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indiscriminately, according to witnesses. About 65 persons, including
four professors, were injured and 100 students arrested. The attack came
hours after the shah returned here from Paris, where he stopped after
the U.S. visit.
The next week, a group of moderate oppositionists gathered in a private
garden in Karaj, near Tehran. Busloads of ‘‘club-wielders’’ charged into the
garden, breaking arms and fracturing crania. For good measure, they also
smashed the cars parked outside.
66
The Iranian government ‘‘clamped down
rather severely in late November,’’ the U.S. embassy reported. ‘‘Following
the shah’s visit to Washington,’’ according to Mahdi Bazargan, a leading
moderate opposition figure, ‘‘repression again seemed the order of the day.’’
‘‘After returning from his visit to America,’’ an opposition group wrote in
late 1977, the shah ‘‘threw himself into a new course intended to seek revenge
against the insurgent people of Iran and freedom seekers.’’
67
The Qum protests of June 1975 and January 1978, then, both took place
soon after marginal shifts toward repression. In 1975, this involved the impo-
sition of a single-party political system; in 1978, it meant reversion to an
unstated ban on oppositional meetings after several months of relative toler-
ance. The Qum protests of 1975 and 1978 were both met with major displays
of state power involving the arrival of troops from out of town, the brandish-
ing of military weaponry, and armed attacks on unarmed groups of students.
Yet the crackdown of 1975, though decried by opposition leaders, was accom-
panied by little protest activity; in late 1977 and early 1978, the crackdown
was followed by increasingly bold protests. Shifts in political opportunity did
not correlate with these different responses.
Organizational Change
A third potential change involves the organization of the opposition. Accord-
ing to this approach, the opposition’s commitment of organizational re-
sources generated and sustained the protest movement.
68
Naturally, this com-
mitment may be related to economic or political changes, and these are noted
below where appropriate. The following sections consider three categories
of oppositional activists: revolutionary leftists, moderates, and revolutionary
clerics.
The Qum Protests and the Coming of the Iranian Revolution
305
Revolutionary Leftists
Leftist revolutionaries responded very little to either Qum protest. The two
primary leftist groups, the People’s Strugglers of Iran (Mujahidin-i Khalq-i
Iran) and the Iranian People’s Sacrificing Guerrillas (Charik ha-yi Fada i-
yi Khalq-i Iran), were both in crisis, having suffered severe state repression
and ideological factionalization over the previous several years. The People’s
Strugglers organization was in the midst of an internal debate over whether
to continue armed struggle (Behrooz 1999: 73; Kian-Thiébault 1998: 179;
Abrahamian 1989: 171; Radjavi 1983: 160).
69
The People’s Sacrificing Guer-
rillas, according to one of its leaders, ‘‘disintegrated and disappeared’’ in the
mid-1970s, ‘‘set itself principally to protecting itself,’’ and engaged only in
‘‘scattered actions’’ to show that it still existed.
70
Ideologically, the group
decided that objective conditions for revolution did not exist (Behrooz 1999:
59, 68), and the organization claimed credit for only a handful of actions,
including squatter protests in summer 1977 (Guzarishati az mubarizat 1977)
and a response to the Qum protests one month after the fact, on 8 February
1978, when it planted bombs at a police station and a Resurgence Party build-
ing in Qum (Sazman-i Charik ha 1978). A third leftist party, the communist
Masses (Tudah) Party, had virtually no organized presence inside Iran at the
time, according to its own accounts (Zindah bad junbish 1978; Javidan bad
khatirah 1978; Posadas 1979: 24; Iktishafi 1998: 385–86), the testimony of a
Soviet agent in Tehran (Kuzichkin 1990: 204), and the judgment of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency.
71
None of these groups claimed credit for the
seminary student activism that followed the Qum protest of January 1978. In
view of the leftists’ limited activism in early 1978, and the bloody repression
of leftist groups during the preceding several years, organizational mobiliza-
tion on the radical left does not appear to explain the differing responses to
the two Qum protests.
Moderate Oppositionists
As noted above, moderate oppositionists, by contrast to the revolutionary left,
mobilized more in 1977 than in 1975. They were highly attuned to marginal
shifts in political opportunities, and Carter’s election spurred a number of
them into oppositional activity, beginning with the publication of open letters
in early 1977 and peaking with the poetry nights in October 1977.
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With the crackdown of November 1977, however, the moderate oppo-
sition prudently retreated, participating in no more public protests until
the next thaw, in the summer of 1978. Several new moderate oppositional
groups were founded during this period (Karimi-Hakkak 1985: 212–13),
but their activities were limited to a handful of relatively mild pronounce-
ments (Zamimah-yi Khabar-namah [Supplement to The newsletter {Tehran}],
1 December 1977–June 1978; Safahati az tarikh 1984). In mid-January 1978,
the National Front of Iran issued a single statement supporting a strike in
the Tehran bazaar (Zamimah-yi Khabar-namah, 31 January 1978, 7–8).
72
The
Iranian Committee for the Defense of Human Rights wrote to the prime
minister, respectfully demanding a full accounting for the Qum tragedy, but
did not call for public protest (Safahati az tarikh 1984 [2]:85–87). Even such
limited oppositional activity as this, the committee’s leader noted in a press
conference on 11 January 1978, was ‘‘very likely to bring about difficulties and
restrictions for us’’ (ibid.: 95). Moderate oppositionists blamed one another
for fearing a ‘‘severe response on the part of the government’’ (Sanjabi 1989:
284) and for worrying so much that ‘‘they’ll arrest us all’’ that after a par-
ticularly rancorous planning meeting in early 1978, ‘‘this political movement
was halted.’’
73
In sum, the mobilization by moderate oppositionists in 1977
affected Iranian responses to the Qum protest of January 1978 at most indi-
rectly, since these oppositionists were themselves restrained in their activities
in early 1978.
Revolutionary Islamists
The radical Islamist opposition did not mobilize its forces in 1975 but did
attempt to mobilize in late 1977. In mid-1975, leaders of the religious oppo-
sition did not believe that Iran was ready for revolution and hence did not
commit significant resources toward protest; in the fall of 1977, by contrast,
the religious revolutionaries decided that the country had ‘‘awakened.’’ This
difference in the Islamist opposition’s sense of efficacy at the two time peri-
ods, I suggest, may well explain the different responses by Iranians to the
two Qum protests.
Khomeini and his followers had long sought to overthrow the Iranian
monarchy and to institute an Islamic republic, but even the most ardent revo-
lutionaries did not think this would be feasible in the short or medium term.
In the wake of the violently suppressed protests of 1962–64, Khomeini and
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