Iran Under the Ayatollahs

By Dilip Hiro. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. 416 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

Despotism at home and isolation abroad have been the price of Iran's bids for an imperium, whether royal or religious. This dispassionate and encyclopedic account of the revolution and its aftermath by a distinguished Indian contributor to the London Sunday Times brings all the contemporary cast into perspective. As in Paris and Petrograd, the revolution in Tehran eats its children and Hiro explains how and why. The Shah's despotic meddling with the economy led to a rising against despotism, and to the installation of an equally arbitrary dictatorship which soon became an economic disaster.

But Hiro, who is not a Muslim, is an empathetically vicarious participant in all this. As in his Inside the Middle East, he has written a primer which makes sense of the senselessness of headlines. In this case, he explains how those Iranian liberals who sought to overthrow the Shah and become the wave of the future were defeated in the semifinals by those who sought to be the wave of the past—the Shi'a fundamentalists.

Like the Shah, the Ayatollah Khomeini's premier Musavi faced problems in redistributing wealth and land. The Guardians Council complained it would violate the Muslim's right to individual property. The bazaaris, Iranian shopkeepers, as a class had supported revolution against the Shah. Afterward, they supported the extremists against the moderates. Similarly, Iranian extremists have prolonged the Gulf war, by insisting on terms which Iraq could never accept and Iran could never successfully impose.

Recultivating the Israeli Connection

Despite his role as the West's doberman pinscher in the area, the Shah stood up to America more effectively than his successors, accepting arms and investments from Moscow and leading the oil-price revolution, Hiro maintains. Although the ayatollahs humiliated the U.S. with the hostage-taking, they gained no positive advantages for Iran. Instead they moved Tehran beyond the pale for both superpowers and everyone else, including all of Iran's neighbors. Iran's promising, and balancing, economic relationship with Japan and South Korea has been drowned in opprobrium and debt. A country which once acquired a fantastic armory out of proportion to its needs now has to sit up and beg in Hanoi, Pyongyang and Tel Aviv for the weapons and spare parts it needs to continue its war with Iraq.

Both the former royal and present religious regimes have worked with Israel. In the case of the Shah collaboration was open. Despite the absence of diplomatic relations, Israel maintained the equivalent of a large Embassy in Tehran and the Shah used the Mossad to train Savak, the Shah's secret police. Collaboration between Israel and the ayatollahs is more discreet, even though Iran is buying from Israel arms, spare parts and services. As in the case of South Africa, Israel seems to find an affinity with religious and racial intolerance anywhere, and the Israeli government has decided it is in its own interest that the Iraq-Iran war continue indefinitely.

Hiro traces Iran's Western links to the 18th century, when Britain was the dominant power. Both the British government and private venturers, including Baron Julius Reuter (founder of the eponymous news agency) did great deals with the Shahs. When the Royal Navy followed Basil Zaharoff's advice and switched from British coal to imported oil, Persia became as crucial to the Crown as Suez later did in Eden's nightmares. Iran became a British protectorate in 1919, under Reza Shah who fathered the last Shah, but Soviet and American outrage forced Reza to abrogate the agreement, and eventually to balance the pressures from Moscow, London and Washington by leaning toward Berlin, where Aryanism was in vogue. Not content with founding a dynasty, Reza Shah even changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran—the name of the traditional birthplace of those who speak Aryan (also called Indo-European) languages.

Hiro also looks at relations within the region—the Iranian-inspired seizure of the Great Mosque of Mecca in 1979, the similarly-inspired planned coup in Bahrain, and so on. Only opposition to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan gives Iran common ground with its neighbors. The country is beset by shortages, despotism, drug addiction and a medieval justice system. The author leads us through all this with admirable detachment. What will happen next?

Hiro's sympathies seem to lie with the 20th-century reformers, and specifically with the mujahedin, who would try to make a political stew out of the country's religious fervor on the one hand and its contradictory desire for a modern polity and material growth on the other. Like Khomeini a few years ago, they plot and plan in Paris. If it's their turn next, Hiro will have another book.

Russell Warren Howe, of Washington, D.C., is a freelance writer specializing in foreign affairs.