292
Social Science History
ten thousand by late afternoon, according to consistent estimates by pro-
testors and police officials.
28
Unlike the previous day, the protestors appar-
ently made an effort not to antagonize the security forces. Rather than chant-
ing confrontational slogans, protestors marched silently to the houses of
religious leaders, admonishing those who shouted to ‘‘observe the silence’’
(‘‘Guzarish-i sharh’’ 1978: 18).
In the late afternoon, security forces set up two trucks as a roadblock
outside a police station. When the marchers reached the roadblock, a police
commander ordered them to clear the sidewalks. The demonstrators were
starting to comply when someone—police officials claimed it was protestors;
protestors claimed it was provocateurs—threw stones through a nearby bank
window, providing an excuse for security forces to attack the crowd with
batons. At this point the crowd began to shout slogans, break store windows,
and resist the security forces with branches and stones. The officers fired
shots into the air, causing the protestors to scatter momentarily; then, as the
crowd regrouped, the officers began to level their weapons at the protestors.
Clashes continued until 9
..
29
Five people died in the event, according to a prorevolutionary research
institute that had every interest in inflating the number of casualties (Shir-
khani 1998b: 283–91). This figure is even lower than the monarchy’s offi-
cial toll of 9, as well as the estimates of U.S. diplomats, who first reported
20 to 30 dead, then 14.
30
The Iranian opposition did not accept these esti-
mates. Rumors spread immediately of 100 or more killed,
31
and opposition
estimates ranged up to 300 (Davani 1998, 7:48; Khomeini 1982a: 285, 297,
299). According to a small survey taken in Tehran the following week, more
people believed the opposition’s casualty figures than those of the govern-
ment (Stempel 1981: 91). The opposition charged that the government took
away large numbers of bodies by truck; in addition, a number of wounded
and killed were said to have been kept from hospitals and morgues out of fear
of being arrested or kidnapped (‘‘Guzarish-i sharh’’ 1978: 18–21). Recently
published documents from SAVAK files do not appear to corroborate these
charges. And, as one former seminary student has reasoned, it seems implau-
sible that the families of these martyrs would have kept silent about their loss
after the rise of the Islamic Republic, which raised the massacre at Qum to
the pedestal of iconic heroism.
32
The Qum Protests and the Coming of the Iranian Revolution
293
Different Responses
Two protests erupted in the same religiously significant city, and each was
forcibly suppressed. Yet Islamist writings before and after the revolution—
which had a great interest in recognizing and honoring protests against the
monarchy—report little public response to the first Qum protest, aside from
press accounts of a single student demonstration at a university television
station in Tehran (Kayhan-i hava i [The globe, airmail edition], 14 June 1975;
New York Times, 11 June 1975, 10) and government reports on two seminary
student protests in Mashhad.
33
Public outrage was so absent, a seminary stu-
dent in Qum later recalled, that residents raised no voice or hand to help
him and his fellow protestors as they were being arrested and beaten and
instead observed passively ‘‘as though they were gathered to watch a pas-
sion play.’’
34
The second Qum protest, by contrast, was immediately taken
up throughout Iran as an atrocity to be avenged. Within a week, according
to U.S. diplomats in the capital, ‘‘major’’ demonstrations had erupted in at
least eight cities, and general strikes had been launched, with partial success,
in at least three.
35
Opposition accounts speak of far more widespread protests
and typically identify the Qum protest as a precipitating event—a ‘‘heart-
breaking tragedy,’’ according to the pronouncement of one group of strikers
in Tehran—that served as an ‘‘example of the misdeeds of the oppressive
regime.’’
36
The following month, commemorative rallies for the martyrs of
Qum were suppressed with further loss of life (Kurzman forthcoming).
How might we account for the differing responses to the two Qum
protests? One approach might be to focus on distinctions between the two
events: a siege versus a march; clashes inside a seminary, hidden from public
view, versus clashes in the streets; the security forces’ use of firearms in 1978.
One might also identify a threshold of outrage between rumors of 8 to 45
fatalities in 1975 and a death toll of 5 to 300 in 1978. We might consider the
events cumulative in their effect, with the 1978 casualties as the proverbial
last straw. If we follow this approach, our explanatory work is done. By con-
trast, emphasizing the similarity of the events, rather than the distinctions,
opens up the fruitful research question: what changed in the meantime in
Iran that might have generated such different responses?
An infinite complex of things changed in Iran between mid-1975 and
early 1978. Time passed. People aged and died. Memories of 1975 grew into
stories. All of these changes no doubt contributed to the different response