,
as they did indeed compromise
the sovereignty of many
of the countries that came
in between the two empires,
Iran could have been also
another example of that kind
of domination, imperial
domination and expansion,
particularly on the side of the
Russians in the Iranian north.
And one should bear
in mind that Iran,
for close to a century
and a half possibly,
had a close border with Russia,
and then shortly after 1917,
with the Soviet Union.
And in all this period,
including the Cold War
in the decades after
the Second World War,
from the end of the
Second World War onward,
after the collapse
of the Soviet Union,
has been the subject of
the rivalry between the two
great powers.
First with the British after
the end of the First World War
and then with the rise
of the United States
as a superpower after
the Second World War.
So there's every reason
in terms of frontiers
and in terms of pressure
on its frontiers
that the survival
of Iran could have
been completely subject
to all these major forces.
Also it could have been argued
that domestically Iran has
been a very volatile,
politically speaking, country.
First of all, if you look
at the Iranian terrain,
it's a land with many
mountainous regions.
It has vast deserts.
And in a sense, much
of its communities
before the 20th century,
before the emergence
of modern communication,
were dispersed,
were basically kind
of a system that,
by and large, was
extremely difficult for
a pre-modern state to dominate.
That's why Iran, basically up to
perhaps the rise of the Pahlavi
Dynasty in the 1920s, was a
country that, as its title,
official title indicated, was
the Guarded Domains of Iran.
Or as it was at the time, the
Guarded Domains of Persia.
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
So it was not referred
to as one nation state,
but as a kind of an imperial
notion of many entities
that were brought under a loose
control of a central government
in a kind of a fashion
that to some extent
would allow many of
these local powers
to have this degree
of semi-autonomy.
And yet at the same
time, the central state
would have maintained a degree
of control over its provinces,
over all these various
semi-autonomous regions.
Kurdistan, Khorasan, Fars,
all these major provinces.
And the peripheries of
Iran all were basically
ruled by this
semi-autonomous fashion.
And this goes back in time.
It's actually
probably an invention.
If we don't want to really go
the path of ultra-nationalism,
but as a matter of fact,
it is the invention
of the Sassanian Empire,
perhaps Achaemenid Empire that
created this whole system
of a degree of autonomy
to its subjects and provinces.
Beyond that, the periphery
of Iran, as some of you
may remember, even as late as
the middle of the 20th century,
was pretty much dominated by
nomadic pastoralist tribal
entities from the Qashqais
and the Bakhtiaris,
and the Shahsavans, and
the [PERSIAN] Mamasani,
all these various tribes
of the Lur background,
tribes of Khorasan and so forth.
If you look at the map
of the 19th century,
you will be surprised
to see how powerful were
these entities in the provinces
or in the frontiers, mostly,
of Iran, and how significant
a role they played
in basically defining
Iran or in this effect
the political
destiny of Iran was
ransomed by the presence
of these powers.
Of course, we have
to be very careful.
If there are some
anthropologists here,
they will tell you that
these tribal entities, they
all can be considered as a
kind of a center by themselves
vis-a-vis the central
government in Tehran
or in the other
provincial centers.
But nevertheless,
this was, as it
has been ever since perhaps
the 11th century onwards,
these tribal powers always
played a very important part
as they came to
take over the power
of the central
government, including
the Qajars themselves, to
some extent the Safavids.
The Safavids although pretty
much the actual dynasty
were urbanized, or to
some extent urbanized,
it was backed by these
great Turkish forces that
came and paid their homage
and loyalty to the Safavids
as [PERSIAN],, tribes or
imagined tribes who came
to the service of the Safavids.
So in that regard, also,
there is an internal tension
in the system between
what may be called
the periphery and the center.
And that goes back.
If you are interested,
for instance,
in Shahnameh
Ferdowsi, you will see
this division between the center
and periphery is already there.
It's references to "bum o bar."
"Bum" is always a
reference to the center.
"Bar" is always a
reference to the frontier.
Or "marz o bum,"
that Persians would
use as a term in
reference to their land,
but nevertheless
there is a distinction
between the frontier
and the center.
OK, the first one, which
I missed to point out,
also is a trend that if you
go back into mythology of Iran
also is present, there
is always an Iran,
and there is always an Aniran.
There is a land.
"A" in Pahlavi means "non."
So Aniran, the land
which is not Iran.
Usually associated with
Turan in its northwest
and mythological geography
of the Shahnameh.
And that also is a
kind of representative
of this tension from abroad
with the land of Iran.
So there is always a distinction
of Iran as an entity.
And there is always
a distinction
of Iran as a frontier.
Back to the idea of how this
book was written if we started
with the point of departure
and a little bit looked at how
these major themes in
the history of Iran
persisted more or less
after the 20th century,
and I would like to go
back to that as well.
This question of methodology
always preoccupied me.
Anybody who wants to
write a long history
or a history of a long period
of time has to deal with this.
There is a famous saying
by Arnold Toynbee,
a famous historian in the
first part of the 20th century.
These days, probably
nobody reads
his book, A Study of History,
but once it was very popular.
At least in my youth, it
was one of the things that
seemed to be some kind of a key
to the understanding of world
history, when these
things were very popular.
He said somewhat mockingly
about his own work,
once he was asked
how you approach
the history of this vast
civilization, rise and fall
of these civilizations.
He said, "History is nothing but
one damned fact after another."
So that may be indeed the case.
We write history as one
damned thing after another.
