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But it was the cleric Ruhollah Khomeini who most vocally, and most credibly, promised the rural migrants a place to live—in fact, in his speeches of early 1979, he promised all Tehranis, and all peasants, their own land. “This Islamic revolution is indebted to the efforts of this class, the class of shanty dwellers,” he said that February. “These South Tehranis, these footbearers, as we call them, they are our masters … they were the ones who brought us to where we are. Everyone must have access to land, this divine endowment … no one must remain without a dwelling in this country.” Furthermore, he said, electricity and water should be provided free of charge to the poor. His deputies, horrified by this promise, begged him to make rural reforms instead, warning that such promises would unleash even greater waves of urban migration. But he knew that his revolution would not succeed unless he won the unqualified support of the slum-dwellers.14

His message was efficiently spread through the mosques, a recruiting network of the sort that the liberal-democratic and Marxist parties did not possess and did not seem capable of replicating. Even as he promised free land and housing, Khomeini kept the Islamic nature of his revolution obscure, couching it in the language of nationalism and democracy, referring to it as an “Iranian revolution” or a “republic” when addressing less religious audiences and avoiding discussion of Islamic policies.15 There is every indication that ordinary Iranians, when they voted overwhelmingly for Khomeini’s government in the referendum of March 1979, believed they were voting for a nationalist, liberal-democratic party that happened to have a mullah for a leader.

As the revolution turned theocratic, rejected the republican constitution, expelled the liberal-minded president, executed many of his colleagues, and turned the Ayatollah into a perpetual, all-powerful Supreme Leader, it was safe from the anger and disillusionment of the secular middle classes because it carefully maintained the loyalty of the far larger mass of arrival-city residents. The squatters won their justice when former Tehran mayor Gholamreza Nikpey, who had ordered the bulldozers to Eslamshahr, was taken before a revolutionary tribunal, given a summary sentence, and promptly executed by firing squad.

A SOCIAL CATASTROPHE

The rhetoric of free land had been heard by the poor, not just in Tehran but throughout the country, and it had its effect. Within months, the flood of migrants from the years of the White Revolution had turned into a torrent the likes of which the world had never seen. It seemed, for a while, as if the entire city’s perimeter was up for grabs. Tehran’s population more than doubled in just a few years.

In Tehran, I spoke with Mitra Habibi, an urban planner who witnessed these events, and she explained the inevitable logic of this exodus: “The revolution had persuaded a large group of people who were living outside Tehran, in the countryside, to come to Tehran, because they were saying that those who were living in Tehran will be given land, and those who have occupied land in Tehran will be given a house. That was the reason why the population of Tehran so quickly grew from three million to seven million, because the people had been given the idea that the revolutionary government was there to support the oppressed poor people, so they started thinking, ‘Whenever we go and we take the land, we confiscate or we occupy the land and start to build the house, it will be legitimated by the revolutionary government.’ ”

As a result of this pressure, the rising cost of the war with Iraq, and the rather evident fact that the outskirts-dwellers had never been terribly interested in Islamic ideology or Koranic law, the revolution soon turned on its village-arrival supporters. In 1983, after Tehran officials begged him to declare a state of emergency, Khomeini deemed migration a “major social problem” that must be stopped. It was a complete reversal of the rhetoric