Going to Bat for Mossadegh, a books review.

Iranian History and Politics: The dialectics of state and society.
RoutledgeCurzon 2003.

Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran.
I.B. Tauris 1990.


In moments of statistical introspection, I wonder if LA Dodgers fans are generally Pahlavi supporters. The occasional Shah picture posted on huge Westwood billboards, and the handful of TV stations time capsuling pre-revolution Tehran are tempting bits of data. San Francisco Giants fans, on the other hand, are generally pro-Mossadegh, though I lack the evidence of billboards. Needless to say, Giants rule and Dodgers suck, but it is nice occasionally to debate with facts and reason. Two meticulously researched books by Oxford scholar Homa Katouzian hit the ball right out of the ballpark for the Giants.

The first book, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectics of State and Society, develops the author’s theory of “arbitrary rule,” and establishes a foundation for understanding Mossadegh’s uniqueness in Iranian history. The second book, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, specifically analyzes the events of the Mossadegh period, demonstrating how he personified a new paradigm in Iran’s civilization.

Arbitrary rule should not be confused with dictatorship, Katouzian says. “The distinctive characteristic of the Iranian state [has been] that it monopolized not just power, but arbitrary power--not the absolute power in laying down the law, but the absolute power of exercising lawlessness.” I believe the umpire is a good example of a dictator. You can’t argue with his decision, but neither can he change the rules of baseball. Katouzian cites the example, Henry VIII of England as a dictator who was not an arbitrary ruler. This dictator had the most unfettered power of any English king, yet he had to use threats, coercion, bribery, and at least one execution to become head of the Church of England, so that he could lawfully divorce his wife (Katouzian does not discuss motivation or methods, just that Henry VIII got the approval of Parliament).

Looking for examples of arbitrary lawlessness, on the other hand, I found this recollection by Farhad Diba of an encounter with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi:

“The Shah asked me what I was doing and I, very proudly, told him about how well NCR [National Cash Register Company] was progressing in Iran. When I reported that to my father the next day, he said "You are a fool. Sure enough, within the year, NCR (which my father had introduced into Iran and, over 25 years, it had grown into a large business) was taken from us and given over to the Pahlavi Foundation.”

In Iranian History and Politics..Katouzian mentions a few of the countless examples of arbitrary usurpation of property by various Shahs. The suspicion that the wealth may have been acquired by unjust means in the first place gives Shahs a certain Robin Hood appeal. But Katouzian’s scholarship exposes the practice as a tragic reason for Iran’s economic backwardness: capital does not accumulate over the generations, making it impossible for any large industrial or financial enterprise to take root.

Under the arbitrary rule of its monarchs, Iran was a “short term society,” as Katouzian terms it, where few social structures were allowed to stand long enough to evolve the sophisticated architecture of modern institutions. In Europe, lords, barons, counts and dukes had the brutal right of ownership to their land, making a feudal system possible. Iran’s khans had no ownership rights, only privileges that could be taken away at the whim of the arbitrary ruler. In such a system even feudalism has no incentive to grow, much less its Western progressions: a powerful merchant class, large scale capitalism, and socialism.

Applying Katouzian’s arbitrary rule theory, I figured out that the spike in the price of oil in the seventies only created the illusion of a modern economy in Iran. This period was in reality little more than a shopping spree by the country’s sole owner, the Shah. In the historic pattern of economic insecurity of the wealthy, nothing had changed.

Applying the simple yet powerful theory again, I realized that freedoms enjoyed by Iranian women and religious minorities during the Shah should not be misunderstood as a modern appreciation of human rights and dignity. True to Iran’s historic pattern, all such freedoms were privileges granted by the monarch, to be taken away at his convenience. The Shah may have been a benevolent soul, but benevolence is no substitute for guaranteed rights under a long term tradition of law. Niceness is a character trait, not a social institution.

The arbitrary rule concept is developed into a solid theory in the book Iranian History and Politics the Dialectic of State and Society. Now the reader is ready for Mussadiq and the struggle for Power in Iran, fully prepared to appreciate this leader’s uniqueness in Iranian history.

The 1906 constitutional revolution was an attempt to put an end to arbitrary rule. At the time Mossadegh was in his early twenties, and for forty-five years he watched as the revolution was torn apart by foreign interference in domestic politics. By the time he became prime minister, Mossadegh knew what to do to piece Iran’s constitution back together. His nationalization of Iranian oil had far less to do with revenue than with eliminating foreign intrusion into Iranian affairs. His recalcitrance in coming to terms with the British should be assessed as serving his grand project—protecting Iran’s newly discovered paradigm of lawful leadership.

Mossadegh himself has been criticized for breaking the law when he temporarily dissolved the majles. “How is that different from the dictatorship of the Shah?” his detractors ask. Katouzian admits the mistake, while explaining the complex mitigating circumstances. Yet his arbitrary rule theory makes it unnecessary to decide whether Mossadegh was a dictator. The reader has already learned that the term “dictator” in the Western sense does not describe our Shahs at all. The Pahlavis were not dictators, but arbitrary rulers. Mossadegh, dictator or not, acted in the modern paradigm of the struggle between various interests of society. For him, the primitive mellat [society]vs. dowlat [state] dialectic was an extinct theme.

As Katouzian explains in Iranian History and Politics..., our numerous rebellions had always been about the mellat overthrowing the dowlat. Everybody vs. the “institution” of the arbitrary ruler. The upheavals led to a period of chaos [fetneh/ahsoub] until a new arbitrary ruler enforced order and began the cycle all over again. In Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran it can be seen that the battles of the Mossdegh era were of a fresh variety. We were fighting over which interests in our society were going to dictate the rules. This gave a totally new texture to the power game, which for the first time could be termed “politics.” Katouzian emphasizes that there was no Persian word for “politics”; the modern connotation of “siaasat” was first adopted during the constitutional revolution.

