Kind of true. But the Shah was no champion of anybody's right:
> ... Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... Public discontent came to a head at the end of the 1910s with the first series of petitions in 1919 calling for sex workers to be banished from Tehran.
> The political figure and writer Hassan Ezam-Qodsi notes that sex workers from Qajariyah alley in Tehran were moved to this new neighbourhood in order to avoid sexual assaults on "respectable" women in the city ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: “the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep... later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw”.
> The district offered its services as usual until the 1940s when public dissatisfaction surged again ... In this period, the practice of nafie-balad was again deployed as a tool to address the public concern over the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases ... the result of an STD test undertaken by Pasteur Institute of Tehran in 1929 showed that 43 per cent of the 3,498 participants were tested positive ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw, restricting entry to a rusty metal gate on the southern edge of the neighbourhood. While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.
> Yeah the Shahs rule was a paradise for regular people...
No it's not. That's a tactic the regime used to silence any opposition for a long time after the revolution. I can't tell you how many times I have turned on the TV and heard something along these lines. Nowadays, however, they have new favorite bogeymen.
Shah was a garden variety dictator backed by the United States. You can find the likes of him in today's Saudi Arabia, for example. It certainly was not paradise for regular people.
But Islamic Republic on the other hand is a theocratic dictatorship. It's like an octopus that wants to wrap its tentacles around every matter of people's personal lives. From their bedroom to the women's bodies to the clothes they wear. Ironic for them, as a result, the current generation who were born after the revolution are more pro-US than ever and unfortunately are even more sympathetic to Shah than one might expect; which is not surprising.
So Shah's misdeeds are no excuse for the demons who have forced themselves upon the country right now.
Context: I was born and used to lived in Iran in a non-Musilm family whose members were in opposition to both Shah and the new regime alike.
>"Shah was a garden variety dictator backed by the United States."
The support of the Shah was very much an Anglo-American concern. The coup to oust Mosaddegh was much the US as it was the the UK, Churchill and Eisenhower, MI6 and CIA.
Of course I did. I lived there and also avail myself of original source material that is entirely closed to you, such as Harvard's Iran Oral History project.
& So what that he was a dictator? He wasn't dictating a course of national destruction; he was dictating a revival of an ancient nation. The historical record of Pahlavi dynasty is exceptionally clear. You just need to grab hold of the National Geographic issue dedicated to "Persia" from just before Pahlavi dynasty and compare to Iran they created 57 years later. From a complete basket case to a nation that was seen to be a threat to Western imperial structures (as soon as he helped create OPEC) in the so-called Middle East.
And who was opposing him? A regressive clerical class -- a class -- that had a strangle hold over what passed for Iranian education and judiciary since the Saffavids, and their substantial network of two digit IQ illiterates that saw pictures of khomeini in the moon. And the past 44 years are exhibit A in why Iranian must eradicate the cleric from Iran and Islam once and for all. The second group, young people who where sent to West, entirely on the Iranian goverments' dime btw as all their education and room and board was covered (!), and instead of returning (like some) to help develop Iran they became "marxists", and later "Islamic-Marxists". (That last bit should shed some light on their conceptual and intellectual ability and integrity). Finally, we had the mini-army of all the descendants of various Qajar aristocracy that just wasn't happy with having an uppity soldier's family (Reza Shah) putting an end to the disaster that was Qajar dynasty.
~
p.s. for interested Persian speakers, this is a fantastic resource:
You have no case, just "dictator" bad. For you to make a case is to point to any (any) historic precedent when drastic social reform happened without confronting reactionary and regressive forces.
This is like arguing that there’s no difference between broken leg and a heart attack. The Shah’s government certainly had problems but you really need to provide a knowledgeable argument rather than just asserting equivalence.
The article you linked is written by a little known author, Abdullah Safi, who wrote articles against atheism. He clearly dislikes the Shah rule. What reason do we have to trust him?
Furthermore, even if we trust him to be unbiased (I don't), he only says that people who were fighting against the Shah (the armed rebels, the Communist supporters, etc) didn't enjoy a good life. He doesn't say that the Shah gave trouble to the regular people who weren't trying to overthrow the government.
