The turbulent history of modern Iran begins with the fall the Qajar dynasty's traditional polity in 1925, followed by the westernizing policies of Reza Shah and Muhammad Reza Shah, who ruled until the Islamic revolution in 1979. The revolution introduced a new ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, who created an Islamic republic that was a hybrid of tradition and modernity.
The Qajar Shahs had ruled autocratically in a traditional Iran where due process of law was unknown and punishment was swift, involving physical torment and at times violent death. Hardly anyone was sentenced to prison. Torture was a part of the process by which the guilt of the accused was established. With the arrival of European-style "modernity," the Pahlavi dynasty adopted new policies. Reza Shah, who ruled from 1926 to 1941, created a centralized administration, a standing army, a police force for cities, and a gendarmerie for the countryside. In the absence of legal safeguards, however, these paraphernalia of a modern state were abusive of the rights of citizens.
The state built prisons and created the category of political prisoners. The new elite who employed Western-designed instruments of power without much hesitation, were much more distrustful of Western-style safeguards such as constitutional limits of authority, representative assemblies, individual liberties, and due process of law. The Shah felt comfortable with adopting Western instruments of power for he did not see them as a cultural imposition much different from what was known in the past. Their safeguards, however, were rejected as Western cultural intrusions. The same selective borrowings in the interests of those who wield power have continued under the Ayatollahs into the twenty-first century.
Under Reza Shah, the number of political prisoners was small, although a few men were murdered for political reasons. However, political and economic abuses of the modernizing elite generated resentment among the country's relatively small, modern middle class. Thus emerged a counter elite of nationalistic and populist persuasions. The ensuing political confrontations did not create an evolutionary process toward a more democratic state. Instead, they increasingly engendered political violence. As the severity of the challenge increased, so did the use of torture and execution. At the beginning of this process under Reza Shah, the confrontations lacked the intensity that they later assumed under his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. The latter's rule, in turn, appears far less violent when compared with what awaited the people under the Ayatollahs. There seems to be a correlation between the increasing commitment to conflicting ideologies and the escalating level of violence.
Faced with the state's forceful modernization of educational norms and the Westernization of the public space (e.g., the removal of the veil), traditionalist Shiite clerics offered some resistance. This was put down with little killing and a relatively minimal use of torture. When a group of Marxists arose in 1938 to present a secular challenge, the state charged them with antistate sedition. None of them was executed, and after the initial harsh interrogations, accompanied by the use of physical pressure, the prisoners settled into routine, monotonous prison life. Iranian prisons lacked the brutalities that were associated with military dictatorships throughout the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century. The regime did not torture its imprisoned opponents. In the words of historian Ervand Abrahamian, the regime "was more interested in keeping subjects passive and outwardly obedient than in mobilizing them and boring holes into their minds. Reza Shah had created a military monarchyot an ideologically charged autocracy" (1999, p. 41).
After Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, the country experienced a period of political openness, during which the influential leftist Tudeh Party ("Masses" party) was formed. The CIA induced a coup in 1953 that brought the almost-deposed Mohammad Reza Shah back to Iran, but which also ended the period of openness, forfeiting the possibility of a gradual democratic process. The leftists were prosecuted without due process of law and were subjected to torture. Overall, whatever mistreatments and physical abuses the nationalists and leftists experienced from 1953 to 1958, these proved to be only a dress rehearsal for the array of state-sanctioned tortures that were imposed in the 1970s.
Both Mohammad Reza Shah and his opponents became increasingly ideological. The Shah's new doctrinaire
In Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1978, demonstrators oppose the U.S. government's backing of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. The hoods conceal their identities from SAVAK, the Iranian intelligence agency that had strong ties to the CIA. [OWEN FRANKEN/CORBIS]
The Shah's political police, known by the acronym SAVAK, was designed to strike fear in the hearts of the regime's young opponents. A new generation of torturers creatively honed their craft. It appeared as if SAVAK was deliberately flaunting its brutality. Tehran's Evin Prison symbolized SAVAK's merciless image. It is not clear how much of SAVAK's brutality actually occurred and how much was the result of the deliberately cultivated image of SAVAK violence or the creative allegations of political opponents. In the end, the brutality and the reputation of SAVAK fed upon each other.
