Iran's Islamic revolution in comparative perspective

World Politics

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1986, Pages 383-414

  Arjomand, Said Amir ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84975966208     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: 10863338     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2010199     Document Type: Article

References (167)

1. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978)
2. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
3. Ekkart Zimmermann, Political Violence, Crises and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Shenkman, 1983), 309–14.
4. Jean Baechler, Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineanu, ed. and trans. by John Lukacs (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 82, 109.
6. S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies (New York: Free Press, 1978)
7. Jack A. Goldstone, “The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions,” Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982), 196–97.
8. The Shah was aware of these vulnerabilities, and, in 1978, knowing he had cancer, began trying to make the regime more “democratic” for the succession of his son. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History (New York: Stein & Day, 1980).
9. Ibid., 168–71
10. William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 190
11. Jerrold J. Green, Revolution in Iran: The Politics of Countermobilization (New York: Praeger, 1982), 92–124.
12. Sullivan (fn. 7), 212. The figures for Tehran are taken from a Master's thesis for Tehran University supervised by Dr. Ahmad Ashraf. I am grateful to Dr. Ashraf for this information.
13. Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran (New York: Random House, 1985), 142–43.
14. Tilly (fn. 2), 20.
15. Sullivan (fn. 7), 199–247.
16. Skocpol (fn. 2), chap. 3 and p. 286
17. Walter L. Goldfrank, “Theories of Revolution and Revolution Without Theory: The Case of Mexico,” Theory and Society 7 (No. 3, 1979), 153
18. Zimmermann (fn. 2), 315, 322, 336–42, 352–57.
19. Skocpol (fn. 2), 318, n. 2
20. Theda Skocpol, “Rentier State and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society 11 (No. 3, 1982), 265–304.
21. On the Cuban Revolution, see John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), chap. 8.
22. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 304–06.
23. Weber, Economy and Society (2 vols.), ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), I, pp. 54–56 and II, chap. 15.
24. Otto Hintze, “The State in Historical Perspective,” in Reinhard Bendix and others, eds., State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)
25. Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 63, 110–11.
26. Said A. Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
27. We encounter this kind of situation in rebellions in Castile in 1520, where Franciscan and Dominican monks figured prominently among the leaders of the Comuneros. Similarly, as the president of the Catalan Diputacio, the priest Pau Claris assumed the leading position in the rebellion of the summer of 1640. When the Spanish people rose against Napoleon in 1808 without any king or government, they were led by the church—priests and monks. See Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), 42
28. Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), I, pp. 266–67.
29. Eisenstadt (fn. 5)
30. Baechler (fn. 3), 139
31. Goldstone (fn. 5), 194–95.
32. By 1640, the English Crown had alienated a large segment of the elite which included, notably, the proponents of aristocratic constitutionalism and the rising local landed gentry who resisted its increasingly statist policies. See Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1972), 30, 57, 92, 124.
33. De Tocqueville (fn. 4)
34. Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution (New York: Norton, 1968); Zagorin (fn. 18).
35. Ibid., II, p. 94.
36. Richard Tapper, Introduction to The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 26–28.
37. Ann K.S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), chap. 15.
38. Ahmad Ashraf “Dehqanan, Zamin va Enqelab” [The Peasantry, Land and Revolution], in Kitab-e Agah (1982/136), 1, 11–12
39. Eric Hooglund, Land and Revolution in Iran, 1960–1980 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 79, 81
40. Ann K.S. Lambton, “Land and Revolution in Iran” (Review Article), Iranian Studies 17 (No. 1, 1984), 76–77. The destruction of the peasant-landlord relationship was completed in the 1960s, during the second and third phases of the reform, with the schemes for division of land between peasants and landlords. Though the redistributive effect of these phases was negligible, their sociopolitical effect in breaking the traditional links between peasants and landlords was profound.
