An Intellectual Thunderbolt

During my four years of study in the United States, I had read a good deal of revolutionary history and Marxist literature — in Persian and English — but never anything like Halliday’s book, which was both rigorously scholarly and Marxist to the bone. English-language scholarship on Iran generally avoided current events or cautiously commented on the shah’s government, staying safely within the conservative paradigms of Westernization/modernization theory and the Cold War. The few exceptional critical studies on Iran were by young scholars affiliated with the anti-shah Iranian student movement, one of the world’s most effective leftist organizations during the 1960s and ’70s.

In 1969, for example, Ervand Abrahamian, whose 1981 work Iran Between Two Revolutions would surpass Halliday’s book in the breadth and depth of its Marxist approach, had published “The Crowd in the Persian Revolution” in the fledgling journal Iranian Studies. The left-leaning journal known as MERIP (Middle East Information Project) had published a few hard-hitting short pieces on contemporary Iran during the 1970s. Arriving with impeccable timing, right when the shah was being overthrown, Halliday’s book hit us like an intellectual thunderbolt. Within a few months of publication, multiple Persian translations came out, reaching a wide audience in Iran.

As Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s introduction points out, Halliday had identified the serious challenges faced by the shah without predicting his imminent overthrow. But then few saw the state as being on the verge of collapse until fall 1978, which is when Halliday finished writing the book, according to his preface.

Another unjustified criticism of Halliday’s book concerns its trenchant secularism and alleged lack of attention to the shah’s religious opposition. In the wake of the monarchy’s replacement by an Islamic Republic, the international community of Iran scholars suddenly discovered the significance of religion — particularly Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s brand of Islam — in prerevolutionary Iran. While noting Khomeini’s movement, Halliday had correctly not considered it as the leading force of the opposition. This was a role that it assumed only in 1978, when the book was about to be published.

Ultimately, as Sadeghi-Boroujerdi notes, Iran: Dictatorship and Development was an astute analysis of pre-revolutionary Iranian society and politics rather than a text of the Iranian Revolution. In ten carefully organized chapters, Halliday laid out and diagnosed Iran’s basic social, economic, and political structure, focusing on the period between the monarchy’s restoration through the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup and the growing challenges it was facing by the second half of the 1970s.

Iran Under the Shah

Halliday began with a brief sketch of contemporary “Iranian society,” using the latest statistics on geography, urban-rural population balance, ethnolinguistic breakdown, work and employment patterns, and the clerical institutions sustaining Iran’s Shi’i Muslim affiliation. The next two chapters focused on “the Iranian state,” covering its historical background and specific characteristics.

The modern Iranian state, Halliday told us, was the product of five twentieth-century political “crises” converging to shape it into a “dictatorship,” one of the two key terms in his book’s title. He then offered his explanation as to why the dictatorial state built under the two Pahlavi shahs corresponded first and foremost to Iran’s domestic conditions and only secondarily to foreign intervention, notably by the United States after the Second World War.

Here Halliday’s analysis diverged from typical nationalist and leftist narratives blaming British and American imperialism for setting up a dictatorial Iranian state with the Pahlavi monarchy as their “puppet.” Halliday was emphatic that the Pahlavi state was “created in a comparatively independent manner,” rather than being a “postcolonial” state set up by Western imperialism and its local clientele.

In another methodological departure, he posed and tried to answer the question of why a bourgeois-democratic political order had not emerged in Iran. Here too, the causes he identified were primarily internal to Iranian society rather than being foreign imposed. At the end of this chapter, he noted the weaknesses and mistakes of Iran’s two mid-twentieth-century opposition movements, the Communist (Tudeh) Party and Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s 1951–53 nationalist government.

Halliday had opened the book with a barrage of bold analytical insights, putting forward a sharply critical perspective on the shah’s government, while questioning the ideological assumptions of its leftist and nationalist opponents. I was politicized in leftist Iranian student circles and yet questioned their Maoist/Stalinist orthodoxies and cult of guerrilla armed struggle. Young activists like me were searching for more sophisticated perspectives on the shah’s government and its relation to US imperialism.

Halliday provided this perspective in crisp, jargon-free prose that was unabashedly Marxist without relying on the tired old cliches of “base-superstructure,” “semifeudal society,” “the hierarchy of contradictions,” or similar dialectical gymnastics. At the same time, his solid scholarly approach marked a break with dominant Cold War paradigms that served to justify Anglo-American intervention in Iran and Orientalist academic tropes of Iran as a nation of poets, supposedly characterized by its timeless Islamic attributes and the Persian monarchy’s millennial roots and branches.

Contradictions of Development

Halliday’s second chapter on the modern Iranian state outlined its “general characteristics,” arguing that this was first and foremost a state promoting the development of capitalism and therefore in some sense “progressive” in a classical Marxist perspective. Development, the second key term in his book’s title, was thus fundamental to Halliday’s analysis of Iran.

This was capitalist development generating contradictory results, both progressive and regressive. Here again, Halliday challenged prevalent leftist paradigms of Iran being stuck in a “semifeudal” holding pattern or its capitalist development being “dependent” on imperialism and therefore wholly reactionary. Instead, he was following Vladimir Lenin’s analytical model for the study of capitalism in tsarist Russia, which Halliday’s Marxist scholar-mentor Bill Warren had adopted.

The assertion that the shah’s state had some progressive features was heretical in Iranian left circles largely beholden to Maoism, dependency theory, and other Third Worldist paradigms. The Left tended to dismiss the shah’s 1960s “White Revolution” reform package as a total sham, even though its main planks — land reform, women’s franchise, and free public education — had appropriated socialist and communist demands.

