Empire: World History - 120. The Iranian Revolution: The Rise of Ayatollah Khomeini

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

With the Last Shah’s reforms - known as the White Revolution - starting to take effect, Iran looked to be in a healthy position. Economic growth is strong, Tehran is a thriving cultural centre, and women now had the vote. Before long, however, the economy began to overheat and inflation soars. Criticism of the Shah grows and the man who articulates the discontent of the nation best is an exiled ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini. He desires a theocratic future for Iran that has no room for the Shah, and his support is growing. Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Ali Ansari to discuss Iran as it slides towards revolution. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hear the Mullers preach every evening to packed audiences. Most of the sermons are revivalist stuff of a high emotional and low intellectual standard, but certain well-known preachers attract the intelligency of the town with reasoned historical exposés of considerable merit. The Tehran that we saw on the 10th of Maharam is a different world.

Centuries and civilizations apart from the gaudy, superficial batch of Cadillacs, hotels, antique shops, villas, tourists and diplomats where we run our daily round. But it's not only poverty, ignorance and dirt that distinguish the Old South. the parvenu north. The slums have a compact self-conscious unity and communal sense that is totally lacking in the smart districts of chlorinated water, macadam roads and fitful street lightning. The bourgeois does not know his neighbour. The slum dweller is intensely conscious of his. And in the slums, the spurious blessings of Pepsi-Cola civilization have not yet destroyed the old way of life, where every man's comfort and security depend on the spontaneous, unpoliced observation of a traditional code

down in the southern part of the city, manners and morals, are better and stricter than in the villas of Tajirish. An injury to a neighbour, a pass at another man's wife, a brutality to a child, evokes spontaneous retribution without benefit of bar or bench. So that is a quote from a British diplomat based in Tehran in the early. 60s, watching the divisions grow in Iranian society, seeing the run up to what will be the first Islamic revolution. Yeah, hello, by the way, you're listening to Empire with me, Al-Intyre. And once again, we are joined by the fabulous Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, author of many books, including his new book, Iran published just last week

and is just providing so much fodder for our conversation. And we are discussing the run-up to the Iranian Revolution. That particular quote, I mean, it is very instructive, isn't it, a fissure in a society that will only broaden and widen? They are indeed. And I mean, I think the problem here is you find the tensions created by rapid modernisation. So unlike the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey, Iran's sort of rush to modernise really occurs from the 1920s onwards.

and you get a development of the Iranian state under Rez al-Shah, the first Pahlavi, then you get this period, which some of us talk about like an interregnum between, you know, the allied occupation of Iran through to the oil nationalization crisis in the coup in 1953. And then the Muhammad Rezarsha, Rezalsha's son then basically establishes his own autocracy under this time a sort of an American tutelage rather than sort of the umbrella or the protection of the British in some ways. And the interesting thing here is you get a switch, a subtle switch. So I always like to divide it in this way.

I say in the previous setup, you have a constitutional period where you have bureaucrats and intellectuals sort of like cushioning the Shah, pushing him in a particular direction. And there is an understanding there that political and economic reform has to happen as far as possible in tandem. If anything, political reform has to precede economic reform. From the 1950s onwards, what you have is technocrats, not. bureaucrats who basically do the bidding of the new Shah, and the emphasis, reflecting the American sort of emphasis, is on economic development. Ali, give us a portrait of the Shah now in the aftermath of the fall of Mossadegh. So the Shah returns from his enforced holiday in Italy,

and he comes back and he makes, I think, a fatal error of judgment by interpreting the enthusiasm of the crowds, because they were enthusiastic, as being in support. of his person as opposed to a notion of stability around the institution of the monarchy. So the monarchy had a certain sort of traditional heft in Iranian-inisiders. No doubt about that, by the way. I mean, nobody was thinking about a republic at this stage. And it's an imperial monarchy. Let's not forget it.

I mean, Iran is still technically an empire. So I think what you have is he comes back really misunderstanding what the public mood is. Ali, just repeat first, because I think it's a very important point. One of the things you said at the end of the last podcast when we were talking about the fall of Mossadegh. You said that Iranians have often talked about the fall of Mossadegh as something done by foreigners, CIA, MI6. It's the terrible thing that they did to us. But you implied there was a lot of Iranian agency in that. Yes. Now, I mean, the trouble is, this is the mistake also the CIA made. The CIA took a lot of credit for the coup. And even exaggerated their role in it, you said.

