Iran, technology, and revolution
Jun 25th, 2009 by MESH
From Michael Rubin
The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post have dubbed it a “Twitter Revolution,” speculating about whether new technology will enable Iranian protesters to overcome government forces. The role of technology in the current unrest is well-covered elsewhere. What is lacking in much of the coverage, however, is a sense of context.
Technology has been essential both to empire formation and preservation, and to state degradation in the Middle East. The late historian Marshall G.S. Hodgson described the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires as “gunpowder empires.” Their sultans and shahs consolidated control over expansive territories by controlling weaponry which potential aspirants to power along the periphery did not have. Once the central government lost monopoly over guns and cannons, however, the empires fractured—devolving into fiefdoms or dissolving completely.
In Iran, technology played a particularly important role in state preservation Looking at 18th and early 19th century atlases, borders are all over the place. Discrepancies of dozens if not hundreds of miles mark frontiers on maps published by different gazetteers. Whereas today imperialism is presented in almost cartoonish terms as a free-for-all, in reality there were huge debates during the 19th century whether or not to expand imperial control over various territories. Imperial rule was an expensive prospect, and so many imperial powers preferred to advance informal control.
Britain did this in Iran by supporting various regional officials—for example, briefly recognizing the autonomy of Makran (Baluchistan) in the mid-19th century and flirting with Sheikh Khazal in Khuzistan at the beginning of the 20th century. While rulers could claim as much territory as they liked, the real litmus test was whether they were able to extract taxes. Sometimes governors or sub-district governors along a country’s periphery, many of whom paid for their offices, calculated they could keep all the revenue for themselves and not remit anything to the center. Often, foreign powers encouraged such defiance (e.g. in Georgia, Kuwait, Herat, and Khorramshahr).
This would create a quandary for the Shah. If he ignored the governor’s defiance, he would effectively lose that province. Mobilizing the military and launching a punitive expedition, however, was extremely expensive. As Iran flirted with bankruptcy throughout the 19th century, the Shah had very few resources at his disposal, and the periphery knew it.
Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), however, embraced the telegraph. He could threaten and cajole opponents, and keep on top of the latest intelligence. What were the Russians doing in Azerbaijan? What were Kurdish tribes doing across the Ottoman frontier? Could he afford to dispatch the army and still maintain his security? In many ways, it was the telegraph which allowed the Shah to play foreign powers and domestic competitors off each other and preserve Iranian independence, even in the regime’s weakened state.
What was a blessing for the government and for the consolidation of the state, however, turned into a liability. Over time, the Shah’s government lost control over the communications network. While the popular belief in the 1860s and 1870s was that the telegraph ended at the Shah’s throne, myriad Iranian groups discovered that they could communicate directly with each other and against the central government. This became quite clear in the early 1890s when, desperate to raise revenue, the Nasir al-Din Shah granted the unpopular Tobacco Regie which gave the British a monopoly over all phases of one of Iran’s most important industries, from agriculture to sale. Liberals, nationalists, and clerics joined forces to force the Shah to retract. Clerics in Najaf used the telegraph to issue a fatwa, obeyed even by members of the Shah’s household, prohibiting the use of tobacco until the Shah recanted. The telegraph network enabled the formation of the mass movement.
This point was driven home in the first decade of the 20th century during Iran’s constitutional revolution. Britain backed constitutional forces, and the Russian government supported the autocrat shah. The conflict was bloody and, just as in Iran today, it made headlines. When reactionary forces laid siege to Tabriz, then Iran’s second largest city, British papers reported news of the deprivation and starvation received by telegraph. What once would have occurred without notice in Europe, sparked outrage.
As the Shah cracked down, a broad array of constitutionalists, nationalists, liberals, clerics, and Bakhtiari tribesmen coordinated their actions by wire. The Shah’s forces sought to cut the wires, but the network was too vast, and not entirely under the government’s control. Importantly, the telegraph extended across the frontier into what now is Iraq. Senior clerics cabled instructions from Najaf and Karbala.