Though the Shah appeared to win the day after the 1953 coup, he could not hold back Iran’s new paradigm, best archetyped in the Mossadegh drama. In an unmistakable occurrence of Katouzian’s mellat vs. dowlat phenomenon, everyone rose against the Shah in 1979. Not a single major element of Iran’s society defended him. Not the merchants he had made wealthy, not the workers he had created jobs for, not even the women and the minorities he had treated so kindly. This puzzling ingratitude is completely explained by Iranian society’s resolve to put an end to arbitrary rule. An evolutionary force overwhelmed sectarian interests.

Some argue that we should stop dwelling on Shah and Mossadegh. After reading Katouzian, I believe we can safely drop the Shah from conversations, as his species is unlikely to be part of Iran’s political ecology again. The Pahlavis were the last dinosaurs. But Mossadegh was the first mammal. His political genes are alive, evolving and relevant. Iran’s stubborn struggle against foreign dependence, even in the face of sanctions, is straight out of Mossadegh’s book. Western analysts flummoxed by The Islamic Republic’s resilience to regime change should acknowledge the unprecedented symbiosis that now exists between the dowlat and parts of the mellat. The Islamic establishment in turn should consider to what extent the concept of a Supreme Leader contradicts the program that the Iranian nation has set for its long term development. The regime’s leaders should also beware: their power is imperiled whenever they arbitrarily suspend constitutional rights.

The Shahs are dead, but Mossadegh’s legacy remains a colossal factor in Iran’s future. This is why Giants still rule. And the Dodgers? Well, who cares anymore?

Gilgamesh the play

In the thirteenth century A.D. there was Rumi and Shams. In 2700 B.C. there was King Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The heroes, Rumi and Gilgamesh, were civilized masters of their domain, enjoying a small greatness in their time. Shams and Enkidu were untutored outsiders who burst in from the wild to become the heroes’ beloved companions. The same extraordinary spiritual upheaval created by the unlikely friendships launched both Rumi and Gilgamesh out of their time and into legend.

George Charbak’s play, The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue, thankfully ignores the Enkidu-Shams comparison. In fact Enkidu’s god protector is simply referred to as the sun god, sidestepping the god’s real name Shamash, the root for the Arabic word Shams.

The play takes a few moments, however, to update the ancient epic with current events. There are references to the Iraq war—the city of Uruk where the epic begins is in Iraq. Also, in the early scenes, Gilgamesh displays George Bush’s demagoguery in his abuse of the word “terror.” But soon the story’s universality and timelessness overwhelms local concerns.

The most dramatic scene in the play is commanded into being by Bella Warda (Ramazan-Nia) as the goddess Ishtar. Though there is no intermission in the one hundred minute dramatic marathon, Warda’s “hell hath no fury..” rebuke of Gilgamesh effectively splits the play into two acts: the hero’s triumphs before he spurned Ishtar’s sexual advance, and the sorrows he endures after that.

Ishtar’s frustration with Gilgamesh ultimately leads to Enkidu’s death. The loss of his beloved friend transforms the hero from Aristotle’s “speaking animal” to a conscious human being aware of time and mortality. Roham Shaikhani, who plays the handsome Gilgamesh, is all instinct and appetite in the first act. His eyes widen innocently at pleasure. His spry movements full of the confidence of youth. But in the second act Shaikhani’s sensuous bulk is harpooned and bleeding. Gilgamesh no longer adventures for glory, his quest is now for immortality.

Shaikhani and Warda admirably carry the weight of this difficult play. But director Charbak has too heavily burdened Hayedeh Doroudi-Ahi with the role of Enkidu. In the epic, Enkidu is a man-beast of Sasquatchian build, whose roar makes the beasts of the forest cower . Yet Doroudi-Ahi is a slight mezzo soprano with delicate and charming Persian vowels. Why Charbak has Jane playing Tarzan is a question the director must know his audience will explore.

The choice of a woman for the role of Gilgamesh’s male friend creates interesting complications. An absence is felt of a romance between Enkidu and Gilgamesh. If they are so intimate, why don’t they get together? A traditional casting would have brought out the hue of homosexuality sometimes implied in the Rumi-Shams relationship. Is this is what Charbak wished to avoid? Unlikely, because with Enkidu as a woman, her sex scene with a temple prostitute-- played by Samera Esmeir—has now become a lesbian love act.

Some clever comedy by Babak Mokhtari comes to the rescue. Mokhtari plays the messenger sent by Gilgamesh to offer the prostitute to Enkidu in order to tame him/her. In his role as pimp, Mokhtari is so excessively voyeuristic that the audience feels chastised in even thinking about gender affairs that are only the characters’ business. The comic reproach goes a long way; a couple of scenes explicitly call for nudity, yet no one on stage takes their clothes off, and the audience is too intimidated to complain.

Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality ultimately leads him to Utnapishtim, the literary predecessor to Old Testament’s Noah. Michael Green, who plays Utnapishtim, is one of the actors who appears as several characters throughout the play. His demeanor as a biblical patriarch does much to reinforce the sense of ancientness in the narration.

Ancientness brings me to the reason for this review. The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue is an entertaining work that need not suffer analysis to be enjoyed. But when I came home from the show I read a recent article about a 6000 year old archeological site in Qom that has been bulldozed to make room for a construction project. The friend who forwarded me the article prefaced the email with, “There probably was once a Persian Gilgamesh standing on the steppes of this site raging against the gods.”

Here in Berkeley California, Gilgamesh is daily resurrected in a theatre on Ashby street. There in Qom Iran, our ancient rage against the gods is consciously buried along with all the other corpses in that city. Some places it is easier to find immortality.