By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 October 2021

There were immense political forces at work in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, and they have been covered in some depth on this blog before. In this brief piece, I want to look at the social aspect, specifically the social contagion aspect. People who were in Iran during the Islamic Revolution or who have studied it deeply in retrospect describe the country going “temporarily insane”,[1] and tend to use terms like “febrile” and “hysterical” when describing the atmosphere, especially by the summer of 1978, since, as everyone seems to acknowledge, the revolutionary fervour fed on itself the longer it was allowed to continue.

DEFINING A ‘CRAZE’

The classic definition of a “craze”—or “mania” or “fad”—was given by Lionel Penrose, who postulated that a craze develops in five phases:[2]

• Latent phase, where an idea is formulated but does not spread;
• Explosive phase, when the idea spreads rapidly in a community;
• Saturation phase, when the idea reaches its peak and, unable to find new minds to colonise, enthusiasm begins to slacken;
• Resistance phase, when enthusiasm is further eroded as more and more people—including former devotees—begin to question and reject the idea, in the process creating arguments and other psychological barriers that spread within the community to inhibit the spread of the original idea;
• Stagnant phase, where the idea remains alive only in the minds of a few enthusiasts.

An idea might then remain in the stagnant phase, as has happened with Nazism—once a very powerful craze in Germany and other places, now a fringe phenomenon in Western societies—or the idea might resume the cycle, possibly in a slightly moderated form, as has happened with the psychiatric concept of repressed memories, which powered the multiple personality craze in the 1970s and then re-emerged a decade later in the form of the so-called Satanic Panic.[3]

“Panic” is another word often used interchangeably with “craze”, and there is overlap, but also a difference: whereas “craze” covers everything from the lethal mania of antisemitism in the 1930s to the harmless fad of hula hoops in the 1950s, “panic” basically applies only to the ‘bad’ crazes and is often prefixed with the word “moral”.

The craze that led to the Iranian Revolution was based on the idea the Pahlavi regime was an affront to God with its Westernizing ways and was intolerably repressive (something objectively disproven by the ability of protesters to turn out for a year): this began in the minds of a few people like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, managed to spread explosively, and is now well into the resistance phase, with legions of fallen Islamist revolutionaries in Iran.

‘HYSTERIA’ IN HISTORY

A related concept, in some ways the psychological condition underlying a craze, is “hysteria”, which Paul McHugh describes as “a vivid form of self-deception”: “hysteria is not something a patient has—like a rash or a fever—but something the patient is doing.” This semi-medical definition is admittedly spongy, and like much of psychology rests on a thin empirical basis; some psychologists flatly argue that “hysteria” does not exist. Since the condition involves patients convincing themselves of their “sick role” and then ‘playing’ the part—with mounting symptoms as they learn of them, often unconsciously from other patients or from suggestions from doctors asking questions—the belief of some psychiatrists that hysterics are wilful frauds is understandable, and doubtless true in some cases.

Nonetheless, McHugh makes a convincing case that hysteria does afflict individuals, and he is even more convincing—which is what is important to our purposes here—that hysteria can become a societal epidemic. McHugh gives several historical examples, among them the most exact analogy to what happened in Iran in 1978-79 is what happened in Salem in 1692-93: people were not being cynical in their stated belief that they were on God’s path; the preaching of the cause by influential figures (especially religious authorities) helped perpetuate and expand the reach of the mania; and within the converts, over time, the beliefs and behaviours got more extreme and wide-ranging.

