Introduction
The advent of “modern” education in Iran and its acceptance by political and cultural elites dates to the Qajar era. But the elitist nature of state reforms prevented modern education from spreading throughout society until the Pahlavi era. This article examines that era through the history of the Islamic Education Society (Jāmeʿeh-ye taʿlimat-e eslāmi) —a cultural organization that, with the approval of the Pahlavi bureaucracy, established a chain of private religious schools throughout Iran and at all educational levels beginning in the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the demand for modern education grew, affiliates of the Islamic Education Society used its template for private religious learning to establish the Alavi, Kamāl, and Refāh schools in Tehran.
Despite the importance of the dabestān and dabirestān, there is little research on pre-university schools during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.Footnote 1 David Menashri touches on the subject in his survey of Iran’s education system. He reports that there were 315,355 students (2.46 percent of the population) in pre-university schools in the 1941–42 academic year, and that number grew to 7.7 million (21.39 percent) in 1977–78. These statistics resemble those offered by the last shah who, in his last memoir, estimated that there were 7.4 million pre-university students compared to 185,000 in universities during his last year in power. While growth began earlier, Menashri found that “the most rapid expansion of the pre-university educational system occurred during the years of the White Revolution.”Footnote 2 Indeed, pre-university school construction accelerated with the Pahlavi state-building project and functioned alongside initiatives such as the Literacy Corps, or Army of Knowledge (Sepāh-e dānesh), in the 1960s.Footnote 3 The evidence offered here confirms these findings, but eschews the typical focus on secularization, the public system, and royal initiatives.Footnote 4
In mid-twentieth century Iran many middle class families availed themselves of the Islamic Education Society’s “private religious schools.” This term is not entirely accurate, though it captures their dual liminality. On the one hand, the schools occupied a space between the “traditional” network of clerical schools and the “modern” public system of the Pahlavi state. Like public schools, few students at Islamic Education Society schools and those of other cultural foundations were preparing to enter the religious establishment. The clerical system was limited for those who embraced modern fields of study in the humanities and sciences and wanted their children to pursue worldly careers, especially in universities and the government bureaucracy. To strike a balance between the state and clerical systems, clergy and their lay supporters opened private religious schools, and their curricular and extra-curricular work fused Shiʿism with national educational mandates to provide a unique student experience.Footnote 5 On the other hand, some of the most significant pre-university schools of the pre-1979 years were, to borrow from a recent article in this journal, “neither dowlati nor khosusi.”Footnote 6 In other words, they were nominally private, and funded and populated through familial, socio-economic, and political networks. But the schools of the Islamic Education Society and its broader network were issued operational licenses by the government. Once operational, the schools fell under the supervision of government ministries, and many of their faculty and staff were employed by the Ministry of Education. This meant that the schools were called upon to adhere to the same curricula and regulations as public schools, but in practice there was room for flexibility.
The most significant private religious schools in Tehran were Alavi, Kamāl, and Refāh, and their history emerges from two types of primary sources. Because revolutionary figures were active in the private religious school network, they were monitored by Iran’s National Intelligence and Security Organization, or SAVAK. Its documents are the first source set. The Ministry of Information’s Center for the Analysis of Historical Documents (Markaz-e barresi-ye asnād-e tārikhi-ye vezārat-e ettelāʿāt) has published multi-volume collections of the security organization’s documents.Footnote 7 Equally significant material comes from the primary source collections compiled by Karamipour.Footnote 8 As the former director of the Oral History and Researching Texts Unit, located at the Islamic Revolution Documents Center (Markaz-e asnād-e enqelāb-e eslāmi), Karamipour has written books about, and conducted interviews with students, teachers, and principals of the schools. The second source set consists of oral histories, which, when considered cautiously and in a supplemental manner alongside Iranian government documents from the period, can enrich the narrative and analysis.