That's the destiny
of the historians.
But perhaps the
important thing is
to try to come up with
some kind of a pattern that
would make sense of how these
events over this long period
of time make sense.
And that is also with the
arrival of deconstructionism
in the 20th century has
been also questioning.
When I started teaching at
Yale, the history department
was a solid follower of this
tradition of historiography
that believed in this kind of
a Cartesian idea of the thesis
and synthesis that you
have to have some idea.
You have to have
some conclusions.
Nowadays, most historians
of a younger generation
have questions about that
kind of overarching argument.
And that makes our job a
little bit more difficult.
It made my job easier,
I must say, in the sense
that I tried not to write
a political history only,
not to write also a
socioeconomic history, which
was very popular to write
in the 1960s and '70s
and perhaps up to the 1980s.
I tried not to write a
diplomatic history either.
And I tried to, in effect,
combine all of these
and break the barriers
between these various genres
of history.
Economic history, political
history, social history,
and indeed cultural history.
Which is, I think, one aspect
of this book that distinctly
may be different from other
accounts that are very capably
written by other historians.
Here I have tried to
blend into my narrative
a great deal about the
cultural life of Iran,
both the high culture and
the popular culture, both
the material culture
and the way literal
and artistic aspects of
Iran's very rich history.
So in a sense, I blended it
because the political history
of Iran over the past 500
years, with very few exceptions,
is a sad history.
It's a tragic
history in a sense.
What I've used in my
introduction, in my preface,
with reference to Forough
Farrokhzad verse that
is translated as
"a sorrowful stroll
in the garden of memory."
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
So this memory in this Iranian
context is very important.
It's very lasting.
These ideas that Iran,
over a long period of time,
incorporated in its psyche,
at the expense of saying
these kind of things that
historians may question,
but it became part and
parcel of this sense
of Iran's view of the past.
Of which actually
the idea of decline
becomes more and more
strong in the course
of the 19th and 20th
century, as Iran becomes
exposed to European
powers and witnessed
its military, economic,
technological advances
the sense that Iran is no longer
is the center of the world,
and it's no longer
a powerful empire
that it was always proud
of, but is in a sense
a marginalized nation
that is sitting
between two great empires
in the 19th century.
So culture plays an
important part in
how I try to put
the story together,
not only because Iran
has a rich culture
but also because it's
a key in many respects
to try to understand a more
subtle and the less accessible
dimensions of
Iran's history that
the political historiography
does not provide us with.
Particularly poetry.
Poetry, as you might know, is a
very dear and a very important
part of Persian
language and development
of Persian language and
culture for centuries.
But it also carries
a message with it,
beyond its literal beauty if
you read it against the grain,
particularly in
more modern poetry,
you would find
always a message that
can be defined as a
message of dissent
or a message of protest.
And that also in the 19th
century, early 20th century,
certainly after the
constitutional revolution,
and more so in the
decades of the 1950s.
With the new poetry,
more and more
adopted a kind of a
political message of dissent,
political message
of disillusionment
and resentment
against the failures
that Iran witnessed over
the course of the 2 and 1/2
revolutions.
One might say, from the
Constitutional Revolution,
the period of the national
movement of the 1940s and '50s
that's usually referred
to as the Mosaddegh era,
and an attempt to
try to reassert
Iran's economic
sovereignty, and of course,
the revolution of 1979.
So in this respect
also, poetry has a place
in the way that we can speak
somewhat in language, as I
would call it, a kind of
personalized interpretation
of history.
Again, a verse from
Rumi comes to mind.
Although I don't claim that I've
been as anarchistic as he is,
in his putting the
stories together,
but he has a very famous
verse in the story
of Moses and the Shepherd boy.
How many of you have
read that story?
OK, fair enough.
Sure.
That God says to Moses to
say to the shepherd boy,
I leave you to actually read
the whole history on your own.
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
God says, "Don't seek any
arrangements or formalities.
Say whatever your
sorrowed heart desires."
As a matter of fact, something
of that motivational aspect
is also reflected in this book.
As I said in its preface,
it's a history with attitude.
And many people ask me,
what do you mean by that?
What is history with attitude?
And I think part of it is that
what your sorrowful heart will
tell you, you would reflect.
And that is, as I said,
probably my order is not--
I still think that there
is an order in this book.
But this idea was in my
mind when I was reading it--
when I was writing it.
And nowadays when I read it.
OK.
Also, writing this
kind of a longue duree
in European history,
particularly
in the middle decades
of the 20th century
became very popular
in the French school
called the School of Annales.
These are the historians that
paid a great deal of attention
to the long term processes
that happened, particularly
in the economy, in the material
culture of European French,
in particular Spanish and
French around the Mediterranean,
these attracted much attention
by very remarkable researchers,
historians of that time.
Braudel is probably the
most well known example
of that school.
And I've been interested and
influenced, to some extent,
by the way the trends that the
Annales School has produced.
Yet there is a difference.
In the Annales School, you
don't see very many men.
You see things.
You see trends of economy.
You see the change in
the material culture
in terms of the trade and the
commodities, the technology,
the development of technology,
how the ships were built,
how it was different,
the way that it was built
in Europe with the
way that it was built
in China in the 16th century
that brought about a revolution
in navigation, and
indeed provided
all the grounds
for European powers
to take advantage and
create a global network
with the Portuguese
and the Spaniards,
and the Dutch and the British
all basically benefited
from that.
