From Palace to Prison
Ehsan Naraghi
I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
“On September 28, 1978, I was summoned to the Saadabad Palace for the first of eight audiences with the Shah spread over the last hundred days of his reign. During these meetings the monarch, anxious to understand the growing revolutionary crisis in Iran and if possible to find a way out, questioned me closely about my views of the situation. ...”
So begins Ehsan Naraghi’s unusual and illuminating account of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Far more than an insider’s memoir of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the Islamic Republic, it is also a unique behind-the-scenes view of Iran’s tempestuous politics and society.
In the first half of the book, Naraghi, a prominent Iranian sociologist, engagingly recounts his long conversations with the Shah in the weeks before the revolution. Here is the Shah at bay, a man overtaken by events and unbelievably ignorant of the causes of the popular agitation against him. Naraghi provides an unparalleled picture of the revolutionary events as seen through the eyes of those at the very center of power.
In the second half of the book the author recalls his thirty-three-month experience in prison—the first testimony to come from a survivor of the Islamic Republic’s jails. In a rich, intensely human portrait of his fellow prisoners and his jailors, Naraghi powerfully reconstructs his prison world as a microcosm of the political earthquake that engulfed Iran.
Ehsan Naraghi founded Tehran University’s respected Institute of Social Studies and Research in the late 1950s, later moved to UNESCO, and returned to Iran in 1975 to become director of the Institute of Research and Planning in Science and Higher Education. He now lives in Paris where he works as an adviser to UNESCO.
Contents
Preface / vii
Part One. Palace
From Dreams to Awakening / 3
From Persepolis to Jean-Paul Sartre / 23
Between Wife and Sister / 57
Flowers on the Carpet / 71
Don’t Fire on the Crowd! / 85
Even Judges / 101
The Impossible Renunciation / 121
What Is Happening in Guadeloupe? / 135
Visa for Egypt / 141
Part Two. Prison
Youngsters as at Vincennes / 149
Surprises in a Prison Hospital / 153
The Corridor of Fear / 197
Chronology / 271
Index / 277
PREFACE
On September 28, 1978, I was summoned to the Saadabad Palace for the first of eight audiences with the Shah spread over the last hundred days of his reign. During these meetings the monarch, anxious to understand the growing revolutionary crisis in Iran and if possible to find a way out, questioned me closely about my views of the situation. The result was a series of conversations, reconstructed in the first part of this book, which touched on issues ranging from the historical and ideological origins of the revolutionary movement to the significance of the day-to-day events of those turbulent months.
I was not someone whom the Shah would normally have met in this way. As director of the Institute of Planning and Research for Science and Higher Education, I had in the 1970s sat on various state councils dealing with educational matters, and on several occasions I had advised the queen on cultural affairs; but my work was not of a kind that brought me into direct contact with the Shah. Furthermore, he had a robust scorn for intellectuals in general and a particular reason to be cautious of me. For, as he must have known from a hostile report in my file with Savak, the Shah’s security police (a file which I later learned about when I was interrogated at Evin Prison after the revolution), my associations were suspect. When I was director of Tehran University’s Institute for Social Studies and Research, I had kept under my wing a number of young scholars who were vehement opponents of the regime, I was not myself an active member of the opposition, but my independent political outlook, evident from my books, and my professional contact and personal friendships with open dissenters would in normal circumstances have excluded me from the Shah’s circle of advisers.
But as the political situation deteriorated in 1978 the Shah began to bypass his usual channels of information—the security police and various courtiers—and to seek independent counsel. This was because, as I explain in the pages that follow, he felt himself isolated and abandoned. Many of the people who surrounded and flattered him in the good days had already fled the country, and the obvious discrepancy between official Savak reports and daily events on the streets had left him disenchanted with the organization. At the same time he was desperate to find a way out of the crisis that engulfed him, especially after the Jaleh Square massacre of September 1978, and had begun to consider meeting some of the demands of the moderate opposition. But neither he nor any of his usual advisers had connections with leading moderates or any knowledge (save through the prism of Savak reports) of how such people viewed the world, his regime, and the political crisis. For the very reason that, only months earlier, I would have been regarded with suspicion, I suddenly became someone with whom it might be useful to discuss events.