While the research is based on Persian-language documents, the analysis is informed by multiple generations of English-language historiography on education and state–society relations. Michael Fischer and Shahrough Akhavi wrote about religious education and its relationship to the Pahlavi state, and their studies have been followed by titles on the bazaar and other subjects.Footnote 9 Monica Ringer’s work on Iranian education and religious modernism during the nineteenth century provides important context for understanding mid-twentieth century Iran. In both cases state–society dynamics created a “modernization dilemma” that revealed the tension between “the desire to adopt elements of ‘modern’ [read European] technology and institutions, while at the same time safeguarding Iranian cultural and religious traditions.” The Pahlavi period witnessed the acceleration of educational trends that began during the Qajar period. Important to scholars of both eras is Ringer’s reminder that “one should not equate advocacy of modernization with the absence of religious belief. Nor with a solitary and uniform approach to the role of religion in modern society.”Footnote 10 While many in the academy have historically equated religious forces with “tradition” and the Pahlavi shahs with “modernity,” this article demonstrates that the royalist government and the religious school network offered competing understandings of modernism.Footnote 11
This article builds on the work of scholars who highlight the convergence of religious and modern worldviews in Iran. The intellectual histories of scholars such as Houchang Chehabi are pertinent, as they examine “religious modernism” during the twentieth century.Footnote 12 They, along with others, have written intellectual biographies that deconstruct and contextualize the modernist ideologies of activist clerics and lay intellectuals.Footnote 13 Some historical figures, such as Mehdi Bāzargān and Yadollāh Sahābi, have been classified as proponents of “liberal Islam” for engaging with the “west” and attempting to make Islam compatible with modern scientific, humanistic, and social considerations.Footnote 14 The network analyzed in this article was far from homogenous and represents a range of ideological camps and long-differentiated social groups.Footnote 15 For that reason, the focus is less on the content of well-studied ideologies than it is the oft-neglected form of modernist organization utilized by members of the school network. As Vanessa Martin has noted, Islamic organizers operated on two levels: the ideological (religious practices and legal interpretations, as examples) and the organizational (schools, for instance). In ways comparable to their secular counterparts, religious educationalists reimagined institutions, claimed public space, produced generations of leaders, and supported a modern educational agenda from the 1940s to the 1970s.Footnote 16
This article argues that the Islamic Education Society promoted religious modernism and provided a model that other cultural foundations followed to establish private educational institutions, serve a broad social base and, ultimately, engage in the politics of statehood. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first discusses the Islamic Education Society, and its social significance during the 1940s as a civil society organization with a board of directors and governance structure. The second section explains how, after the 1953 coup, partners of the Islamic Education Society established similar cultural foundations and cooperated with the Pahlavi bureaucracy to expand the institutional base of religious modernism in Tehran through the Alavi and Kamāl schools for boys. Modern religious education thrived from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, in part because of the concern that the ulema shared with the crown about communist influence among Iranian youth. The quantitative and qualitative growth of this alternative system gave middle class families options as to where to send their children to school. The third section tracks the continued expansion of the private religious school network during the years of the White Revolution, most notably with founding of the Refāh school for girls in 1969. During the 1970s, Islamic activists matched their network of schools with a welfare model and political vision that ran parallel to those of the state. The Alavi, Kamāl, and Refāh schools —along with the educationalists, clerics, lay intellectuals, and bazaar merchants who supported them —were at once a reflection of the revolutionary movement and a vehicle for its organization.
The Islamic Education Society
Prior to the 1940s, Reza Shah constructed a public education system that aimed to secularize knowledge, separate religious life from the public sphere, and subsume schools under the “pedagogical state.”Footnote 17 Despite centralizing trends, many types of pre-university schools existed in Tehran when Mohammad Reza took over from his father in 1941. Chehabi notes that the schools of Qajar-era reformers retained their significance and “furnished many members of the post-World War II Iranian political elite.” Alborz High School, after its nationalization from American missionaries in 1940, became another elite institution in Tehran.Footnote 18 The Islamic Education Society offered a religious alternative to these and other schools. To accomplish their goals, members of the school network bargained with a relatively weak state, used grassroots civil society organizations to fill educational voids, and catered to populations dissatisfied with Pahlavi modernity.
Following the compulsory abdication of Reza Shah and the rise of his son to the throne, new societal conditions developed that were amenable to organizational activity. The Islamic Center (Kanun-e eslāmi) was set up by Ayatollah Mahmud Tāleqāni, the spiritual leader of the Hedāyat Mosque in Tehran and an important supporter of the Islamic Education Society. In Mashad, Mohammad-Taqi Shariʿati, whose son later influenced a generation of students, founded the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth (Kanun-e nashr-e haqāyeq-e eslāmi). In addition to these groups, professional organizations with religious tendencies were established.Footnote 19 Among the most important was the Islamic Engineers Association (Anjoman-e eslāmi-e mohandessin). Mehdi Bāzargān established the group in 1957. According to one scholar, “this associational network constituted the real organized social support for Bazargan and Islamic modernism.”Footnote 20 This statement also rings true for the Islamic Education Society’s network, which was driven by lay intellectuals along with members of the ulema and bazaar.