Torture was used to extract confessions and recantations. More significantly, torture began to cast a dark shadow over the lives of the leading activists. The torture-induced confessions, broadcast nationally, were meant to break the resolve of the activists and dissuade university students from entering the forbidden political arena. In many cases, however, it had the opposite effect. In this convoluted world, which would outlast the dynasty and continue into the Islamic Republic, having been torturednd not any independent act of bravery or a prolonged service to political causesecame the arbiter of who would rise as heroes and who would fall into infamy. Dying under torture created real martyrs.
Martyrs' photos adorned the revolutionary banners of the organizations that helped to overthrow the Shah in 1979. In this time of confession and recantation, Evin Prison linked the Shah's regime with that of the Ayatollah's. Interestingly, the man who shaped the prison life under the Ayatollah's regime had been himself a prisoner in Evin during the Shah's rule. When the monarchy was overturned, the prison was quickly emptied of the Shah's opponents and packed instead with high officials who had previously served the monarchy.
The Ayatollah presented his revolutionary state as Islamic and thus unlike any other in modern history. However, in the early years of the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, many of human rights violations had very little to do with Islam, or even with the politicized clerics' reading of it. The politically shrewd mullahs moved aggressively to eliminate any real or imagined challenges to the legitimacy of the newly established state. Their actions corresponded with the revolutionary patterns that had been created by totalitarian states elsewhere in the world. The mullahs merely added their own Islamic terminology to rationalize actions whose motivations lay in the realities of the contemporary nationtate in the context of an illiberal political culture. For political prisoners who crowded the prisons in the 1980s, the judiciary was characterized by the absence of justice, Islamic or otherwise.
Summary executions are the signature of all revolutionary states, as are torture-induced confessions and repentance. The tactics used by the Ayatollah's mullahs to extract information and to break the resolve of political prisoners were thus almost identical to those used by other revolutionary states, from the Stalinist Soviet Union, to the U.S.upported juntas in Latin American countries during the cold war. The Islamic Republic's ideological fervor, however, was matched by an unprecedented intensification of executions and torture, and in their wake, many came to absolve the Shah of his own unsavory record, which paled in comparison.
The young activists who opposed Ayatollah Khomeini were ill-prepared for what awaited them in prison. They based their expectations on their own experiences in the Shah's prisons, or on what they had heard from previous generations of political prisoners. The Shah's tactics of repression offered no realistic measure of what followed with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini to power, however. By 1985, approximately thirteen thousand individuals who politically opposed the Ayatollah had been executed.
In a creative interpretation of medieval Islamic laws, the clerics found a way to justify torture as Islamic Ta Ezir ("discretionary punishment" in ShiDite jurisprudence). A prisoner who "lied" to interrogators could receive Ta Ezir of as many as seventy-four lashes until the "truth" was extracted. Many well-known individuals of all ideological persuasions were displayed on national television giving "voluntary interviews": confessing, recanting, denouncing their past political associations, and praising the Ayatollah as the "Leader of the Islamic Revolution." In these broadcasts, the mullahs far out-performed the showmanship of the Shah's SAVAK. By extracting formal recantations, the clerics intended to show that God was on their side, and that history, with its teleological direction and ultimate destiny, had vindicated them. Captives were forced to deliver a version of history that rendered them, prior to their repentance and return to Islam, as the essence of all evils, ancient and modern.
Thousands of rank and file activists whose "interviews" had no additional propaganda value, were nonetheless subjected to a crude combination of physical torture, psychological pressure, Islamic "teachings," and public confession, all aimed at remolding their thoughts and conscience. The Islamic Republic added a new term with clear religious undertones to Iran's prison lexicon: Tawaban (singular tawab) were prisoners who had recanted. In fact, the clerics wished to turn the entire secular population of Iran into tawaban. The result was a severe violation of the right of political prisoners to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, as well as the freedom to hold opinions without interference.
