Abstract
When protesters went out on the streets in cities across Iran, some of them were calling the name of the former shah. But are they really calling for a return to the past?
Most of the young people who were also chanting “Reza Shah, rest in peace!” – in reference to the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty – and “A country with no shah has no order” would not have been alive under the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah.
Some would even be the children of dissidents imprisoned by the shah or revolutionaries who worked to overthrow him, so the burst of Pahlavi pride among Iranian youth was surprising. Do they really see returning to the past as progress?
What the protesters were calling for in a concrete sense isn’t clear. However, the fact that the Pahlavis featured at all in these protests is an indication that popular memory of that period is not dictated purely by textbooks and official accounts (from which details of the shah and his reign have been removed).
The protests sparked a social media storm of comparisons among Persian speakers, questioning whether life in Iran had improved or worsened in the 39 years since the revolution.
The Instagram posts and tweets started off by pointing out the relative losses, such as a stronger economy and social freedoms; then other users got involved to counterbalance, tweeting out the regime’s achievements, such as national elections and the rise in literacy rates.
One post that circulated was of two images placed side by side: a photo of a group of women in a park, all wearing the hijab, next to a retro shot of women sitting, reading and wearing short skirts, with their heads uncovered. An opposing post showed a picture of the shah kissing the hand of the former Queen of Denmark beside a photo of Ayatollah Khamanei working alongside farmers with the caption “We gave humiliation and got dignity”.
“It’s reflective of the way that popular history takes hold,” said Ali Ansari, professor of history at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. “In the last 30 years, because of greater literacy in Iran, because of social media, mass media and others, people are taking control of the history they want to read.”
Protesters wave the image of Iran’s deposed shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi at a rally calling for more freedom in Iran, held in Los Angeles
CREDIT: Monica Almeida/Reuters
In particular, Ansari points to the television channel Manoto, which broadcasts from London and is watched by up to 70% of Iran’s population.
“Manoto has produced these documentaries on the shah and Reza Shah and people are watching them avidly,” he said. “They’re great propaganda, actually – very well made. It seems to me that has been absorbed.”
For Mahsa, a postgraduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London, her history class in Iran was a means to an exam grade, not an education. “Most students know that the history is totally biased – everyone expects it to be biased – but they are just accepting it, reading it and taking the exam,” said the 26-year-old, who moved to London from Iran last year. She said the gaps in her knowledge were filled by the internet, her parents and Manoto.
But nostalgia – of which there is plenty in Iran – induces a kind of historical revisionism. On the Manoto show Time Tunnel, viewers are teleported back to an Iran that allowed women to wear short skirts and where citizens could drink and dance, without mention of the less palatable aspects, such as the lack of political freedom, extreme inequality and the torture carried out by the shah’s secret police force, the SAVAK.
The photos of uncovered smiling women are also decontextualised and say nothing about the women who wanted to wear the hijab but had their veils forcibly removed by police officers under Reza Shah’s Kashf-e hijab (removal of the veil) policy.
On social media, Manoto and a host of diaspora satellite channels that broadcast out of Los Angeles, Iranians who are dissatisfied with their present find a rosy and mythical past to look back on.
“The vibe and aesthetic [of Manoto] is chic and beautiful,” said Shervin Malekzadeh, a scholar on the Middle East at the University of Pennsylvania.
“They present in a seemingly objective fashion. The programmes are not overly sentimental, but are done in a way to reassure or remind people that life was better prior to the revolution.”
The Islamic regime’s official narrative of the Pahlavi period tries to do the opposite. In this history, said Ansari, the Pahlavis are “nothing but Western stooges, bought by the British or by the Americans depending on which coup you want to look at”.
Like Mohammad Reza Shah before him, Ayatollah Khomeini cared a lot about history and controlled how it was told. After the overthrow of the shah, the revolutionary government kickstarted a publishing drive that launched hundreds of academic journals, including more than 70 history titles.
Khomeini was specific about how he wanted the shah’s downfall and the revolution to be framed, writing in a note to a historian: “You must show how the people struggled against tyranny, and the oppression of stagnation and backwardness.”
To ensure a smooth rewriting period, university campuses were deserted by state decree between 1980 and 1983 and thousands of academics and students were either not allowed to return or left the country. This left a lot of archival material and history publications in the hands of the government, such as the journal Tarikh-e Moaser-e Iran (Contemporary Iranian History), which was overseen by the ministry of intelligence.
Negative nuggets of Pahlavi trivia became a valuable commodity in this publishing industry. “Officials are writing their memoirs and they struggle to get through any positive commentary about [Mohammed Reza] Shah,” said Ansari. “One of the ways of getting published in Iran is to have an element of slagging off the shah – [for example], he’s a tyrant or a womaniser. There has to be something to show just what a floozie he was.”
Shayan, a BBC journalist who does not write using his surname, lived in Iran until he was 20 and remembers how his history class framed the infrastructure projects that were built under Reza Shah.
“Most of Iran’s major roads were built under him; the rail network – everyone knows about these projects because they could see them,” he said. “What was interesting was that they were justifying that he didn’t do these things because he was a patriot – [they said] he did those things because he wanted to pave the way for British business to pour in.”
But Shayan, who monitored the protests for the BBC, doesn’t think that people actually want the monarchy to be restored. He sees the pro-shah slogans as “a reaction to all the propaganda they’ve been fed over the years”.
Malekzadeh doesn’t see the pro-monarchy murmurs as a real call for regime change, either. “Lots of kids wear the symbols of Zoroastrian practice as an expression of defiance,” he said, referring to the ancient Persian religion that has also become of nostalgic cultural interest in Iran. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll be attending services at the temple any time soon.”
Perhaps the pro-monarchy protesters are just part of the against something crowd after all.