Yes, these are very important.
But for me, also humans
are very important.
So I also try to blend into this
some kind of, one might say,
biographical details about
quite a number of figures.
Every few pages, you
come across somebody.
And it's fun to write
about individuals,
because you can take all
your revenge against them
and write, particularly
if they are not alive.
I try to be a little
more careful for those
who are still with us.
And again, this is the third.
As I told you,
Rumi must have been
preoccupied with how to organize
his own six books of Masnavi.
So again, the same
introduction, he says--
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
So translation-- "The
secret of the beloved
is best to be told in the
stories of the others."
So by giving some kind
of biographical details,
there is an attempt to try to
follow these long term trends.
If you write about the life
of Abbas I, Shah Abbas,
if you write about the
life of Nader or the life
of Qurrat-ul-'Ayn, or the
life of Muhammad Reza Shah.
All of these figures
appear, and more
significant than all of
them of course, Reza Shah,
appear throughout the
pages of this account.
And in this respect,
I hope that I
have been able to provide a
certain complexity, in terms
of trends in economic and
political long term trends,
as well as the life
of the individuals
and make it much more
tangible, writing about poets,
writing about, to the
extent that it was possible,
about painters,
musicians, and a number
of figures that
I think really is
one of the greatest
achievements of Iran
over the past 500
years, a longer history,
as a matter of fact.
Now, how much time do we have?
Half an hour.
Half an hour?
Oh, good.
All right, then.
So let us-- after talking about
these kind of preliminaries,
I hope I'm not making you
worried about the fact
that we are in the
preliminaries still,
but I thought one way
of approaching this
after many attempts to try to
talk as compact as possible, is
to try to really read in reverse
about the history of Iran.
Not to start from 1501, but
actually to start from 1979.
The question that my
editor put me first,
there are certain
characteristics
in the revolution of 1979.
Although it eventually
adopted the rubric
of an Islamic revolution,
it was much more than that.
For one thing, it
is a revolution
that, from the
perspective of a historian
comes after, as I pointed out,
two, perhaps 1 and 1/2 or two
revolutions earlier on.
And it's very few
countries in the world
that experienced two revolutions
in the course of one century.
Perhaps the only other
country that comes to my mind
is China, which in many respects
actually shares the same issues
as Iran does.
It's a country that
maintains its sovereignty
in a very difficult time, in
the most precarious way, as Iran
did.
And it's a country
that also goes
through a, relatively speaking,
liberal Constitutional
Revolution at the
beginning of the century.
And in the 1940s, 1947, '48,
the communist revolution
that brought Mao and
the communist regime
to power in China.
In Iran, that did not happen,
but it could have happened.
I mean, along the
same lines, Iran
could have witnessed the
same kind of a destiny.
The question is, why is it
that Iran faces this long term
revolution, these long
term kind of convulsions
that lead to revolution?
If you look at the objectives
of the Constitutional Revolution
in the early 20th century,
there are several.
It's one liberal
democracy, the creation
of a more plural popular
representation, parliament
and constitution,
equality before the law,
a sense of social justice,
all of these grand objectives
that the Constitutional
Revolution
in a rather, I would
say, innocently
presented at that time.
I would call it an
innocent revolution.
Compared to many of the bloody
and violent revolutions,
the Constitutional Revolution
had a much more kind of dear
and innocent aspect in it.
Anybody who reads any of the
narratives of that period
probably would agree with me.
Or perhaps that's how
I would glorify it.
It also looked for a
sense of social justice
that is in effect
reflected in the idea
that Iranian society is
suffering from backwardness
and decline vis-a-vis
the European powers
because the means of progress
has been denied to Iran.
Of which probably the ideas
such as public education,
more centralization of the
state, , more, in a sense,
accountability of the state
to the citizens were all part
and parcel of it.
I'm sure there are
many that know more
about many aspects of this.
But this set of ideas that were
not necessarily very political
sometimes took
the advantage or--
I'm sorry, not the
advantage, but took
a much more of an
important place
than the idea of
political reform
and democratic institutions
as Iran more and more
face in the years after
1911, or actually from 1906
onward, the pressure
from the European powers
on its frontiers.
It's interesting to see that
the revolution, Constitutional
Revolution of 1906
to 1911, coincided
with the famous secret agreement
of 1907 between the two powers,
between Russia and Britain,
that actually divided Iran
in a polite language
into zones of influence.
And that led in
the years following
to basically the
collapse of at least
the political objectives of
the Constitutional Revolution.
It brought about the occupation
of the whole of northern Iran
by Russia, which would be from
1909 onwards, 1908 onwards,
really, during the civil war
between the nationalists--
between the constitutionalists
and the royalists.
Russia became very supportive
of the government in power,
the Wajar Qajar
Dynasty as opposed
to the Iranian
constitutionalists.
This is one aspect that we would
see contributed to this desire,
particularly in the course
of the First World War,
for greater stability,
for basically
a trade off between the
democratization of Iran
and the stabilization of Iran.
As Iran witnesses more and
more pressure, economically
in a terrible state.
Its economy basically
was shattered
because of foreign
occupation and because
of the internal turmoil,
famine, diseases that probably
destroyed more than at least
1/5 of Iran's population of 10
million at the time.
So these are disasters,
and the fear that soon Iran
is going to be divided between
these two zones of influence.