41. Said A. Arjomand, “Shi'ite Islam and the Revolution in Iran,” Government and Opposition 16 (Summer 1981), 293–316.
42. Ann K.S. Lambton, The Persian Land Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 102–13
43. Tapper (fn. 23), 29.
44. According to Bakhash, 8,000 shopkeepers were jailed and as many as 250,000 fined during this campaign in 1975 and 1976. Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 13. The last figure seems too high.
45. It is interesting to compare the heterogeneity and lack of cohesiveness of Iran's new middle class with the same features associated with its Western counterpart, which Gouldner erroneously portrays as a new class in the Marxian schema. Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury, 1979).
46. Charles Tilly, “Revolutions and Collective Violence” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, III: Macropolitical Theory (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 507–10.
47. It is highly revealing that the period identified by Tilly as marking the transition from traditional to modern forms of collective action, the mid-19th century, coincided with the end of the classic age of revolutions. Charles Tilly, “How Protest Modernized in France, 1845–1855,” in William O. Aydelotte, Allan G. Bogue, and Robert Fogel, eds., The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
48. For an assessment of Trevor-Roper's idea, see J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 129–31.
49. Alfred Cobban, Social Interpretations of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)
50. Jack A. Goldstone, “Reinterpreting the French Revolution,” Theory and Society 13 (September 1984).
51. Krishan Kumar, “Class and Political Action in Nineteenth-Century England: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives,” European Journal of Sociology 24 (No. 1, 1983).
52. Craig J. Calhoun, “The Radicalism of Tradition: Community Strength or Venerable Disguise and Borrowed Language?” American Journal of Sociology 88 (No. 5, 1983), 886, 897, 908.
53. Tilly (fn. 30, 1972)
54. Zimmermann (fn. 2), 374–75.
55. William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
56. Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 126, 127.
57. Calhoun (fn. 34), 911.
58. Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans [The French Revolution and the peasants], in Études sur la Révolution française (Presses Universitaires de France, 1954 [1933]), 250, 254
59. Tilly (fn. 30, 1975), 498;
60. Zimmermann (fn. 2).
61. Dunn (fn. 13), 52–53.
62. Brenan (fn. 18), 206–11, 213, note A. In the Second Carlist War (1870–1876), monks and priests again led the guerrilla bands.
63. Dunn (fn. 13), 49, 64–69
64. François Chevalier, “The Ejido and Political Stability in Mexico,” in Claudio Veliz, ed., The Politics of Conformity in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 161–69
65. Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), chap. 16
66. Alistair Hennessy, “Fascism and Populism in Latin America,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader's Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 280.
67. Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan P. Myklebust, Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980)
68. Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
69. Natalie Z. Davis, “Religious Riots in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973), 85–86.
70. George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)
71. Zimmermann (fn. 2), 387.
72. Francis L. Carsten, “Interpretations of Fascism,” in Laqueur (fn. 41), 416–19
73. Juan J. Linz, “Some Notes Towards a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective,” ibid., 38–39
74. Peter H. Merkl, “Comparing the Fascist Movements,” in Larsen and others (fn. 42), 764, 789
75. Miklós Lackó, “The Social Roots of Hungarian Fascism: The Arrow Cross,” ibid., 395–96
76. Hamilton (fn. 42), esp. 444–55.
77. James C. Davies, “Towards a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27 (No. 1, 1962).
78. Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (London: Croom Helm, 1978).
79. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951 [1897]).
80. Merkl (fn. 45), 760–62.
81. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), 45–48.
82. Stone (fn. 20), 103, 120–21.
83. Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. and with an introduction by Bernard Semmel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
84. Merkl (fn. 45), 757.
85. Linz (fn. 45), 50.
86. Stone (fn. 20), 96–97
87. Michael Walzer, The Revolutions of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 140–43.
88. Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, 3d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1956), 44
89. Carsten (fn. 45), 418
90. Linz (fn. 45), 48–50
91. Juan J. Linz, “Political Space and Fascism as a Late-Comer,” in Larsen and others (fn. 42), 167
92. Zeev Barbu, “Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspective on the Iron Guard, the Fascist Movement of Romania,” ibid., 385–87.
