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Angry, nightly protests on the streets of Tehran, the ruler’s pictures trampled underfoot and set ablaze; statues toppled — and then the chaos, fear and death unleashed by gunshots.
The scenes that have unfolded in Iran in the past fortnight are both incredible yet unnervingly familiar. I am in a time warp, transported back 48 years in an instant to the start of the Iranian revolution. Then, as now, I watched much of it from London, the city to which my parents had emigrated a few decades earlier. Iran was my other home where we spent lengthy summers visiting family.
So tight was the grip of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and so feared was Savak, his secret police, that it was highly unusual to see public protests breaking out domestically in January 1978. Only a few weeks earlier, US President Jimmy Carter had toasted the Shah in Tehran for creating “an island of stability” in a troubled region.
The violent suppression of the protests set off a cycle of demonstrations that ebbed and flowed. Unlike a coup d’état, a revolution does not happen overnight. It was to take a full year before the Shah’s near 38-year rule ended on January 16 1979, the day he boarded a plane to leave Iran for good.
Throughout 1978, I hoped that the Shah’s dictatorial rule would finally give way to democracy. My mother and I enthusiastically bought daily bundles of newspapers and magazines and pasted the articles into large scrap books to document what felt like a historic turning point. Tying scarves around our faces as masks, we would head to Hyde Park to attend protests outside the Iranian embassy. Now, once again, there are dissenters outside that same building — only some are holding the royalist flag.
By the summer of 1978, my family decided that we would still make our annual visit to Iran. I sensed an expectant mood and anticipation of change — not necessarily revolution — but positive change. Friends and family talked more openly; political discussions that were previously hushed for fear of what we thought was Savak’s omnipresence. While I was there, a terrible event occurred in the south-western city of Abadan. Arsonists set fire to a cinema, killing more than 350 people, for which each side blamed the other. And in September, soon after the Shah imposed martial law, scores of people were shot in a huge protest in Tehran’s Jaleh Square.
The last months of the Shah’s rule deteriorated quickly, despite his attempts to placate protesters by acknowledging mistakes and promising free elections. Merchants in the bazaar, in echoes of the current situation, shut their shops in protest at high inflation. Workers in the oil industry went on strike, choking Iran’s economic lifeblood. The coalition against the Shah held, despite its breadth and the infighting between communists, socialists, Islamic Marxists, liberal nationalists and supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. The cleric, exiled by the Shah in 1964, spoke of retiring to Qom and leaving it to the people to decide how they wanted to be governed through a referendum.
My next visit to Iran was in the spring of 1979. Although a referendum in favour of a vague concept of an Islamic republic had been held, the new government had yet to establish the control that later led to accusations that it had hijacked the revolution. Women still dressed as they wished. The enforcement of the hijab; mass executions; the storming of the US embassy; and the horrors unleashed by Iraq’s attack on Iran in September 1980 and beyond lay in an unknowable future. By then my father, disillusioned by the turn of events, could no longer bear to see those scrapbooks. I was eventually encouraged to throw them out.
For more than a century Iranians have taken to the streets and risked their lives for democratic reform and economic prosperity: the constitutional revolution of 1905-11 aimed to limit the monarchy’s powers; premier Mohammad Mosaddegh, who nationalised the oil industry in the early 1950s, was overthrown in a British and US-engineered coup; then came the 1979 revolution. The most recent protests demonstrate that the desire for democratic rule remains alive, whatever the future may bring.