And particularly
the discovery of oil
in the Khuzestan
province in the south
further served as an incentive
for the British government
to actually put a
greater emphasis
on the protection of the
southern provinces of Iran.
Not only the Persian
Gulf, which always
was considered as part of the
master plan of preservation
of the Indian Empire,
British Empire in India,
but also the new oil
resources that were discovered
all around the same time, 1908.
The Constitutional
Revolution is 1906.
The agreement between
the two powers is 1907.
The discovery of oil is 1908.
It's an incredible
coincidence that
did not work in Iran's favor.
Well, it worked in
certain respects.
It did not work
in other respects.
Perhaps by 1917-- that's again
something very remarkable--
if it wasn't because of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,
perhaps Iran would have been
actually fragmented or divided
between the two powers.
It was just a miracle that
the 1917 revolution in Russia,
which has such a bad press over
the course of time, in Iran
was welcomed greatly
as a liberating force.
And of course the fact that
many of the concessions
were given in the 19th century
by the Qajar government
was repealed.
And as a matter of--
Iran welcomed what was happening
in Russia before knowing
what is going on inside.
You know, has an idea
from the outside.
So saying all of
that, these trends
in the Constitutional
Revolution that
favored a more stablized,
more strong central state
welcomed come the rise of
a kind of a savior type
in the person of Reza Khan, who
basically had a message, if you
want a strong state,
forget about democracy,
but allow us, me and my
cohorts and supporters
and the military
officers who supported
him to try to fulfill the
nonpolitical objectives
of the Constitutional
Revolution.
It's not a surprise to see
that throughout the 1920s
and '30s, Reza Shah, in
a very systematic way--
Reza Khan and then Reza Shah--
very systematic
fashion basically
materializes much that has
been said in the constitution--
much that has been desired in
the Constitutional Revolution.
Public education, number one.
This is modern education in
the form of modern schools.
Better communication with
the Trans-Iranian railroad,
creation of a
network of roads that
made the power of the
center much more easily
available, and much easier
exerted in the provinces,
creation of a united army.
That happened in the earlier
years of the Reza Shah era.
And for that matter, creation
of a modern judiciary system
in the European model.
A modern financial
system by creating a more
centralized taxation
that earlier on
had failed, several
attempts that were made.
Well, the question is,
is this all the ingenuity
of Reza Khan that brought
about all of this change,
or what happened that made
this a successful effort?
Partly, it's due not entirely,
because in history it's
hard, very difficult to say
there is one factor that
brought about the
success or failure of one
or the other regime
or a project.
In this case, perhaps the fact
that Iran started to benefit
from around 1920, '21 a
portion of the revenue from
the Anglo-Iranian--
Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
Although a majority of
it went to the company
and to the British, 16%--
of course even that 16% was
questionable, how much of it
the Iranian government
really received.
But whatever it received, it
was important in financing
this process of centralisation.
Not the only one.
As some probably would know,
the Trans-Iranian railroad
was created by taxation on
sugar and on tobacco and tea,
that people paid individually
in order to make it possible.
But nevertheless, the revenue
from the oil reserves of Iran
is the beginning of what I would
call an extracting economy,
an economy that depends
on the resources
from underground,
natural resources,
in this case petroleum,
that allows the state
to create much stronger
a apparatus for control,
a much more powerful state than
ever Iran had seen in the past.
And as a matter of fact,
not only a greater degree
of reform from the top, but a
greater degree of repression
from the top.
So that's the great
dichotomy or the duality
of the early Pahlavi period, for
that matter the entire Pahlavi
period, that on the one hand,
it's the reforms from the top,
on the other hand, it's the
repression from the top.
And this duality greatly, over
the course of the 20th century,
from the 1920s to
the 1990s, 1970s
with the revolution
of 1979 was there.
And of course, afterwards
from what we see,
this strong state
is still there.
There is not much of a change in
that regard between the Pahlavi
state and the Islamic republic.
It still benefits from
the natural resources,
for not being accountable
to its own subjects,
to its own people,
to its own citizens.
It still manages to bring
about a degree of stability
within the country that
probably is missing
from many of its neighbors.
So in that regard, it's
also the same characteristic
of the Pahlavi era.
But this did not
answer the question,
and that's the last point
I would like to make.
What kind of a chemistry allowed
that kind of a transformation
from a seemingly very
powerful Pahlavi centralized
state to what we see as the
rise of a popular revolution
in 1979, which brought
millions of people
in the streets saying
"Death to the Shah
and to the Pahlavi regime."
The answer to that
is rather complex,
but in a few sentences if
I just want to sum it up,
One is the fact that part of the
Pahlavi attempt, particularly
in the 1920s and '30s
to try to modernize
the Iranian social
and educational system
was greatly at the expense of
the religious establishment
of Iran.
Remember that one of the major
themes in the history of Iran
is this collaboration,
or alliance, or symbiosis
between the religious
establishment and the state.
There's an old theory that
goes back to the Sassanian era
that the state and the religious
establishment are twin sisters.
That's usually referred to.
As a matter of fact, if
you look at the cover--
no, I cannot move around.
Can you bring me a
copy of that book?
OK, there we are.
There's some damage.
OK.
All right.
This is from one of
the arch verandahs
of the Vakil Mosque in Shiraz.
That was actually built
not in the Zand period
but in the early Qajar
period under Fath-Ali Shah.
This particular tile
work that you see,
it's a very curious one,
because you cannot see very many
pictorial images in the tile
work of the earlier times.