Yes. Actually, you see it in a tussle between the British and the Americans as well. And the Americans initially were very keen to take credit for it because, of course, their budget could get boosted. But the fact is that any coup doesn't work unless you have a receptive audience or a sort of at least willing to go along with it. People say, ah, the Americans spread a lot of money around, and that's absolutely true. But there also had to be people who were willing to accept it. And there were military officers and there were elements of the clergy and the elements who wanted Moss had that gone. There's no doubt about it. And at the moment, it's even in our own historical studies now, it's a point of great, great contention among historical.

It's about who and what support it is full. But it's quite clear that it couldn't have been done just simply by the Americans and the British. And just to go deep into that, just for a second, as well as the agency of wanting Mossadegh to fall, presumably there's a very large constituency in Iran also that wanted the Shah to have more power. They wanted a strong man. Well, some of them did. Some didn't. It was quite disputed. But basically, the institution of the monarchy was still retained a certain, how should we say, aura.

The question mark was, what's a role? was he going to be a more constitutional monarch, or was he going to emulate his father? Right. And what do we find? I mean, democracy continues in name alone. He starts selecting candidates for the magistrates. How far is he sort of picking and choosing? Well, in the 50s, he's trying to consolidate power. He sets up a state security service known as Sabak with American help. And Moss had help. And Moss had help, certainly. And it's basically the Cold War. And he wants to be a good ally of the United States of the Cold War, you see. And he wants to use the United States to bolster his own internal position. The Americans aren't that enthusiastic. Remember, the Americans

had supported Zahidi, the strong man to come in as basically a, you know, the strong man prime minister. And the Americans, if you look at the American activities around the world, they're basically very much in favor of bringing these sort of strong military men in who they think can be decisive. Everyone was basically of the view that the Shah was a very indecisive person and not really suited to the task. So I think really from about, seven years up until the early 1960s, the Shah was jockeying with other centres of power to really see who was, you know, who was going to be the dominant force. And of course, the monarchists around him said, you know, be like your father. Don't mess around. Which would have been appealing to

a young boy who was always trying to get the approval of his very strong father. Exactly. And he, you know, his argument was, of course, is that nothing could get done in Iran without a strong central authority. But that doesn't mean autocracy. Well, I mean, let's talk about one of the the cudgels of that kind of autocracy, the Savak, which came to be a really terrifying presence on the streets of Iran. Who were they? Who made up their forces? And what did they do? Well, basically, they were the state security apparatus. There's sort of a combined element of sort of MI5-M-I-6 style. I mean, they were sort of the both internal and external. But essentially, after 1953, there was a military government in Tehran, the first general there

helped set up Savak or Savok in the Persian pronunciation. And then with the collapse of military government in 57, this institution comes in. And its role is obviously, as it suggests, to maintain state security, and largely to combat communism is basically its role. And here's a fascinating thing that people don't know. So under Resachar the Father, I mean, this is one of the striking things, and it's in the British documents. Under Reserva Father, all torture for political prisoners was outlawed. If you were arrested on a political charge of being a communist, you basically languished in prison, but nobody maltreated you, and it's well recorded. And Rezaar didn't really understand that, but his prison wardens would say, well, you know, it's the modern thing to do and

these are all the Iranians. Under Muhammad Reza Shah, torture and inducing fear into people in prison, you know, who happened to be anti-monarchical, communist, whatever, makes a comeback. Is he aware of that? He must have been aware. You're not King of Kings. I mean, you have to be aware of it. Can I at the risk of appalling some of our listeners, but I think it's important. What are we talking about? We're talking about torture, because it is a spectrum of horror, and it can be from beatings to electric shock and mutilation. What are we talking about with Savak? Well, it's basically, some of it's psychological,

some of it is clearly beatings, electric shocks. I mean, this sort of stuff increases as you go along. I should stress, and let's be very clear here, it's not anywhere on the scale that you see post-1979. That's a very, very important point, that it gets much, much, much worse under the Mullers. I mean, much, much worse under it. The difference is that everyone assume this Western-educated monarch

might be a little bit more liberally minded. But clearly there was a sort of a view that, I mean, I've talked about this to people, why was it reintroduced? And they sort of say that part of the issue was that the Shah wanted to impress his Americans about how effective he was fighting communism. And one of the more notorious cases is one that's revealed in a British document, actually, that came to lie a few years ago, where the British were suffering from deep angst, I have to say, about what to do about it, was the revelation that General Bathier had noticed that they'd put people who had made insulting comments about the Shah in a cage with a bear. basically to try and terrify them. People can't see this, but Anita had exactly the same reaction as I had when I read the document. Which was a bloody hell, what? I know.