Many Iranians considered government schools too secular, too “western,” and otherwise un-Islamic. Ayatollah Javād Fumani Hāʾeri was an early and vocal critic of these pedagogical trends. In the early 1940s he established a religious union (ettehādieh-ye dini). With the support of prominent members of the bazaar, the group established a mosque in south Tehran. In the late 1940s the group constructed another mosque, along with schools for boys and girls to the east of the bazaar. If the new schools were a response to rising secularism, he sponsored one of the first Islamic kindergartens, or “children’s gardens,” to counter the initiatives of non-Islamic religious groups.Footnote 21 The schools were different from those of the shahs and the ayatollahs, and they represented a new trend in pre-university education in postwar Iran. An old trend that was important to the school network was the “mosque-bazaar alliance.” Arang Keshavarzian explains that the bazaar was part of Tehran’s “embedded economy,” meaning it was “enmeshed in a tightly knit value chain based on long-term relations and interconnected networks.” In many cases, these networks traversed economic transactions. During the postwar decades, merchants organized to discuss the issues of the day with religious leaders and community members. Political leanings varied, but the education of their children was a consistent topic of conversation. For that reason, as Keshavarzian notes, “many schools were located in the immediate bazaar area … and some of these were funded by bazaari families.”Footnote 22 The above example highlights this dynamic.
It was amid this milieu that Ayatollah Abbās-Ali Eslāmi established the Islamic Education Society. In Iran, until recently, most researchers were not familiar with him. But his importance, along with the impact of the religious schools that he sponsored and inspired, has been revealed by the unfolding documentary record over the past two decades and the research of Karamipour. The documents show that Eslāmi was a pragmatic member of the ulema and a strong orator who had the ability to communicate across social groups. In his speeches and organizing, he advocated for an educational system that was at once modern and Islamic, scientific and religious. With the support of the religious hierarchy, Eslāmi cooperated with cultural and economic leaders to build a network of schools.Footnote 23
He established the nucleus of the Islamic Education Society in 1943. The political situation was free enough in the 1940s for Eslāmi’s religious society to hold regular meetings during the decade. The initial group was small, but because of their early successes and consequent growth, it became a formally chartered society in 1949. By the end of the 1940s, the society had established 140 schools for boys and girls throughout Iran. The leaders of the society attributed their success to an action-oriented program, new models of education, relative transparency in operation, a systematic approach to book-keeping and accounting, and the bylaws that ungirded its constitutional foundation.Footnote 24 While different ideologically, the projects of Abbās-Ali Eslāmi and Javād Fumani Hāʾeri were similar in that their educational work was supported by religious, economic, and cultural figures in Tehran.Footnote 25
The Islamic Education Society had a sophisticated internal governance structure. The constitution and by-laws of the society were passed by a unanimous vote of the board of directors in 1949. The document’s preamble staked out the society’s pedagogical and political positions. It stressed the importance of the sciences and humanities to learning, and emphasized how they could align with the Quran and other sources of religious law. Most important, the preamble insisted that the Pahlavi education system was unfit for Iranian Muslims. Eslāmi and his colleagues declared that, in order to thrive in the modern world, Iranian society required an educational model based on individual virtue and the ethical study of modern scientific and humanistic fields. The founding members of the Islamic Education Society believed that the secularizing policies of the Pahlavis had deprived Iranian students of such an education.Footnote 26
After the preamble, the constitution outlined 37 articles that could be amended by a vote of the board. Article 5 explained that the primary goal was to promote Shiʿism through various means. First and foremost was education. The society had schools around the country and at all levels. In addition to pre-university schools, the society administered technical institutes and institutions of higher education. In addition to teaching, its members organized community meetings, sponsored the publication and dissemination of religious texts, and established charities and clinics.Footnote 27
Contrary to claims of mid-century educationalists from the United States that the concept of a board of trustees was a uniquely American innovation, the founders of the Islamic Education Society stressed the centrality of the board to its governance structure.Footnote 28 Article 7 set the original board at nearly two dozen individuals, but it evolved over time. Articles 8 to 26 laid out its structure, responsibilities, and decision-making processes. No action could be taken before being approved by the majority of the board, and members were expected to attend regular meetings. There was a general director, deputy directors, a secretary, an accountant, and a property manager. There were also committees on culture, finance, public relations, and organizational affairs. While its size fluctuated over time, the original board embodied the private school network. The majority hailed from the bazaar, including Abbāsqoli Bāzargān, and other trustees were professionals such as Hossein-Ali Golshan who worked alongside Eslāmi’s clerical allies.Footnote 29
