How Iran’s Mullahs Managed to Turn Iranians Away From Islam

Before the 1979 revolution, it was assumed that, like European countries, Iran was on the path toward greater secularization. Shah Reza Pahlavi’s regime, like that of his father, was determined to break the power of the clerics. Many were persecuted, and the most important one of all, Ayatollah Khomeini, fled from Iran. He spent years the holy Shi’a city of Qom, in Iraq, and later, briefly, lived in Chateau-le-Neauphle, in France, before his triumphant return to Iran in 1979.

During the Shah’s reign, mosques were monitored by Savak, the secret police, for the expression of any anti-regime sentiments by imams in their sermons; imams were also watched if they appeared too fanatical in their faith. The army was firmly in the hands of secularist officers. In the schools, history classes emphasized the pre-Islamic glory of Persian civilization. Many Iranian women went without even the hijab. All that would change with Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution.”

The Shah, like his father and like the far-seeing Turkish statesman Kemal Ataturk, saw Islam as a retrograde force, holding his country back from progress, and he was determined to limit its appeal and influence. The high point of his regime was the celebration of 2,500 years of Persian civilization, held at Persepolis in 1971, among the ruins of ancient Persia. Kings and Queens and Presidents and Premiers from around the world were invited to join the celebration of pre-Islamic Persia – Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes, Ataxerxes. The symbol for the festival was the Cyrus Cylinder, which the Shah then made the national symbol of Iran, calling it the first “declaration of universal human rights,” a view rejected by some historians as anachronistic and a misunderstanding of the Cylinder’s generic nature as a typical statement made by a new monarch at the beginning of his reign. According to Neil MacGregor, the former Director of the British Museum, the cylinder was “the first attempt we know about running a society, a state with different nationalities and faiths—a new kind of statecraft.”

There was nothing Islamic about the celebration in Persepolis. The food was prepared by chefs flown in from the celebrated Maxim’s in Paris. The champagne and vintage wines flowed freely. 50,000 songbirds were imported from Europe. The Tent City (also called Golden City) was planned by the Parisian interior-design firm of Maison Jansen on 160 acres. Fifty “tents” (which were actually prefabricated luxury apartments with traditional Persian tent-cloth surrounds) were arranged in a star pattern around a central fountain. Numerous trees were planted around those “tents” in the desert, to re-create how ancient Persepolis would have looked. The entire celebration was televised to the world by way of a satellite connection from the site.

A legendary French hotelier, Max Blouet, came out of retirement to supervise the banquet. Lanvin designed the uniforms of the Imperial Household. 250 red Mercedes Benz 600 limousines were used to chauffeur guests from the airport and back. The dinnerware was created using Limoges porcelain and linen by the Paris house of Porthault. And so on and so most expensively forth.

The whole affair, which infuriated both Iranian leftists and the dour clerics for its extravagance, cost the state about $80 million in 2020 dollars. Some historians believe that it was this spectacle at Persepolis that drove many Iranians to embrace Islam even more strongly, seeing the clerics as the only force potentially powerful enough to bring down the wastrel Shah, who had the secret police (Savak) and the military to keep him in power. Shi’a clerics were seen as the best promoters of violent dissent from the regime. In his exile, Ayatollah Khomeini recorded fiery sermons on audiotapes that were smuggled into Iran, with hundreds of thousands of copies made and distributed throughout the country. They had a mesmerizing effect on Iranians. Savak had no way to stop them.

When the Shah fell, and Khomeini’s theocrats promptly took power in 1979, it seemed that all the pundits who just a few years before had predicted the continuing march of secularism in Iran were proven wrong. Khomeini instituted a regime of velayat-e-faqih, the rule by the clerics, with the Supreme Leader — the vali e-faqih (the guardian Islamic jurist) — being Khomeini himself. The secularists were defeated at every level. Many of the bravest secular opponents of the Shah – some of whom had been tortured by agents of Savak — were nonetheless executed by the clerical regime that permitted no space for secularism. Islam has in the past 50 years permeated every level of Iranian society. School curricula have become infused with Islamic teachings. Girls and women were – and are — required to wear either the chador, a full-body cloak, or a headscarf and an overcoat that covers their arms. The religious police enforce these and other rules of conduct. Punishments for the slightest infraction are harsh.

But what has happened in Iran in the past half-century is the very opposite of what the clerics, and outside analysts, assumed would happen. Instead of Iranians becoming in this new theocracy ever more devout in their faith, the opposite has happened: they are now moving away from Islam, making Iran one of the most secular countries in the Muslim world. This was noted at length several years ago here.

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.”

Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.

There is disappointment aplenty in Iran with the political system, which, because that system is a Shi’a theocracy, with Ayatollah Khamenei following Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader, also means disappointment with Islam. Iran’s economy is in free fall, but the clerical despotism has chosen to spend huge sums on military and ideological proxies and allies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with still other sums on aid for the Palestinian terror groups, and the greatest sums of all have been spent on the nuclear project that the Israelis keep setting back. All this money sent or spent abroad, or used to make Iran a nuclear power, is unavailable to succor the impoverished Iranians. No wonder that, during the protests by Iranians about their economic situation in 2018, and then in the Mahsa Amini protests, some protesters shouted “Death to Palestine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon” and “Leave Syria and think of us.” Chants of “We don’t want the ayatollahs” and “Death to the dictator” (Ayatollah Khamenei) have also been heard.

It has become clear that these protesters can be temporarily suppressed with violence, but they keep reappearing, their numbers swollen by widespread despair. That disaffection with the clerics has metamorphosed into a disaffection with, and disbelief in, Islam. The statistics about those Iranian unbelievers – as we shall see – are staggering.