Here you see there are two
trees that are intertwined here
in the center of this beautiful
tile work that you see.
Well, it can be
interpreted in many ways.
Who knows what the
artist wanted to do
or his patron asked him to do?
Which was actually one of the
princes of the Fath-Ali Shah
royal family who ruled over
the Fars province, Hossein Ali
Mirza.
But it can be interpreted
that this duality
of the state and the
religious establishment,
being in the middle
and the major entrance
into the Mosque of Vakil.
May I?
OK, then.
But it can also be interpreted
as this kind of duality
about which I have talked,
the duality between the center
and periphery, the duality
between Iran and Aniran,
non-Iran, duality
or tension between
the religious establishment
and the political authority.
Or for that matter, one that
they haven't had much chance
to talk about, between the
court and the administration,
and the [PERSIAN] and
divan, or between the kings
and ministers.
This is an unresolved problem in
the Iranian political culture,
that in certain respects
persisted up to the present.
If you look at the case of
Mosaddegh versus the Shah,
it's a very good example
of that in the 1950s.
If you look back, the
more severe example
is the example of Amir Kabir
versus Naser Al-Din Shah,
and how the ministerial
power eventually
was eliminated or subordinated
by the power of the court.
And how you would see even today
the same phenomenon persists,
all these disgraced prime
ministers and presidents
of the Islamic republic one
after the other in a sense are
representing that kind of an
executive power that cannot act
independently and with a certain
sovereignty from the power
of the Supreme Leader, who
claims this kind of a divine
authority.
As the kings of the
Iranian past have always
claim that there is a
charisma that has been granted
to them from a divine source.
That kind of a tension
remained unresolved.
And Iran is not
the only country.
Most of Europe in
premodern times
resulted in
revolutions, including
the French Revolution,
to be resolved.
But in the Iranian
case, that seems
to be a very powerful factor.
But that was not the
answer to the point
that I raised earlier on.
The process of modernization
in the Pahlavi era,
particularly in the
early Pahlavi era,
basically marginalized the
religious establishment
that had a great prestige
influence, presence ever
since the Safavid period.
This is an invention basically
of the Safavid Empire.
And that's part
of the reason why
we go back so early to talk
about the establishment
of Shi'ism and the creation
of the mujtahid establishment
in Iran ever since
the 16th century.
By the 20th century,
Reza Shah basically
took away from the religious
establishment not only
the educational system.
That was their monopoly.
It was only the
madrasahs who would
be able to educate people in
sciences, generally referred
to as religious sciences.
It took away from them the
judiciary with all the courts.
That was almost
entirely-- at least
the civil law was
under the control
of the religious establishment.
It took away from them much
of their religious endowments.
That is the awqaf, that
for a very long time, ever
since the Safavid
period, was specified,
was earmarked for
the preservation
of religious
institutions that were
under the control of the
religious establishment.
And finally, their
control over the mosques.
In effect, basically there were
so many forms of competition
to the congregation of
the mosques that gradually
lost its centrality,
particularly
for the Iranian middle classes,
as the Pahlavi political--
as the Pahlavi
educational system
basically created a new
secular middle class,
particularly in
the bigger cities,
that were not so loyal
or bound with the idea
of the mosque and the
religious establishment.
However, these all
in a sense added
to the isolation
of the what they
would refer to now
as [SPEAKING PERSIAN]
and push them back
into their madrasahs.
In addition to that, gave
them a new weapon, in effect,
as opposed to the
reforming Pahlavi state,
by appealing, first
of all, to the bazaar.
That also was a partial victim
of Pahlavi modernization.
As the economy of
the bazaar became
greatly affected by the
introduction of new industries,
by the introduction of new
trade, that part of it,
although it was still
physically within the bazaar
but it was not contributing
to the economy of the bazaar.
So as I would refer, this
as another major dichotomy
in Iranian history, the
relationship between the mosque
and between the meydan,
the square, and the bazaar.
Meydan usually in the
control of the state, bazaar
in the control of
the merchant class.
This tension was
further accelerated
in the Pahlavi period, and
as a result brought a greater
alliance, if you
like to call it,
between those classes within
the bazaar, particularly
the lower ranks within
the bazaar who were not
the beneficiary of the Pahlavi
state, who came to support
the religious establishment
in the decades
after the Second World
War in particular.
So we would see
that already there
is a ground for
greater mobilization
beyond the madrasah
and the small group
of the religious seminarians,
the [PERSIAN] who
no longer belonged, much of
them, to the bigger cities
but came from the
smaller cities,
were from the countryside,
from the villages.
They were very different.
These people who now you
see in power, many of them
were the product of these
lower middle classes, less
privileged classes that still
had an appeal for them to send
their children to madrasah.
Which, in effect, if you look
back a decade earlier or two,
you see many of the
children of the mujtahids,
high ranking mujtahids,
of the aristocracy
of the religious establishment,
changed and became
[SPEAKING PERSIAN].
You see, they changed
their religious dress
and became modernized and
came to the bureaucracy
of the state.
This shift also played
a very important part
for allowing the message
of militancy of the mosques
now to be to be expressed
to larger audiences
that the mullahs, as
generally we refer to them,
found mostly in the
margins of the cities,
when most of the people
from the countryside
emigrated to the cities.
Why they came to
the cities, that
was also the result
of a major development
in the latter part of the 20th
century-- the land reform.
