Intellectuals and Opposition in the 1960s–70s

Between the crushing of the June 1963 uprising and the first open protests of 1977, opposition to Mohammad Reza Shah survived mainly in books, lecture halls and underground cells. Writers such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and religious thinkers such as Ali Shariati gave a generation of students a language of protest, while small guerrilla groups took up arms from 1971. None of them could defeat the state, but together they shaped the ideas of the revolution of 1978–79.

After 1963: legal politics closed down

The early 1960s had seen a brief opening. The Second National Front, heirs of Mosaddegh, held rallies, and in 1961 Mehdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani founded the Freedom Movement of Iran (نهضت آزادی), which joined nationalism to a modern reading of Shi’i Islam. After the shah’s White Revolution referendum and the uprising of June 1963, the space closed. Bazargan and Taleqani were jailed, the National Front faded, and Khomeini was exiled in 1964. Parliament was left to two parties approved by the court, and in 1975 the shah replaced even those with a single party, Rastakhiz (Resurgence).

With SAVAK watching publishers, universities and mosques, dissent moved into culture. Censorship was strict, but books passed from hand to hand, and a single lecture, poem or short story could carry a political charge.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad and “Westoxication”

Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) had been a member of the Tudeh Party in his youth and left it in 1947. A novelist, essayist and teacher, he became the best-known critic of the shah’s model of modernisation. His essay Gharbzadegi (غرب‌زدگی), circulated in 1962, argued that Iran had been struck by the West like a disease: it imported Western machines and manners without understanding them, and lost its own culture in the process. The word, usually translated “Westoxication” or “Weststruckness”, entered everyday Persian.

Al-e Ahmad came from a clerical family and, late in life, looked more kindly on the clergy as a defender of national identity. His account of a pilgrimage to Mecca, Lost in the Crowd, and his short fiction were widely read. He died at his house in the Gilan forests in 1969, and many of his younger readers refused to believe the death was natural, though no evidence of foul play has been produced.

Ali Shariati and revolutionary Shi’ism

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) did more than anyone to bring university students to religion. Born near Mashhad, the son of a religious teacher, he studied in Paris in the early 1960s, where he read Frantz Fanon and the literature of anti-colonial movements. Back in Iran he lectured at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad, a religious centre in north Tehran, from the late 1960s until the authorities closed it in 1972.

Shariati presented early Shi’ism as a movement of the oppressed against tyranny. He contrasted the “red” Shi’ism of Imam Hossein’s martyrdom at Karbala with the “black” Shi’ism of mourning and quietism that, he argued, the clergy had taught for centuries. Recordings and pamphlets of his talks spread across the country. Many senior clerics distrusted him, and he was imprisoned for about eighteen months in the mid-1970s. He left Iran in 1977 and died in Southampton, England, in June of that year; his supporters blamed SAVAK, but the British authorities recorded a heart attack.

The armed groups

For some young Iranians, the lesson of 1963 was that peaceful protest was useless. Two guerrilla movements emerged from student circles:

• The Fadaiyan-e Khalq (فداییان خلق), a Marxist group, announced itself with an attack on a gendarmerie post at Siahkal in Gilan on 8 February 1971. The attackers were hunted down and most were captured or killed, but the date became a symbol for the left.
• The Mojahedin-e Khalq, founded in 1965 by former Freedom Movement members, mixed Islam with Marxist ideas about class. In 1975 part of the group turned openly Marxist and split away, with bloody purges inside the organisation.

Through the 1970s these groups carried out bombings, bank robberies and assassinations of officers and some American military advisers. SAVAK and the police killed or captured most of their members, and by 1976 they were badly weakened. Their reputation, however, grew. Guerrillas who died became heroes in student circles, and their fate fed the claims about torture that human rights groups such as Amnesty International publicised abroad.

Writers, poets and the trial of Golsorkhi

Secular writers formed a different current. The children’s author Samad Behrangi, whose story The Little Black Fish was read as an allegory of revolt, drowned in the Aras river in 1967. Writers founded the Writers’ Association of Iran (کانون نویسندگان ایران) in 1968 to campaign against censorship. In early 1974 the poet and journalist Khosrow Golsorkhi defended his Marxist beliefs at a televised military trial and was executed in February of that year, which made him a martyr for the left.

The poet Forough Farrokhzad, though not a political activist, belonged to the same world of Tehran writers and filmmakers, and her challenge to social convention was read by many as another form of opposition.

1977: the opening

In 1977, under pressure from the human rights policy of the new American president Jimmy Carter and worried by inflation after the oil boom, the shah allowed some criticism. Lawyers and old National Front leaders signed open letters. In October 1977 the Writers’ Association held ten nights of poetry readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, attended by thousands. That autumn’s events are often taken as the start of the movement that grew into the revolution, told on the page about the causes of the 1979 revolution.

Who led and who followed

Historians stress that these strands were very different. Liberal nationalists wanted the constitution of 1906 to be respected. Marxists wanted a socialist republic. Shariati’s followers wanted an Islamic revolution without the old clergy. Khomeini, in exile in Najaf, gave lectures in 1970 setting out his theory of rule by the jurist (velayat-e faqih). In 1978 these groups marched together. After 1979 they fought each other, and the clerical movement around Khomeini won.