I just Googled and found an article so I am sure there are better sources, however it shouldn't be controversial to say that the Shah, who came in power through a foreign coup, was a dictator. It is the reason why the revolution was able to succeed. Obviously life under the Shah was much better than after the revolution but that is not to say there were not problems before it.
I don't think anyone claims that there were no problems in Iran under the Shah. Or in the US for that matter.
FWIW, every single person I talked to who lived in Tehran during the Shah said it was great. However, I know It's a biased sample. For one, none of them were Communist sympathizers. And even more importantly, they all emigrated. Maybe if I talked to people who live in Tehran now, they'd also say it's great, who knows.
It doesn’t take much scrutinization to understand the underlying motivations of those who speak nostalgically of the rule of pro-western dictatorships. They come from families which used to profit from the theft of the colonized lands and were forced to flee (with whatever they managed to steal) once said lands were liberated.
The westener who defends such rule are racists unable to grant the oriental people the right to live and organize in a manner of their choosing. It is a “the-white man’s burden” and into the “heart of darkness” brand of racism which justifies itself by painting the East as backwards. But why is the East backwards? Is it because the East does not buy up the hedonistic materialism that the West has always been peddling as “liberalism” and instead prefers its own culture?
So ironic that the first intervention to claim a “public place for women” is one which paints the destruction of brothels negatively as a consequence of the religious gaining too much power. Is there any doubt that those who are claiming to be “enlightened” truly prefer a world where people in general — and women especially —remain objects of sexual desire which are used to herd people through endless cycles of aesthetically-driven consumerism?
It's possible (as a Westerner) to disapprove of totalitarian theocracy such as what exists now in Iran while simultaneously not believing it would be a good idea to interfere, especially militarily or through illegal covert action.
The West has deeply undermined itself with this interference. Quite a few people around the world actually did want what the West had to offer until the bombs and coups came and pushed them into the arms of domestic totalitarians.
All you have to do is turn it around. Imagine if the USA had a brutal dictatorship and China invaded us to "fix" it. How well do you think that would go over?
Edit: Sanctions are a little better but grossly over-used. I think they should be reserved for cases of violation of international law, such as Russia invading Ukraine, to exact a financial penalty for that. Otherwise sanctions tend to just harm the average people of a country. The Iranian dictators and mullahs are rich. It's the people who feel the sanctions. If anything sanctions make it harder for the people to organize any alternative to their current government by keeping them in brutal poverty.
Also to really understand how the West fucked up Iran you have to go back to before the Shah when the bogie man of communism was used as an excuse to intervene the first time. Read up on that history.
> The westener who defends such rule are racists unable to grant the oriental people the right to live and organize in a manner of their choosing.
Now, now, some hold democracy in contempt generally, not just for foreigners. Others believe that people have a right to live and organise in a manner of their choosing, not that they must be governed in a manner pleasing to Westerners.
> Others believe that people have a right to live and organise in a manner of their choosing
"I hate the government, not the people" is a thinly-veiled neocolonial trope when applied to sovereign nations like Iran. It translates to "I don't like it when those people govern themselves".
> It doesn’t take much scrutinization to understand the underlying motivations of those who speak nostalgically of the rule of pro-western dictatorships. They come from families which used to profit from the theft of the colonized lands and were forced to flee (with whatever they managed to steal) once said lands were liberated.
This is the IRI propaganda line that you are repeating and you are adding your own unique bits of outright 'errors'.
Let's start with the "colonized" lands. Iran was never colonized. It had a pseudo-feudal order, with landowning Iranian families and tenant peasants in villages. Of course this is entirely news to you (which makes you a useful unwitting IRI asset) but in the late 60s, one of the reasons the so-called Ayatollah Khomeni attacked the Shah was Land Reform.
The other reason was the evil Shah gave the vote to women, right to divorce, and all other necessary social support so that being 'cut off from family' did not determine a future outside of society.