That's not wholly eliminated
the landed landlord classes that
were the backbone in certain
respects of the Pahlavi regime,
but also the surplus population
of the countryside who
no longer could
sustain this growing
population of the
villagers to move
into the cities
for a better life.
If you have the Literacy
Corps, the Sipah-e Danesh,
and you have the Health Corps
that goes to the countryside,
the outcome of it
is a better rate
of child survival, a larger
population, antibiotics,
clinics, more doctors.
And therefore the growth
in the population,
Iran in terms of a
demographic change,
actually witnessed a
demographic revolution
in the course of the 1960s
to 1990s, to 2000, really,
that included the revolution.
So this provided that kind
of the multi-tools that
could listen in the mosques in
the margins of the big cities
to the message of the
religious establishment,
a message that no
longer could be
establishment,
anti-establishment
as a matter of fact.
A message that was
largely tinkered together
from the ideologies of the
left, from the ideologies
of anti-western that Iran
internalized as a result
of the experiences of the First
World War, the Second World
War, the coup of 1953.
All of this is in
effect bound up in order
to create this narrative
of anti-western Islam
of which comes the great
Satan and death to America
after revolutionary times.
So the ideology is
an ideology that
is the product of people
like Shariati, Al-e-Ahmad,
probably some of the
ideologies of the extreme left
or the guerrilla movements
that were active in Iran
and indeed revitalized
and kind of secularized
the sense of sacrifice and
victimization and martyrdom.
And that actually
was glorified further
in the course of
the revolution as it
was more incorporated
into the message
of the religious establishment,
who very successfully managed
to incorporate all of
this to their own message
and appeal almost
instantaneously in the course
of the revolution.
Why it managed to
actually succeed
vis-a-vis a very
powerful state that
was the Pahlavi the
state is in my opinion,
as I've tried to
argue in this book,
is largely due to the
fact, if not entirely,
largely due to the fact
that the Pahlavi regime
in my opinion rather
unwisely, foolishly
closed all the other
possible avenues
of secular moderate
opposition in the course,
particularly after 1953 onwards.
So reliance with the support
of the United States partly,
reliance on the sense
of self-adulation
or glorification
of the monarchy led
to this kind of a greater
alienation of a population
that even the security
services of the Shah's era,
including the SAVAK,
basically ignored.
Or if it paid any
attention, it was always
marginalized by this grand image
of the monarchy and the Shah
himself, about which Dr.
Milani has written much more
extensively than I did.
These in effect left
the mosques as the only
possible alternative
for expression
of political dissent, for
any kind of a protest,
for reflection of a
sense of dissatisfaction
that, relatively speaking,
like everything else,
is just relative.
People in the Pahlavi era wanted
more housing, more schools,
better standard of life.
And in effect, all
of this reflected
in these mass movements that
came about and the memory
of the revolution
that had remained
unanswered for close
to a whole century.
Thank you.
As you can see, the
title of my talk
is In Search of Modern Iran.
It's actually rather curious
that at the end of the talk,
I'm saying what is the title.
And I called it "The
challenges and rewards
of writing about half a
millennium of Iranian history."
You heard some of it.
So this was the initial
title of the book.
My publisher decided that
it's not strong enough,
so they convinced
me that it should
be Iran: A Modern History.
But the theme is the same.
As a matter of fact, it had a
subtitle of authority, memory,
and nationhood, which I
thought is a nice combination,
but they also said
these days no subtitles.
Is it on or is it--
oh, says on.
OK.
Well, I start from really
the Qajar era onwards.
One of the earliest images
that you can see here
shows Agha Mohammad
Khan in a famous battle,
a famous campaign in
Kerman, when he virtually
destroyed the remnants
of the Zand Dynasty
in a very brutal
fashion, in which there's
stories about 70,000
people who were blinded.
At least if not 70,000 people,.
A large number were
with him of that,
because Kerman was
considered a pro-Zand city.
Here you can see
him with the crown,
that actually at the
time he didn't have,
but the painter actually granted
him the [PERSIAN] at the time.
I brought this is in order
to emphasize the sense
of the center versus periphery.
Once power establishes
in the center,
it has the job of basically
pacifying the periphery.
Reza Shah did the
same, perhaps not
with the same
degree of brutality
but with a much stronger
modernized army.
The same as about here.
You would see Agha Mohammad Khan
Qajar and Hajji Ibrahim Khan
Shirazi E'temad Al-Dawla,
who was the first equivalent
of prime minister,
the chief minister,
the sadr'azam of
Agha Mohammad Khan.
I brought this in
order to show you
this interaction
between the center,
between the kingship and the
divan as the chief minister
representing the administration
of the state and the King
representing the total
authority, military usually,
but it's also associated
with this long tradition
of Persian kingship,
the Shahanshahi
that also the Qajars quickly
adopted Agha Mohammad Khan.
Here we can see that
this is Fath-Ali Shah,
and he's shown in a rock
carving in Cheshmeh-Ali near Rey
in southern Tehran,
but he's actually
surrounded by some of the
princes of the royal family,
on the right and the
left, who are in a sense
representing the state in
this guarded domain of Iran
in various provinces,
including Abbas Mirza
as being one of them.
He was the viceroy
of the Azerbaijan
province in the north.
You see also-- is it
this one for pointing?
Oh yes, here it is.
You see also the authority of
the chief minister here being
shown on the right.
So it always has a place.
And remember, this is
the time that rock relief
for the first time was
reintroduced to Iran
ever since the Sassanian era.