Prior to his death, Ayatollah Khomeini's crowning achievement was the prison massacre of 1988, unique in the annals of the country's brutalities. For reasons not entirely clear, the Ayatollah decided to dissolve the category of "political prisoners" by dispatching them to death or setting them free. The political prisoners faced an inquisition that had no proper judicial task other than inquiring about their thoughts on Islam and the central institution of the Islamic Republic. No consideration was given to the prisoners' alleged crimes or to the sentences under which they had been serving since the early 1980s. Instead, the inquisitors passed judgment on the prisoners' apostasy. Each prisoner was asked, "Are you Muslim, and do you perform your daily prayers." The prisoners understood the true meaning of the question: "Will you renounce your conscience and live?" Many held fast to their beliefs, and were hung the same day.
In the prisons, the prosecutors asked those who had confirmed their faith in Islam to prove it by performing the required daily prayers. If they refused, they would receive twenty lashes for each of the daily five sets of prayers total of one hundred lashes every twenty-four hours. Both male and female prisoners were subject to this daily regimen of whippings. One judge told the prisoners that the punishment for a female infidel was death under prolonged whipping. In fact, however, the clerics treated women differently from men. Men were considered responsible for their apostasy and had to be killed. Women, on the other hand, were not believed to be competent enough to take total responsibility for their actions, so the clerics would punish them with imprisonment until they repented. Thus, one misogynist rule saved many women's lives. Female members of the Mojahedinn anti-clerical Islamic organizationere not so fortunate. They were executed for continuing to support their exiled leaders.
In contrast to the early years of the Ayatollah's regime, the executioners stopped publishing the body counts for their daily activities in 1988. An official veil of secrecy shrouded the ongoing massacre, and the rulers denied that mass killings continued to take place inside the prisons. Many scholars accept the estimate of 4,500 to 5,000 dead for the entire country that year, although some have alleged that the figure was much highers many as 10,000 to 12,000. Opposition publications abroad, however, claimed a national death toll of 30,000.
Like human rights violators in other ideological states, the Islamic rulers of Iran engaged in extrajudicial activities. Scores of intellectuals and journalists were killed in this fashion. From 1990 onward, these crimes were committed by members of the shadowy groups who either worked for or were loosely associated with the Intelligence Ministry. These extrajudicial actions made a mockery of the due process of law, even when considered in terms of purely Islamic, or shariDah, law. Because of this, the Intelligence Ministry tried very hard to conceal its murderous, extra-judicial actions from the public. Even the reformist president, Khatami, elected in 1997, was unable to put an end to these activities, although the intelligence officials became more circumspect.
Although there were similarities between the Islamic Republic and more secular authoritarian regimes in their use of violence and repression, there were also major differences that created new patterns of human rights violations. These differences originated from the invocation of shari Eah, or rather from the much larger and loosely structured cultural habits and norms derivative of the shari Eah paradigm. One major new category of human rights violations resulted from the reimposition of Islamic punishments such as flogging, amputation, and stoning to death of adulterers and common criminals.
The Ayatollah's revolution was Islamic, and the majority of its victims were Muslim Iranians, but non-Muslim Iranians suffered repression and persecution unlike any in modern Iranian history. Iran's Islamic tradition recognizes followers of three monotheistic religionsoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity (Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans)s people of the book. The Islamic Constitution recognizes them, as "the only religious minorities who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education." To put it differently, they are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, but only within the limits of Islamic shariEah. Nonetheless, discrimination against non-Muslim people of the book became blatant. A majority of each community saw no future for themselves in Iran and left.
The largest religious community in Iran was not named in the constitution, however. This was the Bahī, whose faith was never recognized in Iran, its troubled birthplace. Because Bahī were assumed to have been Muslims before accepting their "false" revelation, the Iranian Bahīs were considered to be apostates. By omitting them from constitutional recognition, the clerics' hoped to destroy the conditions needed for their survival as a community with a distinct religious identity. They attacked BaháDís on all possible grounds and in all spheres of public life, from elementary education to professional occupations, from marriage ceremonies to cemeteries. More than 200 of their leaders were murdered. Although many fled the country, the community endured and survived the harshest years of the 1980s.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Iran had already defeated Islamic fundamentalism. A majority of the people were patiently waiting for a nonviolent institutional and legal transformation that would allow the young population to experience personal freedoms and a measure of democracy. The regime lost its Islamic mooring and its institutions completed with each other. The land of ancient Persia had lost the imperial, monarchic facade that was once a source of national pride.
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