At the end of his second chapter on the Iranian state, Halliday outlined its main characteristics in this razor-sharp manner: “It is capitalist, it is developing capitalism, it is dictatorial, it is a monarchist form of dictatorship, and it is in a certain sense dependent on the advanced capitalist countries.” Thus, the main thesis of Iran: Dictatorship and Development, summed up in the book’s title, was that the shah’s government was politically reactionary and dependent on, though not a puppet of, US imperialism, while the socioeconomic capitalist development it had fostered was a mixed bag of positive and negative results.

Moving beyond the abstractions of the early chapters, the rest of the book analyzed Iranian politics and society under the following rubrics: the armed forces and SAVAK, agricultural development, oil and industrialization, the working class, the opposition, and foreign relations. These categories were, and remain, crucial to understanding the Pahlavi monarchy. In each case, Halliday used the best available sources to lay bare the contradictions and tensions that already threatened the government’s stability.

Reflecting on the causes of the Iranian Revolution, subsequent studies have generally gone back to the same set of structural factors Halliday had identified in 1979. Moreover, without predicting an imminent breakdown, Halliday’s book focused on a crucial vulnerability that many observers would identify as the main structural causes of the state’s collapse, namely the growing discrepancy between a dysfunctional political dictatorship and a rapidly transforming or developing society.

After the Revolution

The host of reasons listed above make Halliday’s 1979 text indispensable for historians of twentieth-century Iran and the Iranian Revolution all the way to the present. While recently finishing a manuscript on the history of US-Iranian relations, I went back to Iran: Dictatorship and Development, finding it often as fresh and insightful as I remembered reading it for the first time. Particularly outstanding was Halliday’s analysis of the monarchy’s complex relationship with the United States, where he pointed out the shah’s growing agency, and even a certain independence, while his decisions always remained within the strategic parameters of US imperial interests.

This brings us to Halliday’s writings on the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, an important addition to the 1979 text in the new 2024 edition. The first of these writings was an article Halliday published in Britain’s New Statesman after a two-week visit to Iran in August 1979. Titled “Iran: The Revolution Turns to Repression,” this essay set the tone for Halliday’s critical stance on the postrevolutionary government emerging under Ayatollah Khomeini. It drew on Halliday’s firsthand observations and interviews with members of the Provisional Government as well as leaders of the secular and leftist opposition to the new state’s growing repressive tendencies.

Halliday had participated in a rally organized by the left-leaning Democratic National Front in defense of press freedom. The massive rally was attacked violently by pro-Khomeini thugs, marking a turning point after which the repression of left and secular factions of the revolutionary coalition escalated rapidly. I too joined this rally and had my head cracked by rocks thrown by Khomeini supporters.

At the time, I belonged to a leftist faction that saw a form of fascism brewing from within the revolutionary coalition bent on setting up a new dictatorship under Khomeini. I had written articles warning of the fascist danger and was happy to see Halliday echoing this view in his August 1979 New Statesman article titled “Islam With a Fascist Face.”

Halliday’s alignment with Iranian leftists who were resisting the Islamic Republic’s dictatorial turn continued with his critical position on the November 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran, an event that changed Washington’s relatively cordial relations with the Islamic Republic to a deep-seated enmity continuing to the present. Lasting 444 days, the hostage crisis helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It bitterly divided the Iranian left into those hailing it as an anti-imperialist crusade and those who saw it, as I did, as a ploy to disarm politically and then wipe out the government’s growing opposition.

Halliday was on our side, condemning the Islamic Republic’s standoff with the United States in a Nation magazine article titled “Iran’s Stolen Revolution: Anti-Imperialism of Fools.” This analysis of the hostage crisis as a cynical and foolish political gambit with enormous costs, including Iraq’s invasion of an internationally isolated Iran, was later accepted by virtually everyone. That included several participants in the hostage-taking who subsequently became critical of the Islamic Republic.

Iran in Global History

Halliday’s subsequent commentaries on the Islamic Republic can be found in four more articles, plus one entitled “Iran’s Revolution in Global History,” that are included in the new edition. Here he reflects on the revolution’s first, third, fourth, and tenth anniversaries. Together this trove adds fresh nuance to his highly critical take on the postrevolutionary state.

The gist of these criticisms appeared in the essay marking the revolution’s first year, which took an unambiguous stand toward Khomeini and his allies: “By its very nature the Islamic movement is extremely hierarchical and therefore anti-democratic. . . . Its position on women and on issues of personal morality generally is extremely repressive and, by a socialist standard, reactionary.”

During the next three decades, until his untimely death in 2010, Halliday would go on to write about a wide range of topics beyond Iran, from Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to the Ethiopian Revolution to Latin American politics, becoming an internationally recognized and respected scholar of contemporary Middle East and Islamic politics. Given the extraordinary range of his interests and writings, he inevitably had his share of analytical mistakes and political misjudgments. But he always struck the right note on Iran — from a left perspective, of course.

I met Fred a few times after the revolution and found him to be a warm individual and a charming conversationalist who would break into Persian to chat with Iranian friends. Our last face-to-face meeting was during a conference held in 2000 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where I was proud to present a paper alongside my colleague and comrade Fred.

The proceedings of this conference were published in a volume titled Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran, edited by Stephanie Cronin. It opened with a chapter by Halliday, “The Iranian Left in International Perspective,” followed by mine as a survey of the Iranian left’s twentieth-century balance sheet. Here the internationalism that was a hallmark of Halliday’s intellectual and political career was on full display, and once again, I was overjoyed to appear in print next to him.

Although I miss Fred personally, I recommend the new edition Iran: Dictatorship and Development not on sentimental grounds but because of its own extraordinary merit as a unique text of revolutionary history and an iconic testimony to Marxist scholarship and socialist internationalism. The younger generation of progressives and socialists should not miss it.