And basically, you know, Bachtier, interestingly, when he talks to some British diplomats, which this is the point, he basically said, though, don't worry, we never let the bear get anywhere near the man. But that's not the point. The point is they were trying to terrify him into submission. Okay. And what are the clerics doing at this point? I mean, they weren't huge fans of Mossadegh. are they supportive of the Shah, even if he is slightly with American puppet masters?

And they were very much part of the coup, weren't they? I mean, they were on the streets against Mossadegh. Well, I mean, the argument is basically that the clerics were much more supportive and certainly didn't come. Let's put it this way. They certainly didn't come out in support of Mossend. But did they actively dislike him because he was secular? And left-leaning. No, they just thought that, first of it, because he wasn't actually, he did pander to the religious right to some extent. But they just felt that he was operating with the support of the communists. And this was a big no-no. They wanted a certain amount of orthodox stability.

And of course, the monarchy as an institution represented that orthodox stability. So what's interesting is at this stage, you have the mullahs on the same side as America, in a sense. A coincidence of interest is the best way you put it. A coincidence of interest, which doesn't last long? No. I mean, it's interesting because the relationship between the Shah and the American obviously changes over time. The relationship between the Shah and his domestic constituents change over time. So, for instance, in 1955, there's a very notorious incident in Iran where there's a major

pogrom against the Bahais. And even British diplomats say that this would never have happened under Reza Shah. But their argument is, is that this was the Shah's payback to the Mullers. So he was thanking them for their help in the coup by, you can have a go at the Baez. And at the same time, as all this is happening, the economy is beginning to boom. we're coming out of a period of stasis and the oil revenues that have been clawed back from the Anglo-Persian company are beginning to feed into the system. And you're seeing the growth of road building, you're seeing infrastructure growing. And the army as well, military. I mean, you know, he's beefing that up too, isn't he?

I mean, initially, okay, so the 1950s are not a period of dramatic growth. The 1950s are a period of consolidation. The new agreement, by the way, sees the Americans come in in a much bigger way into the oil concession. and there's a new organ. The nationalisation doesn't survive. I mean, don't have any illusions about that. In 1954, when they renegotiate the concession, it's a concession which now has American companies as 40% shareholders, the French and the Dutch and others, and obviously the BP, as it is now, is British Petroleum, with another 40%. But the relationship differs. There's more money coming in, but the real growth comes in the 60s. And the real growth comes in the 60s

when the Shah launches with the encouragement of the Americans, and he was very reluctant to begin with because the Americans were said you've got to start a program of reform because the communist threat is a serious one. He launches what comes known to posterity as the white revolution and it's white because it's meant to be bloodless. And the Shah very interestingly says to the Americans when they approach, I mean, the idea is one that is around with intellectuals as well, but people say that you look at the monarchy in Iraq, overthrown a revolution, very bloody, you look at the coup d'etat and Turkey, you need something to happen in Iran. So they start a process of land reform, other aspects of reform, not initially with the Shah's support. Basically,

the Shah says that, you know, I can start a revolution if you want, but you may not like the outcome. Oh, interesting. How interesting. And what does he mean by that? Well, he says basically that a monarchy cannot support a revolution. For his thing, he says that, you know, I'm here as the top of a pyramid and, you know, I have to maintain order and harmony in the society. What you're asking me to do is to revolutionize my society, but that may have effects that you don't particularly like. Now, he does buy into it. I mean, he's persuaded that he needs to take the lead in it, and that's what after 1963 he does. Okay, but what's interesting is, I mean, I would have thought that, you know, things like female suffrage would have been the thing that got up the clerics nose the most, but it was

