In 1975, I was thrust into the world of art and public culture when I accepted an offer to join the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, established under the sponsorship of the queen, which oversaw a number of major museums and cultural centers. The museums in my charge included the Carpet Museum of Tehran, the Tehran Museum of Ancient Iranian Ceramics and Glassware, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the Khorramabad Museum of Ancient Lurestan Bronzes. We were also running cultural centers in the capital, where we organized art exhibitions, art workshops, lectures, and seminars. I was only in my second year at the foundation when the clouds of revolution began to loom over the country.
REVOLUTION
In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran seemed to be prospering. The country was stable. The economy was booming, and while wealth distribution was uneven, Iranians in general were better fed and clothed. Increasing numbers of people had access to education as well as cars, refrigerators, TV sets, and other modern conveniences. The shah had managed his foreign relations well and, in a much-divided world, enjoyed good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as with China, India, and Pakistan, and Israel and the Arab states.
Yet political stability had been purchased at a price—repression. A growing educated middle class chafed at the lack of freedoms and input regarding how the country was run. The explosion in oil prices in 1973-74 dramatically boosted government revenues, but the rapid injection of that money into the economy led to inflation, rising food prices, and a real estate boom that pushed affordable housing out of reach for most ordinary families. Rural migrants crowded into the capital and other major cities in search of jobs and found themselves living in crowded shantytowns lacking electricity and piped water. For newcomers, life in Tehran, a messy, sprawling metropolis, meant a bewildering sense of cultural dislocation and a shock to traditional and religious sensibilities.
Since other avenues for the expression of discontent—political parties, trade unions, an independent press, professional associations—were suppressed or strictly controlled, people flocked to mosques, where clerics used a religious vocabulary to preach barely disguised condemnations of the state and its policies. When the shah responded to these murmurs of discontent by easing up on controls over speech and political activity, opposition elements quickly seized on the opening.
By 1977, for example, Tehran’s “poetry nights” at the German sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners. These letters circulated widely in Xerox form, even if they could not be published in the daily press. In January 1978, under government pressure, one of the two leading newspapers in the country published an article scurrilously attacking Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah’s principal opponent abroad. The article led to protests by seminary students and clashes with the authorities in the shrine city of Qom. Khomeini had risen to prominence in the early 1960s for his uncompromising denunciations of the shah’s policies. He rapidly achieved a name for himself.
His arrest in 1963 had led to widespread riots, shaking the government to its foundations. The following year, free again, Khomeini used a sermon to denounce the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) Iran had signed with the United States. It gave American military personnel and their families in Iran immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts, and was hugely resented by politically inclined Iranians. He was sent into exile and eventually made his way to Najaf, in Iraq, where he took up teaching, attracting a wide circle of seminary students with his learning and his ability to give potent political meaning to traditional Islamic teachings. He continued his attacks on the shah’s regime, eventually describing monarchy as hateful to Islam and calling for the establishment of an Islamic republic under clerical leadership. In Iran, he gained a wide if not always public following and a clandestine network of clerical devotees who spread his message.
When demonstrations against the government broke out in January 1978, triggering further protests, Khomeini was well poised to seize control of the nascent opposition movement. In February, demonstrators in Tabriz went on a rampage, trashing government offices and the headquarters of the ruling party. They also attacked the symbols of “modernity”: nightclubs, cinema houses, liquor stores, and banks. The protests accelerated with astonishing speed. Six weeks later, similar riots erupted in half a dozen major cities. In September, over a hundred thousand joined in a protest march and communal prayers in Tehran. On Friday, September 8, after martial law had been declared in the capital, dozens were killed in clashes between protesters and troops. “Black Friday,” as it was instantly dubbed by the shah’s opponents, proved a watershed in the trajectory of the growing protest movement, which brought together varied political organizations and social classes: traditional and radical clerics, centrists from Mossadegh’s old National Front, Communists of the Tudeh Party, as well as men and women associated with underground guerrilla movements, civil servants hurt by inflation and stagnant salaries, intellectuals eager for more freedom, and shopkeepers and bazaar merchants chafing at government attempts to control prices.
Khomeini’s clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader. Charismatic, adept at a rhetoric that resonated powerfully with the public, rejecting every compromise, and unrelenting in his determination to unseat the shah, he transformed what began as a call for the restoration of constitutional guarantees into a call for revolution. He united this disparate collection of opposition groups behind one goal: the overthrow of the monarchy.
In the fall and early winter of 1978, the shah’s regime seemed to be unraveling before our eyes. Heavily armed troops appeared helpless to stop the mounting demonstrations and the imaginative forms of civil disobedience adopted by a thoroughly roused public. Civil servants went to work every day, but sat in their offices and did nothing, gradually bringing much of the government to a standstill. The mail could not be delivered, nor could imported goods be processed through customs. Oil-industry workers went on strike, reducing production to a trickle, which caused massive shortages of fuel and grounded truck transport. Factories shut down. Workers at Tehran’s major electric power plant turned off the city’s electric supply at will, plunging the capital into darkness. Schoolboys in Tehran stalled cars in the middle of major crossroads, snarling traffic and causing massive traffic jams. Tehranis took to their rooftops at night to cry out Allah-o-Akbar, God is Great, into the December night, as if calling on God to rid the country of the shah.
Many of our friends were caught up in the revolutionary fervor, somehow imagining that the regime could be overthrown, the shah replaced by Khomeini, and that their own lives—comfortable, privileged—would remain unchanged. “Let him go,” one of our friends said. “Anything will be better than the shah.” Shaul and I, and a small circle of our closest friends, however, witnessed these momentous events with mounting trepidation. A political earthquake was taking place. The future seemed full of uncertainties. Deep down, Shaul and I sensed that that our lives would never be the same again. Shaul returned from a trip to London in early November. I could not pick him up at the airport because martial law had been declared and a curfew was in force. He took a cab home. No one at the airport seemed to be in charge at passport control or customs, he said. Troops patrolled the nearly deserted night streets, but they were lackadaisical in enforcing the rules of martial law. Back home, Shaul silently took in the familiar objects of our living room and library—the books, the frames of Persian calligraphy on the walls, the glow of lamps on the sofas. He seemed moved by the sense of calm and order inside the house, compared with the rising chaos on the streets. I could read his thoughts from the look on his face. “Are we going to have to give all this up?” he finally asked.
Clerical and other opposition leaders called for massive protest rallies on December 10 and 11, to coincide with the days of religious mourning. The government banned the marches, and fear of violence and bloodshed was widespread. Shaul and I decided that, as a precaution, I should take our daughter Haleh to London for two weeks and wait things out. I left Tehran