Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [105]
Despite having become one of the world’s leading oil exporters during a decade of rising petroleum prices—or more likely because of this—Iran’s economy became inflationary and failed to produce jobs. By early 1979, one Iranian cabinet minister estimated that in Tehran 700,000 people were employed in “dead work,” such as the sale of chewing gum on the streets. Urban land prices increased daily. Between 1967 and 1977, Tehran property increased in value by over 2,000 percent. In 1975, in an attempt to control land speculation, the government forbade the selling of vacant land, a move that severely exacerbated the problem. By the end of 1977, every day 3,500 Tehran families were searching for somewhere to sleep. In southern Tehran, each single room was occupied by an average of six people. Between 1967 and 1977, the percentage of urban families living in a single room rose from 36 to 43; on the eve of the revolution, 42 percent of Tehran’s inhabitants lived in “inadequate” housing, usually single rooms in slums.8
These numbers became an embarrassment to the regime. In the summer of 1977, the Shah began to respond with bulldozers. By the end of the summer, the slum-demolition plans met fierce resistance within Eslamshahr, where the community took up arms against the police and bulldozers. Entire families were buried in their houses, but the community was organized enough to keep rebuilding, rewiring, and replanning the new town, resisting the regime and becoming increasingly desperate for any new form of government.9
“I am inclined to believe,” the scholar Leonard Binder wrote after spending the late 1970s in Iran, “that the extent of the opposition to the Shah was not primarily because of his repressive treatment of the opposition, but because of the outrageous simple-mindedness of his modernization programs which attacked the quiescent and made political activists of them. The Shah had gone out and created a mass opposition and therewith a responsive audience for the small groups of extremists on the right and the left who had taken up arms against the regime.”10
AN IMPLOSION FROM THE EDGES
The 1979 revolution was an event deeply rooted in the arrival city. According to the Iranian political scientist Ali Farazmand, it was “rural migrants who participated in the massive anti-regime demonstrations in the streets during 1978 … These migrants whose living conditions were growing worse every day were among the early demonstrators in the streets of the major cities. They became targets of the revolutionary organizers, religious and secular as well as left and liberal, who focused their attention on the urban poor … Both religious leaders and liberal leftist political organizations targeted these migrants as well as the other lower- and lower-middle-class people who dropped to the poverty line during the 1970s.” And no wonder. At that point, 94 percent of Tehran’s working-class population had been born somewhere else, usually in a village. Even in major factories in Tehran, whose workers were the blue-collar elite, 80 percent of workers were peasants or sons of peasants who had migrated to the city.11
There was every reason to expect a mass revolt against the Shah, but no reason to expect it to be an Islamic revolution. “The vast majority of participants in the revolutionary uprising,” the most comprehensive study of the revolution’s social origins concludes, “did not indicate in any way that they wanted to establish a society based on fundamentalist principles.”12 According to the sociologist Asef Bayat, who observed the revolution closely, “most of the poor seem to be uninterested in any particular form of ideology and politics.”13 There was every reason to expect this to be a liberal-democratic revolution, a turn