actually the land reforms that really bugged them. It is. It was both. I mean, Khomeini comes to prominence. I told of Khomeini, the great nemesis of the Shah, comes to prominence in this period, really railing against female suffrage and land reform. So why land reform? Is it? Because the Lerick's own land? I mean, why? Yeah, no. But basically what Khomeini was arguing against, and this was the key. I mean, Khomeini was also, as a member of the clerical class, also in tune with many of the landed aristocracy and gentry, many of whom were losing land. And they were losing land quite dramatically. And of course, they were all blaming America. I mean, you have to sort of

bear this in mind. Basically, a lot of these landed aristocrats were saying, I got a minute, we're all having our land confiscated. And this is some sort of American-led reform program. Yeah, I mean, so, God, again, strange bedfellows, again, clerics and the gentry. But let's talk about Khomeini, because for most of us, he is that dead-eyed cleric who looks angrily out at the world. But let's talk about his origin story. So he was born in 1902. Where was he born? He's a small town boy, isn't he?

Khomein, I think, is where he's born somewhere in central, central Iran. It's near Iraq, I think, Iraq, which is a town north of Islam. And his family had been in India. Yeah. and he was labelled al-Hindi. Were they clerics going way back? I mean, was it a very super religious family? I think, I mean, his father was, but again, a lot of his early life is shrouded in this

or hagiography now. Okay. But he's clearly from a fairly poor clerical family. Oh, really poor, because, you know, I've heard other stories that he had a wealthy, you know, a family of wealth and status. You know, that they brought money back from India? Yeah. Well, I mean, the hagiography won't tell you that.

I mean, basically, he comes from a very, in the grand scheme of things, not wealth. All right. Okay. We're going to throw you things. then you can knock him down if you want. Okay, so what... Okay, so what I've heard is that he was orphaned at a very early age, six months old. Her mother dies of cholera, father murdered.

Yes, murdered by bandits. How come his father got killed by bandits? Well, it's just because, I mean, this is a very early pre-constitutional revolutionary Iran. Yeah, no, we don't. You don't expect tribes going on and hacking up Nathar's family. It's only under Reza Sheld that you start to see order in the wider parts of the country. Okay, so he grows. up as an orphan and because he's on his own, he excels at his studies because that's the only

way out of being a poor sad orphan and so he becomes very clever. I mean, do we accept this is probably what it is the making of him? I mean, I think he is. I mean, there are disputes about how great his intellectual abilities were. I think he was far more of a political malo. Really? Because that's interesting because they say he loved, you know, little Ayatollah was a lover of poetry and mysticism and beauty and things. Philosophy, yeah. Philosophy. We see, that does that sit so uncomfortably with the man that we have come to know and fear in the web? Well, again, the hagiography would like to whitewash that out, because a good, austere, as you say, in the image as you have it, a jurist, you know, a sort of a cleric as a senior jurist, you don't do things like phonosophy and poetry. No, God, they're not frowny subjects at all. Okay, so at the age of 34, he becomes a serious cleric. That is, you know, sort takes the robe, the robe that we are now familiar with. What does that mean? What does that give him a status in society?

Well, it does give him a status. Now, again, we can revert back to Reza Sharba here, because when Rezaa imposes the dresser dress codes, the one group of people that have the dress code waived are the clerics. So it's really from the dress codes of Reza Shah that the clerics have a distinctive clothing because before that, everyone wore that. So basically the clerics are the only class of people that are allowed to continue wearing turbans and gowns. They're gowns as you might find in the university today, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. University or the old sort of, you know, the judges used to wear. So when does he start getting irritated by the Shah? When does the Shah come into his crosshairs? So in 1961, if I'm not mistaken, Ayatano Bourgerdi, who was this most senior cleric in the kingdom, in the empire, if you will, dies.