93. Ahmad Ashraf and Ali Banuazizi, “State and Social Classes and Modes of Mobilization in the Iranian Revolution,” State, Culture and Society 1 (No. 3, 1985).
94. Barbu (fn. 57), 392.
95. Eugen Weber, “The Men of the Archangel,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (No. 1, 1966), 107.
96. Max Weber (fn. 15), II, p. 1195.
97. Michael M.J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
98. Quoted in Ervand Abrahamian, “Structural Causes of the Iranian Revolution,” Middle East Research and Information Project 87 (May 1980), 26.
99. It was neither the first nor the last time that a social class participated in a revolution which did not further its interests. As Barrington Moore has pointed out, peasants have often been the principal victims of modernization brought about by communist governments they helped create by their participation in revolutionary movements. See Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 428–29
100. see Zimmermann (fn. 2), 339–41, 356.
101. Similarly, the outcome of the French Revolution was not especially favorable to the petite bourgeoisie, the sans-culottes, who most vigorously participated in it. Ibid., 387, 407.
102. George L. Mosse, “The Genesis of Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (No. 1, 1966), 22.
103. Anthony F.C. Wallace, “Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for their Comparative Study,” American Anthropologist 58 (April 1956).
104. Walzer (fn. 56), 313, 315.
105. Svend Ranulf, Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (New York: Schocken, 1964 [1938]).
106. Eugen Weber, “Rumania,” in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)
107. Istvan Deak, “Hungary,” ibid., 394;
108. Barbu (fn. 57).
109. John Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 42 (1969), 42–44, 48.
110. Hexter (fn. 31), 178.
111. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. by Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. 29, 48–49, 70–74.
112. Eugen Kamenka, “The Concept of Political Revolution,” in Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Revolution: Nomos VIII (New York: Atherton, 1966), 126.
113. Dunn (fn. 13), 8–11.
114. Jules Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology in Communism (Bosten: Beacon Press, 1960 [1949]), 12.
115. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: New American Library, 1969), 281
116. Baechler (fn. 3), 10, n. 15.
117. Mosse (fn. 65), 21.
118. Linz (fn. 45), 16.
119. Once the attempt to export the Islamic Revolution, temporarily checked by the setback in the Iran-Iraq war, is resumed fully, one may expect further resonances of the Italian fascist ideas of “an imperialism of the poor” and “proletarian imperialism.” Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Laqueur (fn. 41), 334–35
120. Joseph Baglieri, “Italian Fascism and the Crisis of Liberal Hegemony: 1901–1922,” in Larsen (fn. 42), 322–23.
121. Linz (fn. 45), 5.
122. Ibid., 20–21.
123. William M. Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
124. Said A. Arjomand, “Traditionalism in Twentieth-Century Iran,” in Arjomand, From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam (London: Macmillan, and Albany: SUNY Press, 1984).
125. Sternhell (fn. 78), 320–21, 326, 335–37.
126. Quoted, ibid., 335, 347.
127. Abu'lA'la' Mawdudi, Process of Islamic Revolution (Pathankot, Punjab: Makteb-e Jamaat-e Islami, 1947)
128. Eran Lerman, “Mawdudi's Concept of Islam,” Middle Eastern Studies 17 (October 1981), 500
129. Yvonne Y. Haddad, “The Qur'anic Justification for Revolution: The View of Sayyid Qutb,” The Middle East Journal 37 (No. 1, 1983).
130. Said A. Arjomand, “Ideological Revolution in Shi'ism,” in Arjomand, Authority and Political Culture in Shi'ism (forthcoming, 1987).
131. Lotfollah Safi, Nezam-e Emamat va Rahbari [Regime of Imamate and Leadership] (Tehran: Bonyad-e Be'that, 1982/1361), 16–18.
132. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Essays on Sociology and Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953).
133. Karl D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1970), 7–13
134. Carsten (fn. 45), 428.
135. Baechler (fn. 3), 108.
136. Hennessy (fn. 41), 258.
137. Zagorin (fn. 18), I, p. 741.
138. Walzer (fn. 56), 92–113.
139. Roland Mousnier, Social Hierarchies, 1450 to the Present, trans. by Peter Evans (New York: Schocken, 1973), 50, 61
140. Zagorin (fn. 18), II, chap. 10.
141. Stone (fn. 20), 90.
142. John Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 487.
143. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament,” in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1972).
144. Tai Liu, Discord in Zion: The Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 50–51, 94–97, 146–60
145. Zagorin (fn. 18), II, p. 166.
146. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, new trans. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 13, 156.
147. Monnerot (fn. 75); Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1968). It is interesting to note that in 1949 Monnerot described communism as “the twentieth-century Islam.”
148. It was “a spectacular but transient phenomenon … in no sense basic to its program.” Therefore, the antireligious features faded as the true political teleology of the revolution unfolded. De Tocqueville (fn. 100), 5–7.
149. On the vitality of religious sentiment among the insurgent masses during the French Revolution, see Albert Soboul, “Sentiment religieux et cultes populaires pendant la revolution: Saintes patriotes et martyrs de la liberté” [Religious sentiment and popular cults during the revolution: patriotic saints and martyrs of liberty], Archives de sociologie des religions 1 (No. 2, 1956).
150. These variations become intelligible in the light of Linz's demonstration that the extent of organized preemption of the political space by Christian-democratic or Catholic-conser-vative parties was a decisive factor in inhibiting the growth of fascism (as in Spain and Belgium). Where such parties existed and had carved up electoral territories for themselves, fascism found a formidable rival. Fascism would also tend to be anticlerical in order to differentiate itself from the rival religious party (as were the Belgian Rex and the Nazis vis-a-vis the Zentrum party). See Linz (fn. 45), 16–28, 52, 84
151. Linz (fn. 57), 156
152. Hamilton (fn. 45), 37–41.
153. Mexican fascism, the Sinarquism of the late 1930s and early 1940s, also fits Linz's pattern. The movement declined when its middle-class supporters defected to the Catholic Accion National. See Hennessy (fn. 41), 280–82.
154. Linz's account of cases in which fascism was not anticlerical but intensely Christian is unsatisfactory, however; see Linz (fn. 45), 16
155. Linz (fn. 57), 164, 184, n. 51.
156. The reverse side of Linz's argument is well put by Merkl: “There is ample evidence that religious decline and confrontations played a role in fascist development …, creating a massive reservoir of confused quasi-religious fears and longings open to exploitation by fascist demagogues.” Merkl (fn. 45), 757.
157. Yeshayahu Jelinek, “Clergy and Fascism: The Hlinka Party in Slovakia and the Croatian Ustasha Movement,” in Larsen and others (fn. 42).
158. E. Weber (fns. 60 and 69); Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Rumania (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1970), 247, 266–70.
159. Stanley Hiltoe, “Acaõ Integralista Brasileira: Fascism in Brazil, 1932–1938,” Luso-Brazilian Review 9 (No. 2, 1972), 12
160. Margaret T. Williams, “Integralism and the Brazilian Catholic Church,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (No. 3, 1974), 436–40.
161. In this typical search for “a third way,” Salgado also sought to “Brazilianize” Italian fascism. He considered the two aspects of his project fully compatible, and declared, “My nationalism is full of God.” Ibid., 434–36.
162. Monnerot (fn. 75), chap. 3
163. Nicholai A. Berdiaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961)
164. James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), 79.
165. Guenter Lewy, Religion and Revolution (1974), chap. 7.
166. Lewy (fn. 41), chap. 7.
167. Arjomand (fn. 17), 269–70.