There are very, very
few rock reliefs
of the Islamic period because
of the ban on producing images.
As a matter of fact,
as you can see here,
the showing of the prime
minister versus the king
is an old idea that also comes
from the Sassanid period.
The presence of the religious
establishment as two examples
that I wanted to show you,
they generally are not pictured
in the service of the ruler,
because they maintained
a certain distance
from the state
and considered any
kind of a service
to the state as an anathema.
Nevertheless, they were
supporters of the state.
There was a kind of
a de facto division
of labor between the state and
the religious establishment.
The one on the left is Mullah
Muhammad-Baqer Majlesi,
the famous theologian
of the late Safavid
period responsible for actually
the actual popularization
of Shi'ism in the course
of the 18th century.
And on the right is the famous
mujtahid of Isfahan, Mullah
Muhammad-Baqer Al-Shafti, known
as Hojatoleslam before the days
that the title of Hojatoleslam
was debased to the level
that it is now.
He was the only
other Hojatoleslam
was known in the Shi'i
world at the time.
And even then, some
of his colleagues
were angry with the introduction
of this title, which previously
was that of the Mahdi,
the Twelfth Imam.
He was enormously powerful in
the golden age of muhtahids,
as it's sometimes been referred
to in the late Fath-Ali Shah
and throughout the
Muhammad Shah era.
And the state patronage
of religious institutions,
here in the city of Kashan,
you can see two examples.
The one on the left.
The one on the left is
the Soltani madrasah,
built by the order of
Fath-Ali Shah commissioned
by Hajji Muhammad
Hossein Sadr Isfanhani,
the famous chief minister
of Fath-Ali Shah era.
During the period of the
reconstruction of Iran
after the wars of
the 18th century
is, again, another aspect
that many people don't
want to give credit
to the Qajars
with massive
agricultural projects,
massive architecture
projects that they carried.
That's one example of it, 1840.
The one on the right is the
magnificent Agha Bozorg mosque
and madrasah in
Kashan, commissioned
by the order of Muhammad Shah
in honor of the Naraqi family,
particularly Muhammad
Mahdi Naraqi around 1840
and completed around 1849.
Another homage to
the significance
of the religious class as it
was respected and acknowledged
by the state.
More examples of
popularization of Shi'ism.
As you can see in this
fresco, the Story of Karbala
in Takkiyeh-e Moshir
in Shiraz in the 1870s,
unfortunately now a
state of disrepair
under the Islamic Republic,
believe it or not.
Some of the tiles,
apparently, from what I know,
has been stolen from this very,
very famous Takkiyeh in Shiraz.
This is significant,
because as a matter of fact,
one can identify a distinction
between the high Shi'ism
of the madrasah and the ulama
and the study of jurisprudence
and the Shari'ah and the low--
I don't want to use-- more
popular form of Shi'ism
in which the stories of Hossein
and Karbala were central.
And it's usually out
of this tradition
that you see many of
movements of dissent
in the earlier period shaped.
For instance, we can see that
many of the origins of the Babi
movement in the
19th century goes
back really to this more
popular, passionate martyrdom
tradition of Shi'ism
that was somewhat
distinct from the
religion of the mujtahids.
By the early 19th century, as
you can see in this painting
by a Persian painter unknown,
showing Fath-Ali Shah receiving
gifts from Captain John
Malcolm and his mission
in Tehran in 1800,
that's the first mission
in the course of the
19th century that
was sent by the
British government,
actually by the East
India Company in India,
British India, to try
to strengthen relations
with Qajar Iran at a time
when still Qajar Iran had
the prestige of being the most
important power in the region
and the British felt that
the support of the Qajars
was quite important for greater
stability in the peripheries
of colonial India.
The idea of Iran versus Aniran,
as you can see in this painting
from Shahanshahnameh of Fath-Ali
Khan Saba that was composed
in the age of Fath-Ali Shah,
shows Fath-Ali Shah in battle
with the Russians.
This is one of
the campaigns that
was fought in 1805 in which
Iran was relatively successful.
And this was very much glorified
in the narrative of the Qajar
period.
This was the real Aniran
for Iran at this time.
And what was the outcome?
There are several paintings
about this particular episode
in the book.
I just showed one of them here.
This is the time
when Iran, defeated
in the war with Russia, the
second round, and the Treaty
of Turkmenchay was concluded
as a result of which Iran
was supposed to give war
indemnity to Russia in millions
of rubles.
That basically bankrupted
the Iranian regime
and bankrupted its
very credit in terms
of its political legitimacy.
What you will see here,
there is this scale
hanging from the ceiling.
This is gold being
weighed in the presence
of the representatives of the
czarist Russia and Iranian
representatives
on the other side,
then packed here and sent
off to St. Petersburg.
So it's very moving.
There's a whole set
of these paintings.
OK.
This shows-- I tried
to show you something
of the contrast between
the meydan and the bazaar.
This is of course, as
many of you recognize,
this is the meydan in
Naqsh-e Jahan, which
today is misappropriated
as Meydan-e
Khomeini against all Islamic
restrictions of not naming
charity endowments
in a different name.
So you see this is a
painting of the 17th century.
It shows a very different
kind of an arrangement,
as you can see from the
bazaar, in which you
have the [SPEAKING PERSIAN]
on the left.
You have the royal
chapel of Lotfollah--
[SPEAKING PERSIAN] Sheikh
Lotfollah on the right.