And normally, what the sitting shah should do is he should basically tacitly recognize his successor. There is no hierarchy in the Shia system, as you might have in the Church of England or the Catholic Church. But there was a sort of a tacit acknowledgement that, you know, so-and-so is, I think, the senior cleric. The Shah, to his everlasting regret, I have to say, decided, oh, you know, I'm not going to pick one. out, I'm going to just play them all off against each other. Of course, when doing that, it opened the door for ambitious political clerics like Khomeini to seize the moment when the moment arose to basically lay the mantle of political leadership of that clerical class. And that was a major mistake by the Shard, not to formally recognize a sort of successor

to Buri Jedi when he died. Burjedi was a quietist. He didn't believe that the clerics should participate in politics. Khomeini, on the other hand, was not. Cormani was very radical, had some sort affiliation or knowing with the Fedain Islam, the people who killed Rasmara, these sort of internal terrorist organization, radical Islamist. And Hameini was very much a doer, not just Dauer, doer, but, you know, someone actually did things. And this was part of his attraction. His attraction was he didn't just talk about it. He tried to do things about it. And he could speak the language of philosophy and maybe a bit of poetry as well. Ali, you've just used the word radical Islam. And this is very important because today we're

very familiar with the idea of religion and politics being intertwined, not just in Iran, but all over the Middle East. And the idea of Islamist radicals playing political roles is something which we're very familiar with and which is absolutely defining what's going on at the moment in Israel, in Palestine, in Lebanon, everywhere. But presumably in the 1950s, this was not something which we'd seen years of secular governments and groups that were resistance groups tended to be secular and leftist rather than Islamist. This was something quite new. So what you have really from the period of 1906 onwards is this narrative template, which is very clear, and it's secularisation, you know, the nation state, if you can call it that, in the development of a particular past development. Religion was seen as irrelevant to that. When I go to houses, whether it's in Iran or in Egypt, you see pictures framed of people's

grandmothers and bikinis by pools. And you see the granddaughters hooded and covered up. And this goes back to this man. He begins this process, which has changed not only Iran, but the entire face of the region. But I want to know, I sort of want to know the step-by-step process by which he manages to make these changes because surely, you know, the Shah is in charge. So if you've got a troublesome cleric who is preaching things that you don't like, they aren't on your agenda, won't someone rid me of this troublesome priest quite? I mean, he's got the Savak, he's got others.

Does he not just try and, when he sees Khomeini is a problem, and Khomeini is saying things that aren't on his agenda, why doesn't he just deal with him then? Well, originally what he did was he exiled him. And there was an attack, there was a violent arrest, wasn't there, during a lecture? I mean, again, that might be part of the legend, as you say, I'm not. Basically, what happens is that Homania makes a very serious protest after the white revolution is launched in 60 years.

There's a major uprising, and it's suppressed. Homania is then put under house arrest. They say, you know, enough of this, rabble rousing. Then in 1964, something in my view more serious happens. And that is the United States decides that it's going to seek a status of forces agreement with Iran, where government employees, quite broadly defined and their dependence, would be exempt from Iranian law. Okay, they couldn't be tried in Iran. Now, if you just permit me, I'll just take you back to compare how Mohammed Reza Shah is different from his father. So his father faced a similar

thing in 1926-27 when he said, I want to remove these capitulatory rights that the Europeans have in this country. I want to remove all these extra judicial rights. And the Europeans say to Reza Shah, fine, but if you want to do that, you have to set up a judicial system that we can work with And, to his credit, he gets one of his bureaucrats, a gentleman by the name of Darvair, who worked like an absolute Trojan and got, and basically within a year set up a, what is ostens of being independent judiciary, with all its faults. So in 1927-28, the Shah is able then to abolish the capitulations. Fast forward to 1964, the Americans come in with the status of forces agreement,

and many nationalists in Iran say, hang on a minute, this seems to be a return to the sort of thing that your father had In the American defense, you know, this is the sort of thing they signed with almost every country. It just so happened that the legal system in Iran was so incomplete, shall we say, the reforms that Reza Shah had yet to be completed, that the extent of the status of forces agreement was a bit broader. Now, when this is signed, the Americans wanted to be a government-to-government agreement. The Iranian government says, no, no, it must be ratified by Parliament.

