The Dynamics of Revolution

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But Historian Walter Laqueur warns against rigid analogies. If anything, says Laqueur, "you should compare Iran not with France, not with Russia, but with the revolutionary movements in Spain beginning in 1808 against Napoleon, where the revolt was carried out by the crowd, by the mass of people." Princeton University Political Scientist Robert C. Tucker suggests some similarity to the Russian uprising of 1905. Thousands of unarmed striking workers marched on the Czar's Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. Government soldiers fired on the crowd, killing and wounding hundreds. More strikes broke out. Peasant and military groups revolted. Says Tucker: "That may have been the purest case before Iran in the 20th century of a great, spontaneous, popular, antimonarchical movement spreading across the country. In that case, it failed; the monarch caught itself, staggered and survived—temporarily."

For every point of historical comparison, Iran offers at least one anomalous or unprecedented detail. The role of mass electronics was rather weird, causing the McLuhanesque web to thrum with a new note. Ubiquitous transistor radios and cassette tape recorders with messages relayed over telephone lines to some 9,000 mosques all over Iran allowed a 78-year-old holy man camped in a Paris suburb to direct a revolution 2,600 miles away like a company commander assaulting a hill.

The most interesting and socially entangled factor in the Iranian revolution has been the role of the Muslim religion. The Ayatullah Khomeini's revolution was aimed to a large extent at restoration, a re-establishment of the Islamic spirituality and law that had been, so the faithful believed, desecrated by the Shah's modernizations and the widespread, profound corruption of everyday life. Iranians were caught in an intolerable bind: their daily routines were elaborately oppressed by a stupid, corrupt bureaucracy, and yet everything in Iran (costs, salaries, the pace of change) was moving at ungodly speeds. Eastern European official stolidity was impossibly combined with Western velocity.

Islam proved to be a liberating vehicle, although an ironic one, to Western eyes. There are several layers of paradox in the relationship between religion and revolution. The word revolution first entered the English language as a political term around 1600, and implied restoration of the old order. Later revolutions, like the French and the Russian, were explicitly antireligious, anticlerical. And yet revolution is almost always cryptoreligious in its vocabularies, disciplines and even operating psychologies. Revolution needs martyrs, saints, zealots, and almost always involves a rigorously ascetic ideal. Revolution, like religion, means faith and commitment, righteousness, intolerance, overriding goals, doctrine and ideology. In the revolutionary paradigm, the old order is corrupt, out of grace, godless, and therefore to be swept aside. Revolutionaries, of course, tend to seek their heaven on earth, here and now. But the contradiction between revolutionary dreams and religious yearning achieved at least a temporary resolution in Khomeini's Iran. Islam, after all, makes no distinction between the church and state, the secular and the sacred.