The purpose of this essay is twofold; to present an argument on the role of communication in the processes of modernization that goes substantially against the dominant views of the last two decades, and to illustrate that point of view by the example of Iran. The article was written at a moment of enthusiasm, in January-February of 1979, when the Iranian revolution looked like one of the most unanimous, nonviolent and liberating social revolts of modern history, enjoying widespread domestic and international support. Alas, that rare historical opportunity was spoiled by division and rancor in the revolutionary leadership.

The Iranian revolution presents a unique challenge to social scientists. Marked by massive popular participation (primarily in urban areas), by the rejection of violence by the revolutionaries, and by the rapid fulfillment of its goals, the Iranian experience seems to elude prevailing paradigms for the study of revolution. Although there were several factors that made the country ripe for revolution—widespread feelings of relative deprivation, a state apparatus under pressure from the international system, impeded elite circulation, and conflicts among various social classes—none of these alone can explain why the upheaval occurred. While it is unlikely that a definitive explanation of the revolution can ever be found, virtually all theories of revolution implicitly ask two questions: (1) What social conditions lead to revolution, and (2) What is the nature of participation in such revolutions? It is with the first of these questions that this essay is primarily concerned.

A well-educated, wealthy, 35-year-old woman from Tehran reported the following: “Someone I know has a man working for him whose brother is a gravedigger. He dug graves for those murdered in Jaleh Square 40 days ago. He said they needed a bulldozer to dig the ground for all the dead. An entire tent was filled with chadors. Fifty thousand people were killed.”

The Jaleh Square incident of Tehran was a momentous event in the Iranian revolution, marking popular revolt against the shah's regime by the people, and retaliatory atrocities by the shah's army against the people. Although demonstrations and killings in other cities after Jaleh Square were no less dramatic, Jaleh Square remains in the minds of nearly everyone in Iran as the principal episode of innocent citizens slaughtered. Yet, details and facts pertaining to the event are undocumented. What is known is that thousands of people participated in a massive antishah demonstration on Thursday, September 7, 1978, to demand the resignation of the shah, defying a government ban on rallies.

The role of religion and of clerics in the events leading to and during the Iranian revolution of 1977-79 provides an instructive exercise in formulating a theory of cultural influence. The institution of religious training (the madrasah system) has been in decay and under political pressure throughout this century. That the clergy should have emerged as central actors in the revolution, therefore, says something about their cultural, rather than institutional, centrality. The popular idioms of Islamic protest—deriving from the story of Karbala and from the modernist reformulations associated with Dr. Ali Shari'ati—are elaborated with reference to the learning of the madrasahs. That forms of open, secular, political discourse were suppressed under the Pahlavi monarchy helped ensure that Islamic rhetorics would become the idiom of political debate and helped give clerics (both preachers and teachers) extra leverage. The struggle over the role of the clerics continues, a struggle in which Ayatollah Khomeini himself has intervened by drawing ambiguous distinctions between obfuscatory clerics and revolutionary ones, and by chastising clerics for meddling beyond their competence.

The revolution in Iran stands out as a striking exception to other Middle Eastern coups of the twentieth century. While the latter have mostly been of a military-putsch type, in Iran, an apparently stable regime was toppled by a civilian, predominantly clerical, leadership capable of calling forth mass participation on a vast scale, neutralizing the army, and forcing the shah into exile. This religious leadership was strong and resourceful enough to weld its components together and to overcome ideological barriers that elsewhere, and in other circumstances, would have precluded joint action. But in Iran—where political cooperation among divergent groups has been a recurrent feature for the past hundred years—the clergy, the National Front, other middle-of-the-road liberals, and the left were able to make common cause. Reviewing the period from 1890 to the mid-1960s, Nikki Keddie writes: “Although it is a truism that politics makes strange bedfellows…the alliance between much of the religious leadership of Iran and the most advanced Westernized political activists is virtually without parallel either in the Islamic or the non-Islamic world.”

The Iraqi invasion of southwestern Iran on September 22, 1980, appears to have halted, though not reversed, one of the most intriguing experiments in modern history: Khomeini's attempt to create a Shi'ite theocracy in which the state is totally subordinated to the clergy and its powers are drastically circumscribed. What follows is an analysis of the theoretical foundations of this attempt, and of the way it has been carried out in practice.

In the chapter of Economy and Society devoted to the analysis of the church-state problem, Weber states:

The precondition for the strength of hierocratic charisma is its autonomy, an autonomy which the world religions of salvation grant in principle but which does not always find adequate institutional translation.