Big mistake. Goes to Parliament. It's an absolute embarrassment. It is passed, but there's a lot of opposition to it. People get up, they protest, they say, why the hell are we offering these extrajudicial rights of the Americans? And of course, lo and behold, Khomeini comes out house arrest and gives another stonking speech about how this means that Americans are more important than so and so, and, you know, this is a disgrace, whatever. The Americans with uncannily bad timing also offer the Shah loan at this very moment for $200 million,

dollars, which is simply added to the view that basically he'd been bribed. So the whole thing is a fiasco. Khomeini issues this really violent speech and he's now kicked into exile. I mean, that knows. He goes to Turkey and then to Iraq and he sits in Najaf and he sits and he rails, you know, turbulent priests on full metal. And Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Let's give the positive side of things, though, Ali, because particularly again when looking at the Iran today with the oppression that's going on and so on, the positive. The positive things that happens under the shah. Let's look at feminism, cinema. How am I pronouncing her right? Farag Farrasad. Talk a little about that whole world that's growing now.

Now, from 1963 to 73 witnesses a time of extraordinary economic growth in Iran. The country's stabilized, for good or ill, but it's stabilized. Oil revenue is averaging a billion dollars a year. Which is useful for the exchequer. Very useful. And there's a sort of a process of industrialisation taking place and the process of, I wouldn't want to call it liberalisation because this is not what happens. It's basically a process of economic development that gives the Iranians opportunities that they had never had. The point is at this period, the average growth was about 10% of you. And it's a period that transforms the country. And the Shah finally in 1967, because he's so pretty, he says, you know, now I can have my coronation. Rather

stupidly, he models his coronation on the British coronation, which I don't know why for an empire that's so old. And then in 1971, of course, he holds this great bash in Persepanis, celebrating two and a half thousand years of Persian monarchy. And just to remind us that this is an empire when he does the invitations, you know, it's Hali Salasi, the only other emperor around who gets a seat at the top table with the Shah and everyone else, including presidents, are way down the scale, which is why the American president wasn't going to come. That's so interesting. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, yeah. Wow. And the queen didn't go, but Princess Anne and the Duke of Edinburgh way.

Hang on a minute. If the Queen would have gone, would she have been on the top table as well? I think she would have been, but she would have been behind. Behind Highley Salasi? Because he's an emperor. He's an emperor. Interesting.

I've met people that were at that party, including the wife of the then Prime Minister of Lebanon. And this was a big deal for these people at this time. It was a huge bash, not just in Iran, but in the entire region. And there was a big arts festival. So it was at 2,500 years of the... the Persian Empire, if you will. It's a banquet. It's a celebration of culture. It's festivities.

There are wonderful films of the plays, the theatre, put on in the ruins of Pacepolis. Orson Wells narrates the main thing. Orson Wells narrates what main thing? Narrates the main documentary of the main festivities. Oh, really? Oh, fantastic. I'm looking that up. Very good. Very deep voice. You can get it on YouTube. And it's imported everything. It's imported food from Paris, from Minim's or Maximes or whatever it is. So this is interesting. So you know, you sort of said, look, he did it on the British model, which is actually perplexing, because if you're celebrating two and a half thousand years,

you know, you've got some pretty good blingy precedent for doing a good emperor, aren't you, really? So what are we thinking he's thinking? He's thinking that Iran has arrived. We are back. We are back on the world stage. And of course, the British monarchy is the one we can refer to, and we're going to do it better. And this is what he does. Now, there's a very good book by a good friend of mine Rob Steele who talks about it. There's a lot of myth making about the cost, and you can talk to people, they all go from 100 million to 1 billion to this.

No, no, it was a much more modest expense than that. I mean, a lot of payments were not taken from the Iranian excheca. They were companies sponsoring this and the other. But where it failed was that the Shah was so concerned about security that the Iranians weren't really invited. Do you see what I mean? So only special guests were invited. But there was a tremendous sort of like over the year.

many academic events and other things that were trying to put Iran on the map. Unfortunately, for the Shah, it put Iran on the map in a way that he didn't want it to be on the map because people started to scrutinize it. They started to see Iran as a sort of an Asian tiger or a second Japan and they wanted to say, what's going on here? Before we take a break, Ali, give a little picture of the arts, feminism, cinema, all the new things that are taking root at this time. Well, what's happening is you're getting a tremendous sort of art scene is it.