And again as an evil man he removed the requirement to swear on the Quran for official procedures -- he said any divine book, Torah, Bible, Qur'an will do.
Clearly he was an evil dictator and had to go!
My family:
My father born to a provincial merchant, with no religious affiliation. He happened to get the top score for the national examination, after which he got his PhD, and later with two other engineers from Tehran university started their company that went on to build some of the major high-voltage infrastructure in Iran. He also taught in the engineering school. Clearly we are oppressors longing for the good old days when we could unjustly enjoy the fruits of our minds and abilities. (Btw, this same father of mine came to US starting at 0 again and again proved himself a man of distinguished ability. These people are Iran's loss.)
So yes, we miss the meritocracy, we miss the freedom, and not lastly I personally miss the aesthetics.
> ironic that the first intervention to claim a “public place for women”
Too bad you can't read this - try a translator (this is from this year):
بسم ا لله ا لر حمن ا لرحیم
قال رسول الله(ص):النّکاح، ُ سُنَّتی، فَمَنْ رَغِبَ عَنْ سُنّتى فَلَيسَ مِنّى.
آستان قدس رضوی جهت ارتقای فضای معنوی جامعهٔ و ایجاد شرایط مناسب روحی و آرامش خیال برای برادران زائری( خصوصا برادراني كه از كشورهاي اسلامي ديگر، عراق، سوریه، لبنان... آمده اند) که در مدت زیارت حرم مطهر امام هشتم از همسر خود دور می باشند اقدام به برگزاری مرکز صیغه های کوتاه مدت در جوار حرم رضوی نموده است.در این راستا از کلیهٔ خواهران باکره که سن آنها بین ۱۲ تا ۳۵ سال است دعوت به همکاری مینماید . هر یک از خواهران بر اساس قرارداد ۲ ساله ای که با آستان قدس رضوی منعقد مینمایند موظفند که ماهانه حد اقل ۲۵ روز به صیغه برادران زوار در آیند.مدت قرار داد جزو سابقه اشتغال متقاضی محسوب میگردد مدت هرصیغه از ۵ ساعت تا ۱۰ روز متغیر میباشد .مبلغ پرداختی بابت هر صیغه بدین شرح است:
صیغه های ۵ ساعته: مبلغ پانصد هزار تومان
صیغه های ۱ روزه صدو هفتاد و پنج هزار تومان؛ ٢ روزه سیصد هزار تومان؛ ٣ روزه چهارصد و پنجاه هزار تومان و از ۴ روز تا ۱۰ روز هفتصد هزار تومان تا یک میلیونخواهران باکره که برای اولین بار صیغه میشوند مبلغ ۱۰۰۰۰۰ تومان اضافه بابت برداشته شدن پردهٔ بکارت دریافت خواهند نمود.
بعد از انقضای قرارداد ۲ ساله در صورتی که سن خوهران به حد نصاب ۳۵ سال نرسیده باشد در صورت تمایل میتوانند در لیست انتظار صیغه های دایم قرار بگیرند.خوهران بالای۳۵ بدلیل بالا بودن سن لطفا ثبت نام نفرمایند.خواهران موظفند ۵ در صد از مبلغ دریافتی هر صیغه را به ضریح مطهر واریز نمایند. از کلیه خواهران علاقه مند در خواست میشود ۲ قطعه عکس تمام قد (با حجاب اسلامی) ، آخرین مدرک تحصیلی، وضعیت بکارت و گواهی سلامت کامل روانی و جسمانی از سازمان بهداشت شهرستان محل سکونت خود را به آدرس ذیل ارسال نمایند(برای خواهران کمتر از ۱۶ سال رضایت رسمی پدر یا جد پدری یا عمو الزامی میباشد)
جهت اطلا عات بیشتر با تلفن 09121169680 حاج مجید علیزاده09124251704 حاج علیقهرمانی تماس حاصل فرمائید و یا به نشریه استان قدس مراجعه نمایید.