Technology created a template upon which the opposition could act. Oppression was a constant during the Qajar period and, indeed, before. It was technology, however, that enabled the mass movement; it simply could not occur before the technology template was laid.
Into the 20th century, the Iranian government sought again to dominate technology. Early in Reza Shah’s reign (1925-1941), the Iranian government controlled radio. Under his son and successor, the state controlled television. However, it could not control audio tapes smuggled across the border from Iraq, and so in the 15 years before the Islamic Revolution, the audio cassette—easily copied and distributed—was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s only means of communication. While Khomeini’s image is iconic now, it should be remembered that until his return to Iran, many Iranians knew his voice but had not seen his image.
The Islamic Republic knows it is unpopular, and knows its vulnerability to technology. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stepped in to cancel a 2004 contract granted to Turkcell to create an independent cell phone network in Iran. Only this past year did the Iranian government bless the introduction of multimedia messaging services in the Islamic Republic. It could be a decision the Islamic Republic will not live long enough to regret.
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One Response to “Iran, technology, and revolution”
Michael Rubin is certainly right that technology can give an edge, either to the defenders of the status quo, or to the challengers. In some cases, it can be decisive. But, as I am sure Rubin understands, it is one factor of several major ones.
Technology is after all a means that can be applied to an end. But for the means to be applied at all, there must be a motive. Or, as Nietzsche said, there must be the will. The elections in Iran provided an opportunity for disgruntled youth to support a candidate—”moderate” and “reformer” only in terms of the established extremism of the Islamic Republic’s government—who might put a kinder and gentler face on the rigid theocracy, and might give them a bit more breathing room. Their campaigning expressed this desire, motive, will.
But the “Supreme Leader,” not satisfied with his few hand-picked candidates, and with the absolute power to veto policy or legislation he did not like, decided to fix the election in favor of the most extreme candidate, Ahmadinejad. Those opposed to Ahmadinejad were stunned that their votes were nullified and replaced with nonsensical vote counts. The challenging of the governors of the Islamic Republic began with voters’ rejection of the fixed election. There was now a double motive, a strengthened will.
The Supreme Leader, not satisfied with having spoiled his legitimate monopoly by fixing the vote and betraying Iranian voters, decided to respond to the demonstrators with the batons and guns of the police and militia, beating and killing ordinary citizens more or less at random. The Supreme Leader, after all, represents God and the Islamic Revolution. Except he no longer does. The brutality of the regime has provided a triple motive, an even more strengthened will to the opposition. The Supreme Leader and his acolytes have lost legitimacy, as has this form of rule. So the opposition yells from the rooftop, “Death to the dictator” and “God is great,” invoking the oppositional slogans of the Islamic Revolution.
It is true, as Rubin says, that the opposition have used technology—Twitter, the internet, cellphone cameras—to mobilize and to send abroad their message and images. This is important. But we must remember that martyrs have become legends and spurs for opposition for millennia, long before modern means of communication. And that primitive forms of communication, such as opposition samizdat, have trumped modern communications technology in the hands of the state. So, yes, advanced technology can help, but it is advantageous, not necessary.
If we recall Ibn Khaldun, we will be reminded that, in addition to motive and will, organization and solidarity are factors that can be decisive in regime change. It is the superiority in these elements that Ibn Khaldun credits with the ability of peripheral tribes to conquer states, as so often has been the case in the Middle East and North Africa. And here I would recommend caution in prophesizing the rapid fall of Islamic Republic. The Revolutionary Guard, the militia, and the army are highly organized; the opposition, no matter how strongly motivated, is not. The best hope for change is that a major part of the military, also disillusioned with the loss of legitimacy of the government, will go over to the opposition. If this does not happen, it may take the opposition years to organize sufficiently to challenge effectively the government.
Philip Carl Salzman is a member of MESH.