Mahdi Bazargan

The History of the Islamic Revolution
Mahdi Bazargan

Mahdi Bazargan was an Iranian scholar, academic, long-time pro-democracy activist, and head of ‎Iran’s interim government, making him Iran’s first prime minister after the Iranian Revolution of ‎‎1979. He was the head of the first engineering department of the University of Tehran. A well-respected religious intellectual, known for his honesty and expertise in the Islamic and secular ‎sciences, he is credited with being one of the founders of the contemporary intellectual movement ‎in Iran.‎

 

Bazargan was born into an Azerbaijani family in Tehran on 1 September 1907. His father, Hajj ‎Abbasqoli Tabrizi (died 1954), was a self-made merchant and a religious activist in the bazaar guilds. He ‎completed his elementary and high school education at Tehran’s Servat, Soltan, and Dar al-‎Moallemin Schools, and participated in a European scholarship competition in 1929, and was sent ‎to France by the Ministry of Public Benefits in the same year.‎

 

When in France, Bazargan attended Lycée Georges Clemenceau in Nantes and was a classmate of ‎Abdollah Riazi. He then studied thermodynamics and engineering at the École Centrale des Arts et ‎Manufactures (École Centrale Paris).‎

 

After his graduation, Bazargan became the head of the first engineering department at the University of Tehran in the late 1940s. He was a deputy minister under Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq in ‎the 1950s. Bazargan served as the first Iranian head of the National Iranian Oil Company under the ‎administration of Prime Minister Mosaddeq.‎

 

Bazargan co-founded the Liberation Movement of Iran in 1961, a party similar in its program to ‎Mosaddeq’s National Front. Although he accepted the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the ‎legitimate head of state, he was jailed several times on political grounds. As a consequence of ‎criticizing the Shah’s White Revolution, LMI members were arrested and imprisoned.

 

Bazargan ‎himself was sentenced to ten years imprisonment but released on a royal pardon, after four years ‎and nine months. Following his release and throughout the 1970s, Bazargan kept a low profile but ‎was actively involved in some intellectual debates ‎—‎ in a dialogue with the clerics on the meaning of ‎government; in a critique of Marxism; and in elaborating a modern interpretation of Islam.‎

 

During the Pahlavi era, Bazargan’s house in Tehran was bombed on 8 April 1978. The underground ‎committee for revenge, a state-financed organization, proclaimed the responsibility of the ‎bombing.‎

 

When political controls relaxed in 1977, Bazargan re-entered the open political arena through the ‎Iranian Committee for the Defense of Freedom and Human Rights, the first independent human ‎rights organization in Iran’s history, in which he was elected as chairman. An established record of ‎activism in Islamic and national circles promoted Bazargan to the forefront of Iranian opposition ‎circles, and it was on this basis that the emerging leader of the revolutionary movement, Ayatollah ‎Khomeini, appointed him as the first post-revolutionary prime minister.‎

 

As popular uprisings against the Shah raged, Bazargan’s political activities became even more ‎vivid. In September 1979, after Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Paris, he also travelled to France to ‎meet with the leader-in-exile. At the meeting, Bazargan was tasked with preparing a list of the ‎members eligible for membership in the Revolutionary Council and providing it to the leader of the ‎revolution.‎

 

On 4 February 1979, Bazargan was appointed prime minister of Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini, and in ‎the hope of reforming the state bureaucracy, formed his cabinet. His nine-month government ‎was, however, to preside over the greatest defeat suffered by the liberal moderates at the hands ‎of the radical and revolutionary movement. He was seen as one of the democratic and liberal ‎figureheads of the revolution who came into conflict with the more radical religious figures as the ‎revolution progressed. ‎

 

Despite Ayatollah Khomeini’s recommendations, Bazargan government ministers were mostly chosen ‎from members of the Liberation Movement. As prime minister, Bazargan sought to solve problems ‎routinely, less in revolutionary ways, and always spoke of step-by-step politics in government ‎programs.‎

 