I began to write this memoir soon after the Shah left Iran on February 11, 1979, two days after my last conversation with him. My intention was to record my impressions of a man who for several decades had been one of the world’s most powerful leaders and whose reaction to the disintegration of that power I had witnessed at close quarters. I have tried to make my testimony as accurate and authentic as possible. My main source is the notes I wrote immediately after my audiences with the Shah, while our conversation remained fresh in my mind. But I have also drawn on additional notes I prepared before the audiences, for after the first conversation the Shah told me I should feel free to raise whatever issues I felt were important. To supplement my own record I have used the notebooks put at my disposal by Abdollah Entezam and Gholam-Hossein Sadighi, both highly respected independent politicians to whom the Shah turned for advice in the last months of his reign. My conversations with the former prime minister Ali Amini, who saw the Shah regularly during this period, and with Aslan Afshar, who was chief of protocol and the Shah’s constant companion throughout the revolutionary crisis, have also been of great help. Finally, Michel Poniatowski, who was sent to Iran by Giscard d’Estaing to ascertain the Shah’s thinking and mood on the eve of the Guadeloupe summit of January 5-6, 1979, kindly provided me with an account of his long interview with the Shah on December 26, 1978. I am deeply indebted to all these people.
I more or less completed the first part of my memoir toward the end of 1979 and planned to publish it the following year. But in December 1979 I was arrested at Tehran airport as I was about to board a plane to Paris. When I was released four months later I began to add the notes I had taken in prison, and I made up my mind to delay publication. Later events justified my decision, for I was arrested again in June 1981 and imprisoned until September 1983. By the time I was free to write again I had such rich material on prison life—material which I felt threw important light on the experience of the revolution and the nature of Iranian society—that I decided to give myself time for reflection and put together in the same work my conversations with the Shah and my prison experiences.
In both sections of my memoir I have tried to report the facts as I saw them and to draw accurate and truthful portraits of the people involved. Whether writing about the Shah, a revolutionary activist about to be executed, or a prison guard, I have tried to capture individuals as they were, “as human beings who come into the world to suffer and to die.” In reconstructing my conversations with the Shah, Queen Farah, and many of the people I encountered in prison, I have chosen to present them in the form of a dialogue. These dialogues do not of course represent verbatim accounts of our exchanges—particularly with the men I met in prison where I could not keep a diary; but I have made every effort to keep closely to the authentic tone and substance. If I have not been entirely successful, I hope the reader will forgive me, for no human being is without faults or shortcomings.
E. N.
Paris, August 1993
In golden letters ’tis written in a crystalline sky:
Good deeds will live, all else will die.
—Hafez (1320-1389)
From Palace to Prison
Palace
From Dreams to Awakening
(First Conversation with the Shah)
Monday, September 23, igy8, 3:30 p.m.
My first audience with the Shah took place at his summer palace of Saadabad in the Alborz foothills in northern Tehran. He had been intending to see me since March, but the meeting had been postponed several times because, I believe, deep down the Shah was reluctant to receive me. In this he was undoubtedly influenced by reports prepared by the head of Savak, the secret police, about the Institute for Social Studies and Research during the 1960s. Nonetheless, when the chamberlain led me to his office, the Shah, who was adept at hiding his feelings, received me very amicably, standing in the middle of the room. He politely shook my hand and invited me to sit in a chair facing his own. I knew immediately that the crisis had brought about a change in him, for in normal times whenever he received Iranian subjects he would remain standing, and if the discussion went on for some time he would pace up and down the room while the visitor was expected to remain still with his eyes always turned toward the monarch.
Before me sat a man profoundly shaken by recent events, who had lost the self-assurance he had displayed not long ago in the official meetings I had sometimes attended. He said in a friendly manner, as …
Ehsan Naraghi
From Palace to Prison
I. B. Tauris
I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
From Palace to Prison
Ehsan Naraghi
Translated from the French
by Nilou Mobasser
I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd
Publishers
London - New York
Published in 1994 by
I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd
45 Bloomsbury Square
London WCiA 2HY
Copyright © 1994 by Ivan R. Dee, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 1-85043-704-1
In memory of my mother,
to my wife, and, through them,
to all the wives and mothers of prisoners
wherever they may be found
Jacket Design by Robert McCamant
Jacket Photograph from AMH
