Despite widely held beliefs, the 1979 Iranian Revolution was not a popular movement in support of Islamic fundamentalism at its outset, but instead began as a revolution for social justice supported by a broad coalition of secular interests, according to sociology professor Misagh Parsa. Following Parsa's "What's Next for Iran" lecture, Haviland Smith '51, retired CIA station chief and chief of counterterrorism staff, led a discussion entitled "Who Are Our Real Enemies?" on the causes of instability in the Middle East and ways in which the United States can refocus its intervention.
The gross disparity between the 1979 Iranian Revolution's initial goals and its eventual outcome one of the world's leading Islamic fundamentalist theocracies is "shocking," Parsa said.
"This is an amazing transformation from what people were asking for to what they got this is the tragedy of the Iranian Revolution," he said.
Most revolutions begin among the intellectual class, Parsa said. In the years leading up to the Iranian Revolution, however, the vast majority of Iranian intellectuals were not Islamic fundamentalists, but instead either secular socialists or liberal nationalists, he said.
After he spent several years analyzing the rhetoric leading up to the 1979 Revolution, Parsa said he found that 38 percent of protest rhetoric was anti-despotic and 31 percent was in favor of a "Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic."
Only 16 percent of the pre-Revolution rhetoric, however, called for the leadership of fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, who ultimately overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Parsa said. He added that the majority of Iranians during the pre-Revolutionary era did not equate the phrase "Islamic Republic" with a fundamentalist theocracy, but rather with a social democracy.
"If you want to summarize what Islamic Republic meant, it meant social justice for most of these people," he said.
Throughout the revolution, even Khomeini focused his attacks on the Shah's despotism instead of on supporting strict Islamic fundamentalist law, Parsa said. Upon examining all of Khomeini's public statements leading up to the revolution, Parsa said that Khomeini never supported many of the ideas later associated with the fundamentalist regime he established.
During the revolution, for example, Khomeini never attacked women or homosexuals, never urged the banning of Persian or Western music, and never called for the appointment of a supreme religious leader or for the formation of a theocracy all of which are associated with Khomeini's later fundamentalist regime, Parsa said.
After successfully overthrowing the Shah, however, Khomeini became the de-facto leader of the "anti-despotic" movement and created the Revolutionary Guard to establish a fundamentalist theocracy in Iran. Over the next six years, Khomeini used the Revolutionary Guard to execute or assassinate over 11,000 dissenters; to deny women basic social, political and economic rights; to condemn homosexuals to death and to impose cultural restrictions on dress, music, dancing and drinking, Parsa said.
Even though 31 years have passed since the revolution, current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime maintains many of Khomeini's fundamentalist policies, according to Parsa. As poverty and income inequality rise, though, the majority of Iranians have turned against the regime, he said.
"The Islamic fundamentalists and the theocratic clergy have discredited themselves and undermined their own religion by making Islam the underpinning of failed economic and political experiments," Parsa said.
Recent national surveys revealed that 75 percent of Iranian youth do not recite the daily prayers required by Islamic law, and 86 percent of all citizens view religious teachings as "irrelevant to daily life," he said.
Ahmadinejad's re-election in 2009's allegedly fraudulent election has inspired a new revolutionary movement amongst students and workers from different social classes, Parsa said.
In the second portion of the lecture, Smith discussed how unsuccessful U.S. policies have made it difficult to determine who American enemies actually are. To ensure national security, the United States should simplify its national goals in the Middle East, he said.
"I start with the basic premise that what our national interest is in the Middle East is stability nothing beyond that," he said.
Countries in the region often lack "inherent internal security" because foreign powers have imposed artificial borders that divide cultural groups, Smith said.
"The countries are not really countries at all," he said. "They didn't evolve on the basis of communal, religious and cultural bases but were imposed by foreign powers, mainly the British."
During attempts to export democracy, the United States has failed to identify countries with stable foundations, Smith said.
In the future, the United States should verify that countries are receptive to intervention before offering funding and other resources to such a mission, according to Smith.
The lectures held in Spaulding Auditorium on Wednesday were the sixth installment of the seven-part summer lecture series, "Perilous Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran," sponsored by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth.