اینم از مملکت اسلامی و فاحشه گری به ر وش اسلامی..!اگر ایرانی هستی کپی کن و به اشتراک بذار تا همه بفهمند که احمد علم الهدی وعواملش دارند به اسم دین ناموسمون رو به عربها هدیه میدهند!!!..
خواهشا این را نشان بدهید که عموم مردم ایران بدانند که چه کثافتکاری دارد انجام میشود در زیر پرده دین.... نشر دهید..
Here's a partial translation as it is directly related to "prostitution" in Iran:
"The holy state of Razavi [i.e. Khorasan] in order to improve the spiritual atmosphere of the society and create suitable mental conditions and peace of mind for the pilgrim brothers (especially the brothers who came from other Islamic countries, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon...) who during the pilgrimage to the Holy Shrine of the 8th Imam are detached from their wives, has started organizing a center for short-term concubines [Sigheh marriage] near the Razavi shrine. In this regard, all virgin sisters between the ages of 12 and 35 are invited to cooperate."
Now you're likely curious as to the rates of this 'holy' prostitution system? Here you go:
صیغه های ۵ ساعته: مبلغ پانصد هزار توما
5 hour marriage: 500,000 Tomans.
صیغه های ۱ روزه صدو هفتاد و پنج هزار تومان
1 day marriage: 175,000 Tomans.
etc.
So how does this work?
"After the 2-year contract expires, if the sisters are not 35 years old, they can be on the waiting list for permanent concubines if they wish. Sisters over 35 please do not register due to their age. The sisters are obliged to deposit 5 percent of the received amount of each concubine to the holy shrine. All interested sisters are requested to send 2 full-length photos (with Islamic hijab), the latest academic degree, virginity status and a certificate of complete mental and physical health from the health organization of the city where they live to the address below (for sisters less than 16 years old, official consent of father or paternal grandfather or uncle is required)"
Anything to help our Muslim brothers from Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, and soon comarades from Russia. Iranians should be delighted to be free from the yoke of the evil "dictator" Shah. This, after all, is clearly progress.
Your argument is oddly one-sided and does not include any of the issues with the Shah. At least try to look at it objectively. I understand you hate the current regime, we all do, but it seems you are unable to view history correctly because of it.
Democracy pretty reliably leads to persecution of religious minorities. I’m not aware of any exceptions in the Muslim world but the pattern held in early modern Europe too. Greater popular involvement in government meant the ruling class couldn’t protect useful but unpopular minorities. Thus everyone who isn’t Sunni supporting Assad in Syria. They know that the good outcome of the US winning is getting out alive. Or see the treatment of the Rohingya in Burma or Tamils in Sri Lanka. Absent a commitment to liberalism that requires generations of propaganda work national self-determination is bad news for religious or ethnic minorities.
Please point to a democratic country where people are prohibited from praying five times a day, or are otherwise prohibited from having private religious beliefs? (Religious practices that harm others, or force others to participate, such as ones that require non-consensual subjugation of women don't count.)
I know in the states, at least, pausing your job to pray could easily get you fired. Is it against the law of the land to fire someone for their religious beliefs? Probably. Do shitty workplaces do it anyways? Almost certainly. If they even hire you in the first place.
Have to fast during Ramadan? Job performance suffers because you aren't eating? Companies will absolutely go out of their way to make you miserable.
You might not be banned from practicing, but you better believe you aren't really protected either.
> ... Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... Public discontent came to a head at the end of the 1910s with the first series of petitions in 1919 calling for sex workers to be banished from Tehran.
> The political figure and writer Hassan Ezam-Qodsi notes that sex workers from Qajariyah alley in Tehran were moved to this new neighbourhood in order to avoid sexual assaults on "respectable" women in the city ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: “the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep... later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw”.
> The district offered its services as usual until the 1940s when public dissatisfaction surged again ... In this period, the practice of nafie-balad was again deployed as a tool to address the public concern over the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases ... the result of an STD test undertaken by Pasteur Institute of Tehran in 1929 showed that 43 per cent of the 3,498 participants were tested positive ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw, restricting entry to a rusty metal gate on the southern edge of the neighbourhood. While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.