In Iran, this culminated on 27 November 1978 with the belief—testified to by millions of people, including middle-class secularists in Tehran and even the Communist Party newspaper—that Khomeini’s face appeared on the moon.[4]

A further point of commonality that McHugh notes is that “the more attention is paid to a behaviour, the more the behaviour is seen”: the Salem elders treating the accusations of witchcraft by young girls seriously begot more and wilder accusations; the Shah accepting, and announcing his acceptance, of the disorders in the spring and summer of 1978 as a legitimate part of the liberalisation process—“letting off steam”, as he put it—contributed to the spread of the mayhem, and his 6 November 1978 declaration to the mobs that had savaged large parts of Tehran: “I heard the revolutionary message of you the people” (often translated as: “I heard the voice of your revolution”) was the death knell that told both the royalists and the revolutionaries that it was over.[5]

CONCLUSION

The Shah was not really thinking about ways to suppress the Revolution by early November 1978. Two months earlier, at the time of the Jaleh Square fiasco, the Shah had decided that the compact with his people was broken and he would leave the country as soon as possible.[6] Strict instructions were given to the Army and security forces to avoid any further bloodshed in the meantime,[7] but the Shah had essentially surrendered to the Revolution.

It is doubtful, by that first week of November 1978, that anything except lethal force on quite a large scale could have snapped the Iranians out of the fever that had taken hold of them and aborted the Islamic Revolution. This is as much as to say it was impossible: the Shah would never have given such an order. “If you wanted someone to kill people, you had to find somebody else”, as he later said.[8]

Even by the time of the Cinema Rex fire on 19 August 1978, set by Islamists and killing 400 people, the worst act of terrorism since the Second World War, the hysteria was at fever pitch: Khomeini blamed the Shah and SAVAK, and many were prepared to self-deceive that this was true.

The missed chance was probably on 13 May 1978, four months into the Revolution, when the security chiefs met and agreed an organised challenge to the Monarchy was underway. The SAVAK chief, General Nematollah Nassiri, put forth a plan—drawing on the advice of his counter-terrorism director, Parviz Sabeti—to decapitate the revolutionary movement by arresting a few hundred of its leading agitators, closing down the bazaars in Qom and other restive cities, and creating an enforced period of calm using all necessary measures.[9] The death toll was expected to be minimal, and once the mania had passed the activists and intellectuals could be released to resume their negotiations about the Shah’s planned transition from an executive to a constitutional monarchy by the end of 1979.[10]

The Nassiri-Sabeti plan was vetoed, and a course of outreach and accommodation was adopted towards the revolutionaries, advocated by SAVAK deputy Hoseyn Fardust. As a childhood friend of the Shah’s, everyone assumed Fardust spoke for the King; in fact, communication had frayed.[11] Moreover, Fardust is the most infamous case of a traitor: his policy was meant to help the Revolution. Nine months later, while his colleagues in the Imperial government were being butchered by revolutionary tribunals, Fardust helped Khomeini create his first secret police force.

The Shah’s dismissal of Nassiri on 7 June 1978 probably marks the moment when the options for short-circuiting the revolutionary hysteria without notable bloodshed ended, not least because Nassiri was replaced with Nasser Moghaddam, who went over to the Islamists before the end.[12] Not that it did him any good: Moghaddam was shot in April 1979.

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REFERENCES

[1] Mark Bowden (2007), Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, p. 22.

[2] Lionel Penrose (1952), On the Objective Study of Crowd Behaviour, pp. 18-22.

[3] For a detailed look at the “memory wars”, see: Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters (1994), Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria.

[4] Andrew Scott Cooper (2016), The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, p. 458.

[5] The Fall of Heaven, pp. 307, 447.

[6] The Fall of Heaven, p. 393.

[7] The Fall of Heaven, p. 408.

[8] The Fall of Heaven, p. 498.

[9] The Fall of Heaven, pp. 413-14.

[10] When the Shah told his twin sister, Princess Ashraf, in March 1977, long before the revolutionary turmoil began, that he planned to hold free elections in the summer of 1979, she was shocked and not at all supportive. She became no more supportive after years in exile. See: Ashraf Pahlavi (1995), Time for Truth, p. 11.

[11] The Fall of Heaven, pp. 414-15.

[12] The Fall of Heaven, p. 491.