The image of the Iranian woman clad in the traditional chador, pointing her fist in the air or carrying a machine gun, has become one of the hallmarks of the most recent revolution in Iran. But, in spite of the role played by women in toppling the shah's regime, women have lost more from the change of government than has any other group that participated in the revolution. This loss is evident in (1) the abrogation of laws enacted under the previous regime that introduced a measure of equality for women; (2) the dwindling of employment opportunities available to women due to the deteriorating economic situation; (3) the long-term policy of the current government to encourage women to stay at home; and (4) a massive and persistent campaign to convince women that their own welfare and the welfare of society is best preserved if the roles of men and women are kept separate and if contact between the sexes is kept at a minimum.

We commonly think of Iran as a unified entity with a political history beginning somewhere between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., a period roughly corresponding to the time of the religious figure Zoroaster and the political figure Cyrus the Great. Culturally, Iran reaches further back in time through an epic mythology that pictures Aryan heroes in struggle with Turanian invaders and links the ancient and the mythic with the modern and the real. Conceptually, Iran begins as an empire and ends up as a nation-state, following a path similar in our minds to the movement from imperial Rome to modern Italy. The reality, however, is distinct from the myth. Iran has always been a multi-cultural society divided into a number of socioeconomic formations—a sedentary agricultural formation based in the Central Iranian Plateau, surrounded by pastoral nomadic and seminomadic formations located in the Zagros Mountains and other border regions.

This paper discusses the attempted resumption of paramount Qashqa'i leadership upon the fall of the Pahlavi regime in 1979. Paramount Qashqa'i leaders had been exiled from Iran following their support of Prime Minister Mosaddeq in the early 1950s and had, since then, either remained in exile or returned to Iran to live under political restrictions. In early 1979, those in exile returned to Iran and joined the others in resuming positions of regional and national political power.

These questions are central to the discussion and analysis: What was the nature of Qashqa'i leadership both before and during Pahlavi rule, and how and why had it changed under the Islamic Republic of Iran? How had changes in Iran affecting the Qashqa'i people between 1953 and 1979 affected the attempted resumption of paramount leadership? How had the nature of the Iranian state changed during these periods? How are Qashqa'i leaders best characterized? Are they “tribal” or national-minority leaders, or are they better seen as regional and national powers? How is Qashqa'i leadership different from other kinds of political leadership in Iran, in particular that of other tribes and national minorities, and why?

The Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, which toppled the Pahlavi dynasty, came to fruition as a result of massive participation by diverse elements and groups in the social order. Similar to previous riots and uprisings in Iran, the locus of revolutionary activities centered in the country's towns and cities. The urban areas once again emerged as the focal points for demonstrations, riots, strikes, and other antiregime activities. Included among the participants in the revolution were large groups of urban dwellers who had migrated from Iran's villages and towns to its principal cities. The term urban migrants, then, encompasses a wide array of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and political orientations. For the purposes of this paper, however, the term is used to refer to the urban poor who had migrated from the rural areas to Iran's dominant and largest urban center, the capital city of Tehran.

Anyone familiar with Iranian history would not have been surprised by the uneasy coalition of religious leaders, secular intellectuals, and bazaar merchants that spearheaded the antishah movement in Iran. Once each generation in this century such a coalition has attempted to gain political control of the nation. Each time, including this one, their efforts have met the determined resistance of one or more external powers. There appears to be a cruel geopolitical determinism at work. Iran, standing at the meeting point of competing imperial interests, is not allowed for long the luxury of chaotic development. Internal chaos threatens the delicate balance of external competitors—each fearing the other will take undue advantage of the situation. And since the kind of regime the coalition claims to seek, liberal and democratic, is certain to be at least initially unstable, it has been consistently the negative target of the external competitors.

The triumph of the Khomeini forces and of the Iranian revolution in February 1979, sweeping away the old imperial regime and the transitional Bakhtiyar government, marked the beginning of a highly critical period in American-Iranian relations. The conflict culminated in the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and in the holding of U.S. diplomats as hostages for well over a year. The hostage issue was the most controversial question for U.S. foreign policy in 1980 and marked a historic low point in relations between the two countries.

From the viewpoint of most Iranian leaders, this battle was an inevitable one. Based on their perceptions of bilateral relations over the previous three decades, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters expected a deterministically hostile United States. In their eyes, Washington had provided the main foreign support for the shah, a regime for which their passionate hatred can scarcely be overstated, and had tried to prevent the revolution's triumph.