You know, when you get more money and you get more, you know, when education is starting to boom, you know, all the things that had been established under Reza Shah, the foundations were now yielding fruit and this new money was coming in, the economy was growing, there was a degree of political stability, not political freedom, but a degree of political stability. And what you had is also a very good underground sort of art scene, dissidents were emerging, there were new ideas. So it was, it was right in some ways an exciting time. People that were there at the time, both Persian and foreigners coming through, were dazzled by it. Yeah. I mean, basically, it was seen as Persia was back. It was sort of Monte Carlo crossed with Glymborne sort of moved to Sepulets. I mean, you know, Tehran was seen as a sort of a, first of all, quite apart from it being the hippie trail coming from Kabul down and whatever to Delhi or whatever, everyone would go through Iran. But the other thing was it was just seen as had this exoticness. And I use the word Persia, they deliberately, because this is what for the Western mind it was,

in the Persian Empire. I should say one thing that when I first went there in the early 80s, just after the Shah had fallen. That's a good time to go. Yeah, what it was, it was quite a interesting time. There were still lots of revolutionary sort of piles of spectacles of the martyrs and everything. But the point I'm trying to make is that you would leave very, very backward east of Turkey, where things, you know, Istanbul was all very well. but the further east you went in Turkey, the more you sort of were slipping into the kind of 18th and 17th,

even 16th century of places. And then you'd arrive at the Iranian border and suddenly it would be three-line highways, everyone in modern cars, electricity would work, there'd be no power cuts. And this would continue until you left in the Pakistan border at Zidan. Again, there was no road. There's literally no road across the desert. And if you went north to Afghanistan, again, you know, you were going back 100 years. And so what we've forgotten because, in a sense, now the regime is associated so much with backwoodness and oppression and so on, that this was this little island of prosperity and modernity. Let's take a break there. And I mean, it all augurs so very well.

Big party. Lots of money coming in. Happy, happy, happy people. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Join us after the break. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had an economy booming people.

happy, miniskirts, bikinis and tie-dye making their way through a country of exotic Persia. But it doesn't last long, does it, this sort of bubble of happiness? What happens next, Ali? Well, first of all, you have to bear in mind that this sort of progress that is happening is very uneven. There are cities that are doing very well. There are rural areas that are doing so well. And, of course, it's a process. I mean, you can't blame it all entirely on the shower, but you can blame part of it on the

shine. The main thing is that basically, again, he concentrated on it on. economic as opposed to political reform. So, as I've argued in other places, you know, it's that political and legal framework is not there to regulate the economic activity. And this becomes a disaster when you get really quite exponential growth, economic growth, in the 1970s. And rather than the Shah really democratizing in a meaningful sense, he starts to get very hubristic, actually, in terms of his own position. So in 1973, you get the Yongkippur War, okay? We've remember the Arab oil boycott and the price of oil goes rocketing up. I think it goes from

something like $1 a barrel, Alcyon days, to about $3.14, if I remember correctly. The Shah did not join the Arab oil boycott. Remember, Iran at this stage was still probably the largest producer of oil in the Middle East. The Saudis had not overtaken Iran yet. There's more oil coming out of Iran than Saudi Arabia. Yes. I never knew that. Yes, yes, yes. You know, remember, I mean, the Saudi Arabia overtakes Iran during the revolution, for obvious reasons, but, you know, So at this stage, Iran is still the way. But the Shah has this view, okay, that Iran's oil resources are limited. They're going to run out.

What we need is a rapid martial industrialization. So He then decides, and he looks at this shock of this oil shock, and he says, well, it hasn't had quite the shock we want. So in December, 1973, there's an OPEC meeting, and he holds a meeting in Tehran. And he then announces his own oil shock. And this is both the apogee and the Nadir of, if I can put it, of the Shah's position. he then quadruples the price of oil from $3 a barrel to $11 a barrel. In one fell swoop.

Yeah. Then he announces it. You can see the videos. He says, as far as I'm concerned, it is ludicrous. He said that the price of oil should be, a barrel of oil should be cheaper than a barrel of perrier. And he says basically oil, this noble resource needs to be priced properly. Anyway, what this means in practical terms, I just want you to sort of absorb this. In the fourth development plan that ran from, what was it, 1967 to 72, I beg it by 68 to 73,

there was $7 billion of extra oil revenue was injected into the Iranian economy, you know, to support industrialisation. For the fifth development plan that would run from 1974 to 79, the plan and budget organization in Iran had basically organized a plan for $21 billion of oil revenue to come in and to be invested in the Iranian economy. So that's a threefold increase. The Shah, with his oil price rise, basically gave them $70 billion to play with. You need to really digest what that means for an Iranian economy that is good.

