By Dr Tariq Rahman
Twilight of the Aryamehr
T The Iranian Revolution has often been compared to its 1917 precursor in Russia. Besides being momentous
events, the two great uprisings, it is generally believed, also represented the triumph of one ideology over another. In reality, however, they were an expression of the people’s rage against corruption, nepotism and prolonged injustice. The ideologies – Marxism in the first case and Islam in the second-only provided the revolution’s leadership the inspiration and hope for eventual redemption.
PRIEST AND THE KING
DESMOND HARNEY
The Priest and the King: An Eyewitness Account of the Iranian Revolution
Desmond Harney
- B. Tauris Publishers
London, 1999
Price: 438 rupees
158
Those wishing to test the verity of this claim with regard to the Iranian Revolution would find erstwhile British diplomat and banker Desmond Harney’s The Priest and the King: An Eyewitness Account of the Iranian Revolution a useful read. A riveting diary maintained by the author who was stationed in Tehran at the time, the book chronicles the events that led to the Shah’s overthrow and the meteoric rise of Ayatollah Khomeini (the prince and the priest of the title, respectively).
Harney appears to have secured a unique perch from which to view the tumultuous events that shook the country. He first entered Iran in 1958 as a junior diplomat and again in 1971 as first secretary. Later, he resigned from government service and returned to the country as an executive of the Morgan Grenfell Bank in 1978. It was then that he started writing his diary.
Harney’s entries are both factual and reflective. He first describes an event and then comments on its popular perception, invariably presenting his own views on the situation as well. For instance, he describes how keenly people responded to the BBC’s Persian service at that time, especially when the authorities clamped down on the local media. But this, according to the author, also lent credence to the conspiracy theories regarding the British being behind the turmoil in Iran.
The note of alarm and bewilderment is sounded from the very beginning- “What murder is out there, what scheming, what nervous soldiers?” – and continues to crop up throughout the narrative. But this adds to the credibility of Harney’s account because people in the midst of revolutions and other
similar upheavals are generally unsure of whether there will really be a change in the normative order.
The first shots of the revolution were fired during an attack on a police station in Qom on January 10, 1978. As this was the city of the Ayatollah, Islamic radicalism was part of the anti-Shah agitation from the very beginning. But the revolution began in earnest only after the Jaleh Square massacre in downtown Tehran on September 8 that year.
The next month saw a steady disintegration of the Shah’s regime. Khomeini, who was then in exile in Najaf, Iraq, moved to Paris and started leading the onslaught against the monarchy. Meanwhile, the unrest spread to many towns and the death toll increased. The rioters, who were generally young, attacked everything perceived to symbolise the materialism and modernisation of the West, raising the battle cries of “Marg barae Shah” (Death to the king).
On November 5, the British embassy was torched, allegedly by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, or the army. While many speculated that the hard-liners wanted to force the Shah into bringing in a tough military set-up that would not brook any civil unrest, no such government was ultimately installed. The pace of the revolution quickened around the close of the year and the country presented a grim scenario: about 1,600 people had died during the riots and the once bustling city of Tehran was paralysed by strikes.
With the Shah having left the country on January 16 the following year, Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1 and established a theocratic government. Much had changed in Iran. In 1963, the country had appeared to be one of the most
The Herald, July 2000
