Iran in the 20th Century
Iran in the 20th century
The Pahlavi dynasty
1921 ousted the then War Minister Reza Khan, who after initial thoughts play Turkish a republic embossing 1925 but when Reza Shah the ruler of Iran was crowned, the last Shah of Qadscharen and began a policy of industrialization and radical modernization, under Reza Shah mainly understood a westernization. Among other things, he banned traditional clothing for men and women, including the veil. The nature of his reforms and his ruthless harshness in their implementation earned him a lot of resistance, led (and instrumentalized) again mainly by the Shiite religious and legal scholars. These used their growing influence on the population and, since Constitutional Revolution of 1906, your say in parliament. In 1941 Reza Shah finally had to abdicate under pressure from the Allies, who accused him of being too close to the Axis powers.
His successor was his son Mohammad Reza Shah. He planned to continue his father’s reforms from the start, but had to go abroad for the first time in 1953 after the escalation of the domestic political disputes with his Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, which mainly revolved around the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the nationalization of Iranian oil flee. Only a short time later, however, after a coup under the guidance and funding of the CIA, he was able to return to power. Over the next two decades, Mohammad Reza Shah made Iran the largest military power in the Middle East and created himself with the secret service – SAVAK a means to secure one’s power internally. With the help of the ever increasing income from the oil business, the Shah tried to turn Iran into a (according to his imagination) modern country of the first world, shaped by the combination of ancient Persian traditions and Western achievements.
Since he could not or did not want to see the social realities of Iran, despite all the undeniable achievements, resistance began to rise from the 1960’s onwards. This consisted of various groups and notions, the unifying element of which was the desire to overthrow the Shah. Regardless of the enormous influence of secular intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati on the younger strata of the protest movements in particular, religious and legal scholars took the lead again, from 1963 onwards Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The arguments, which grew in intensity over the years, finally reached their climax in 1978. After several large demonstrations against the rule of the Shah were broken up by the military and the secret service, more and more supporters fell away from him because of the many dead. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi then left Iran on January 16, 1979 and went into exile. Khomeini returned from exile on February 1 and proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979.
The Islamic Republic of Iran
Before 1979, Khomeini only spoke to religious scholars and students about his theory of “ velayat-e faqih“And spoken an Islamic republic. This was probably because he had to suspect that his idea would not win a majority even among the Shah’s opponents – be they liberals or communists. After the overthrow of the Shah, Khomeini and his supporters, hardly having returned from exile, then quickly set about implementing his idea of an “Islamic government” (pers. Hokumat-e Eslami). Khomeini had a new Islamic constitution drawn up, which was adopted on December 3, 1979. Through the establishment of revolutionary courts, he got rid of many of his opponents, while others fled abroad. As an expression of this ignorance about Khomeini’s true plans for the time after the overthrow of the Shah, even among his opponents, a linguistic image of Mehdi Bazargan is often used, the first Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic, who was not a religious scholar himself. In his farewell speech, Bazargan said: “We prayed for rain, but there was hardly a flood.”
According to extrareference, the eight-year war against Iraq (1980-88) played an important role in the consolidation of the Islamic republic. Against the background of this external threat, Khomeini managed to conclude a truce and at the same time implement the Islamic Republic according to his ideas. Gradually, the opponents of these ideas were removed from public life. After the war ended, the Islamic Republic of Iran essentially assumed the form it still has today.