And the Shah Mosque here
that you cannot see,
and the entry to
the bazaar here.
[INAUDIBLE]
So this kind of a
combination of four elements
was a symbolic kind of
architecture of the period.
More about that in the book.
That's what it is today.
That's a replication
of that in Tehran.
When the Qajars
built the mosque,
Shah Mosque that again was
renamed as the Khomeini
Mosque in today's Iran in the
entrance to the Tehran bazaar.
And basically functioning the
two sides, on the one side
is the entrance to the
mosque and eventually
leading into the bazaar.
And on the other side is
the side of the meydan
that you would see the
representation of the state.
Here, this is the entry to the
Arg of Tehran around the 1840s
and with the new army that was
trained in order to provide
some new defenses,
modern defenses for Iran
against the threats
mostly of the Russians
but also the interiors.
The economy, the
change of the economy
is also very remarkable
in this period.
Iran gradually shifted in
its greater incorporation
into the world economy to try
to provide some commodities
in order to be able to sell
to the international market.
And of which tobacco and
opium were the most important.
Opium was the biggest
revenue earner
for Iran in the 19th century.
Much of it was exported,
some for medicinal purposes
to Europe, but much of it was
actually exported to China
as a result of the famous
British Opium Wars in China
that opened the markets for
the import of opium into China
and greater addiction
for the general public.
Iranians, as you
can see here, there
was a whole industry of
processing the opium.
This is the role of
poppies that will
turn into the kind of
a processed [PERSIAN]
in order to be able--
the opium to be sold
to the international market
in which Europeans played
a part, an important part.
This I always thought
is a British guy,
but it turned out
to be a Frenchman.
And the Constitutional
Revolution of 1906,
I included this one
to show you how much
the popular involvement
in the revolution
was contrary to virtually any
other revolutions in the Middle
East at that time.
The Young Turks Revolution
or 1919 in Egypt or whatever,
none of them had that
kind of representation
of the ordinary people
showing up and demanding.
This one, of all the
places, is happening
in the British legation
in Tehran in July of 1906.
It's a postcard.
At the time it became popular to
try to produce these postcards.
This one, as you can see, is the
clothier guild, senf-e bazzaz,
as it was in the 1906 sanctuary.
Or after the defeat of the
royalists and the success,
one of the very few successes
of the constitutionalists
in the Civil War of 1908, 1909
when they took over Tehran.
As you can see at the top,
it says [SPEAKING PERSIAN],,
these were the three
forces, the Qashqais,
the forces from Gilan,
and the forces from Tabriz
that were actually
brought together
in order to provide a
certain degree of discipline
in the revolutionary
Tehran of 1909.
And at the top of it, it says--
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
"Long lives the Majles."
the national
constituent assembly.
And "Long live the
national soldiers of Iran."
I wanted to use this as
the cover of my book.
My publisher didn't like it.
So of course, the rise of
Reza Shah, already Reza Khan.
The way that it
kind of symbolically
stands out in the midst
of all these groups,
the man on his left is Muhammad
Hassan Mirza, the last--
the last of whatever.
Crown prince.
Crown prince--
thank you so much--
of Qajar period and some of
the courtiers of that time.
It's actually somewhat-- the
contrast is very interesting,
that this is a Cossack
officer in a Cossack
appearance, largely Cossack.
Somewhat changed after 1921,
but still very military
in the midst of all
this old Qajar nobility.
And that is what brought to
Iran that kind of unification
of a unified army,
relatively unified.
Because what you see here on
the right with the skin red cap,
these are the gendarme
forces that were not yet
fully incorporated into
the unified army of Iran.
But the cossacks, as you
can see some of the officers
are still pretty much
clad like the cossacks.
This is one of the
four armies that were--
Iran divided into four regions.
There were four armies.
This is the army of the
south, Lashkar-e Jonub.
That was responsible not
only for the pacification
of much of Lorestan, much of the
Bakhtiari, much of the Qashqai,
but further south
towards control of Iran,
of the entire Khuzestan.
That's probably the greatest
challenge in the early Pahlavi
period and a great
credit, actually,
to Reza Shah, that contrary
to all the pressure
by the British government
of not doing so,
took over the
Khuzestan province,
and in sense was reassertion
of the Iranian sovereignty
over the south.
Or the first public appearance
of the unveiled women
in Shiraz around 1930s, part of
the cultural policies of Reza
Shah that virtually forced
much of the growing Iranian
bureaucracy, the officers and
as well as the civil servants,
to bring the women unveiled
into a public gathering.
That's the one in
Shiraz, very early.
Or the theme of the
reconstructed Iranian
nationalism in the
Reza Shah period,
in Nader Shah, despite
all these horrors
that Iran witnessed
in his era, became
a great hero and a savior
of which Reza Khan basically
was a revival, was
based on the model
of Reza Khan-- of Nader Shah,
probably early Nader Shah.
What is somewhat interesting
about this painting,
of this pictorial rug
from Ravar in Kerman,
is the fact that some of you
may recognize that everything
about it is Qajar.
This is basically Fath-Ali Shah
on his throne of Takht-e Tavus.
But what has happened
to Fath-Ali Shah
is that his head was
actually decapitated
and the head of Nader Shah
was placed in its stead.
So in a sense, it was a kind
of a humorous ironic way
that the Qajars have
now been basically
left out of the narrative
of the early Pahlavi period.
There is much more,
but we don't have time.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