Although pious, Bazargan initially disputed the name Islamic Republic, wanting the Islamic ‎Democratic Republic. He had also been a supporter of the original (non-theocratic) revolutionary ‎draft constitution and opposed the Assembly of Experts for Constitution and the constitution they ‎wrote that eventually adopted as Iran’s constitution. Seeing his government’s lack of power, in ‎March 1979, he submitted his resignation to Ayatollah Khomeini. Ayatollah Khomeini did not accept his ‎resignation, and in April 1979, he and his cabinet members escaped an assassination attempt.‎

 

Bazargan resigned, along with his cabinet, on 4 November 1979, following the American Embassy ‎takeover and hostage-taking. His resignation was considered a protest against the hostage-taking ‎and a recognition of his government’s inability to free the hostages, but it was also clear that his ‎hopes for liberal democracy and accommodation with the West would not prevail. ‎

 

Bazargan continued in Iranian politics as a member of the first Parliament of the newly formed ‎Islamic Republic. He openly opposed Iran’s Cultural Revolution and continued to advocate civil rule ‎and democracy. In November 1982, he expressed his frustration with the direction the Islamic ‎Revolution had taken in an open letter to the then speaker of the parliament Akbar Hashemi ‎Rafsanjani.‎

 

His term as a member of the parliament lasted until 1984. During his time, he served as a ‎lawmaker of the Liberation Movement of Iran, which he had founded in 1961, and abolished in ‎‎1990. In 1985, the Guardian Council denied Bazargan’s petition to run for president.‎

 

Throughout the 1980s, Bazargan’s insistence on liberal politics, scorned by four groups. First were ‎the modernist/monarchists, who in their apolitical model of social development, had no time for ‎Bazargan’s indigenous concoction of open, active, religious, and liberal politics. The second group ‎represented the traditional religious community led by the senior clergy, who jealously guarded ‎the mystical world of their creed and saw Bazargan’s notion of democratic rule as a threat to their ‎elitist concept of the right of the clergy to interpret the religious text.

 

The third group which stood ‎against Bazargan was that of the Marxists, including the Islamic/Stalinist Mojahedin-e Khalq ‎Organization. This group saw Bazargan as a “petty-bourgeois bazaari merchant” whose notion of ‎liberalism was rooted in his greed for personal profit. The last, but most influential, group was that ‎of the radical Islamists, the main benefactors of the 1979 Islamic revolution. They saw Bazargan as ‎the personification of western corruption amongst the ranks of the believers and thus sought to ‎isolate him.‎

 

The 1990s could be termed as a period of strategic ideological success for Bazargan and his liberal ‎colleagues. On the one hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the other the futility of 15 ‎years of anti-government terrorism and state terrorism, had initiated a far-reaching revisionist ‎trend among all political activists. The word liberal was a derogatory term popularly understood to ‎connote a weak, wishy-washy, and petty opportunistic mentality in politics. Almost all Iranian ‎political groups sought to present a liberal image of tolerance and moderation.‎

 

Bazargan is a respected figure within the ranks of modern Muslim thinkers, known as a ‎representative of liberal-democratic Islamic thought and a thinker who emphasized the necessity ‎of constitutional and democratic policies. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Bazargan ‎led a faction that opposed the Revolutionary Council dominated by the Islamic Republican Party ‎and personalities such as Ayatollah Beheshti. He opposed the continuation of the Iran-Iraq War ‎and the involvement of clerics in all aspects of politics, economy, and society.

 

Consequently, he ‎faced harassment from militants and young revolutionaries within Iran. Bazargan believed that ‎there is a link and relation between politics and religion, but did not believe in Political Islam.‎

 

In the more than 50 books and pamphlets that left behind, Bazargan is known for some of the ‎earliest work in human thermodynamics, as found in his 1956 book Love and Worship: the ‎Thermodynamics of Human Beings, being written while in prison, in which he attempted to show ‎that religion and worship are a byproduct of evolution. His other works include The Way Passed, ‎The Evolutionary Course of the Quran, and The Iranian Revolution in Two Phases.‎

 

Bazargan married Malak Tabatabai in 1939. They had five children, two sons, and three daughters. ‎He died of a heart attack on 20 January 1995 in Switzerland and was buried in a family tomb in Qom.‎

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