So in 1974, the official figure for the growth rate of the Iranian economy, I kid you not, was 40%. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Whoa. This is a nonsense. Of course, it's a nonsense. It reflected the fact that there was a huge intake of oil income at some becoming. Why, it's just as a balloon that's going to go, isn't it?

And what happens is in the absence of a political legal framework, what does this result in? Quite apart from choking points in the economy where things can't cope, you get massive inflation and massive corruption. And this is what really colours the rest of the 1970s. And this, to my mind, is what frames the Islamic Revolution that is to come. So if you are in a small town and you're not part of the elite in North Tehran and you're looking on to the Shah at play in Persepolis and all the shenanigans that are going on, air hostesses and incredibly gorgeous outfits, what's your view of this boom? Well, this is all very alien to you. I mean, you just can't relate to it. It's a completely

unrelatable development. Now, of course, you know, the argument is that modernisation takes time and it's got, you know, the benefits have to spread. I think many, Iranians now, by the way, would very much regret not having waited for the benefits to spread. But the fact is, at the time, there was great alienation. One of the problems of land reform, for instance, was many smaller landholding tenants and peasants whenever were kicked off the land. It was basically like a form of, if I could put in this way, sort of like a highland clearances. And, you know, many of them just migrated to the cities. And huge shanty towns emerge in the cities. And there were clear stresses and strains on the economy. So what you have is a very rich country,

but with very poor distribution of income and serious strains. Well, I mean, the late lamented Michael Axwell, who we mentioned so many times while doing this podcast. Put it this way, Tehran was a place of aspiration, but in the late 70s became the place of resentment, frustrated desire, frustrated aspirations for many. And that's right. And so you have how much tension,

you have an overheating economy, you have people getting angry, you have an indecisive man at the top. This is not a recipe for a happily ever after, is it? And also, I think we should put it in the wider context of what's going on in the rest of the Middle East. You've got the PLO at their peak. You've got a lot of revolutionary movements. And this is a period when the left is ascendant. In Lebanon, the civil war is growing. See, the Shah at this stage, what he should have done with this enormous, enormous dividend is to begin a serious process of political reform and democratization. But instead, he took it as a sort of a badge of validation for his reign. I'm better than my. father, I've brought all this, I've brought in so much money, I've done, but that's clearly the mistake. But there are two mistakes, aren't there? Because if you've got this sort of simmering tension and resentment, that, you know, your own actions are fuelled and your big parties and your

big balloon of wealth has set into motion, spread a bit of the wealth around. But he doesn't do that either. What he does is he sends his secret police out even more to look at people who are raising their voices against him. He becomes almost even more insular and inward looking. So let me give you one of the paradoxes. One of the paradoxes is that education in Iran increases exponentially. All those reforms that were started in the 1920s and 30s are then built upon by the Shah. Iran has, you know, numbers of universities. But he's also sending abroad on government grants, full scholarships, by the way, to the United States and to Europe. He's got 50,000 students on government scholarships in the United States. And the corollary of it, of course, is exactly as you said,

Anita. What he doesn't provide these students and they come back with all their fancy degrees, is anything to do. He basically says, stick to business, don't get involved in politics. They all want to get involved in politics, of course, because they're, you know, educated students. But they're young and idealistic. Exactly. And so the corolli of that is, of course, he does set Savark on them.

So, you know, what I said to them, I said, you know, the perversity of this period is you have such phenomenal economic growth, social change, and yet no outlet for its expression. Okay. Well, that is a good place to leave this episode. We will be back with Ali as we get to. towards the end of the 1970s. The denouement.

The denouement of this extraordinary roller coaster of a story. Do join us as we enter the finale and talk about the Iranian revolution itself. Of course, if you can't wait for the appropriate time when we usually release this podcast, you can get it early. If you're a member of our Empire Club, a friend of the show, we will allow you to hear the rest of the episodes right here, right now. So if you are on Apple Podcast, all you have to do is sign up. A few clicks on the Empire page or anybody else, all you need to do is go to EmpirePoduk.com and you can sign up there right now and hear how this story ends. Until though, for the rest of you. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan.

And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.