The Emergence of Combative Clerical Activism

Ruhollah Khomeini belonged to a generation of clerics who had been deeply affected and antagonized by the policies of Reza Shah Pahlavi, which had sought to undermine the sociopolitical influence of the clergy. At the same time, Khomeini was a product of the traditional religious and educational milieu of the seminary (hawza) established in the shrine city of Qom by the quietist Ayatollah Abdolkarim Ha’eri-Yazdi, who was permitted to do so by the Shah. The Qom seminary – the Iranian counterpart to the one in Najaf, Iraq – enabled the beleaguered Iranian clerics to retain their residual institutionalized social power and enhance their capacity for self-perpetuation and the reproduction of their cultural capital.

The ease of political restrictions in the aftermath of Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941 and the rise of secular and particularly leftist ideologies that provoked the anxieties of the traditional classes provided the clerics with an opportunity to reassert themselves. They attempted unsuccessfully to secure a formal reversal of some of Reza Shah’s policies, particularly the banning of the veil in public. Efforts toward this end by Ayatollahs such as Hossein Qomi – who appeared to enjoy the goodwill of the new Shah, Mohammad Reza – bore insufficient fruit. The emergence of the Tudeh Party, however, despite its professions of respect for religious sensibilities, alerted the traditionalists and other anti-leftists to the utility of religion as an antidote to secular trends. Traditionalists such as Sayyed Zia al-Din Tabataba’i, the Anglophile former prime minister, had a penchant for religious sentiments or at least utilized them for instrumental, utilitarian purposes. Against the background of growing anti-imperialist nationalism, the Tudeh Party was hampered by its affiliation to the Soviet Union; civic-nationalism, increasingly associated with the National Front and particularly the name of Mohammad Mosaddeq, was on the rise. Advocating national intellectual-ideological autonomy and political independence, the Front sought to establish constitutional government and secure Iranian sovereign rights over the country’s oil resources and industry.