Land reform and religious critique in Pahlavi Iran, 1960-1979

In histories of Pahlavi state politics and of religious opposition to it, the simultaneity of the pivot to development and the emergence of a seminary movement tends to be elided. Instead, development and religious opposition are analyzed on separate planes: The former an outcome of Mohammad Reza Shah’s desire to extend state power to society’s every pore and the latter, in the form of the 15 Khordad uprising, an isolated occurrence presaging Khomeini’s political ascendance. While the conventional paradigm of state action/clerical reaction leads us to understand critiques of development and land reform as expressions of clerical self-interest, following Fernando Coronil’s study of the performance of state power in oil-rich Venezuela, I argue in this paper that religious dissent ought to be analyzed as an ideational form apposite the performance of Pahlavi power. Rather than covering clerical self-interest, religious dissent arose from the contradictions generated by a self-deifying developmental state that, on the one hand, justified its power by pointing to its miraculous creation of wealth, and, on the other, mismanaged resources and co-opted the left’s political platform and the clerics’ moral authority.
Development and land reform not only displaced agrarian workers from their homes but also distanced the state from its prior source of legitimacy by extending its claims to managing Iran’s national resources beyond oil to water, land, and labor. I explore how the Pahlavi state affirmed its authority to manage water, land, and labor in Khuzestan and, in tandem, how the state cast clerical opposition to the White Revolution as “black reaction” to the shah’s eradication of regressive “feudal” vestiges. These designations, I argue, reflect not so much the reality of Iran’s political-economic structures as an attempt to moralize questions of national production. Steeped in the modernist determination to remake humans and nature, development projects and the White Revolution brought to Iran’s agricultural periphery a new moral language for justifying state power. As in Venezuela, this entailed the deification of the state, but unlike in that case, this process was resisted by custodians of the historically dominant moral tradition. Ultimately, I suggest that while Iranian agrarian workers were not the architects of political Shi‘ism, their immiseration at the hands of a productivist, developmental state created the conditions of historical plausibility for a religious critique of the state which played a role in supplanting not only traditional Marxist ones but also the very state it opposed.