Equally significant was the Islamic Education Society's confederative structure and national scope. Articles 27 to 35 explain that the board was charged with managing an organization that possessed regional branches across the country. Each branch had the same governance structure as the national office, and each was required to submit annual financial statements to the Tehran headquarters. Despite the need to submit statements, most of the money raised by a particular branch served people in that region and was used based on donor specifications. Each branch sent members to the central board and elected the director, and teachers often rotated between schools in different cities.Footnote 30
Differences aside, the ulema and bazaar cooperated with educated lay Muslims to carry out the work of the Islamic Education Society. Yadollāh Sahābi and Mehdi Bāzargān were instrumental. Both were educated in France and earned doctorates during the interwar years in geology and engineering, respectively. Both held faculty positions at the University of Tehran and advocated for the compatibility of Islam and the sciences. In this endeavor Bāzargān was Sahābi’s “closest personal friend and political ally.” While both men later ran afoul of the government, Sahābi’s “pleasant, graceful old-world Persian manner” and status as a cultural luminary enabled him to build bridges between the school network and the Pahlavi bureaucracy. The two men also bridged the universities and mosques, as they were “religious Mosaddeqists” who supported the National Front in the early 1950s and then the National Resistance Movement. In 1961, with constitutional governance in Iran suspended at the national level, they worked with Tāleqāni to found the anti-shah Freedom Movement.Footnote 31 However, in the 1940s and 1950s individuals such as Sahābi lobbied for the advancement of religious education from within the administrative machinery of the Pahlavi state. The most important arm of government, in this case, was the Ministry of Education.Footnote 32 Also important was the Supreme Cultural Council (Showrā-ye āli-e farhangi), whose work dealt with education and whose membership included influential cultural and religious figures. Sahābi was involved for many years in educational and cultural planning. In this way, Islamic modernists advanced the cause of religious education from within the state bureaucracy.Footnote 33
While lay intellectuals were important to the mission of the Islamic Education Society, the involvement of religious leaders helps explain why, after the coup of 19 August 1953, the school network survived and even thrived. In some cases, the Iranian government collaborated with religious organizations to reestablish the legitimacy of the post-coup monarchy. As one scholar assessed the situation, after the coup “the clergy and the monarchy were also bound together by common enemies and mandates,” namely the threat of communism during the cold war.Footnote 34 In some cases state–society cooperation was tenuous, but the shah’s government was too weak in the mid-1950s to move against its most vocal religious critics. After the 1953 coup and prior to the establishment of SAVAK in 1957, Teymur Bakhtiār’s military government destroyed the communist Tudeh party, but was unable and unwilling move as aggressively against the clerical establishment.Footnote 35
Here again the case of Javād Fumani Hāʾeri is instructive. The Bakhtiār government issued arrest warrants for him that it could not carry out. Authorities were concerned about his preaching, which was critical of the government and charged that the shah had deviated from the religious requirements of Iran’s constitution. These views were not concealed from the public; his amplified loudspeaker was loud enough that many neighbors considered it a nuisance. Either because of his appeal to the community, or because of direct interventions on his behalf by religious authorities such as Grand Ayatollah Hossein Borujerdi, the Tehran police and the government determined that the potential risks of long-term detention outweighed the benefits of confronting certain popular anti-shah ayatollahs.Footnote 36
Likewise, Eslāmi’s position of leadership in the Islamic Education Society provided its schools and teachers with a protective umbrella that left-wing and radical organizations did not enjoy. Because private religious schools needed to be chartered in the name of a cultural figure or organization to receive a license from the government, Eslāmi was, in many ways, personally responsible for providing that cover. In the mid-1960s there were reportedly some 300 schools belonging to the Islamic Education Society, with all of them licensed to Eslāmi.Footnote 37 Despite their differences, all of the schools fell under the purview of the Islamic Education Society. It was guided by a prescribed governance structure, and operated outside of the public education system but with the tacit cooperation of the Iranian bureaucracy. In the mid-1950s the Islamic Education Society was among the many groups that contributed to the expansion of private education at the pre-university level.Footnote 38
In addition to pedagogical innovations, the Islamic Education Society was a vital component to an emergent Iranian civil society, defined by Ali Mirsepassi as “the organization of institutions among the population from below.”Footnote 39 During the Pahlavi period, there emerged a rift between civil society and the Iranian government. Yet as this section makes clear, the state “had to cope with a very strong constellation of power in the civil sphere of society” and, in turn, these groups “both cooperated with and frustrated the aims of the state power.”Footnote 40 The binding agent was, by and large, a mutual fear of communism. Through civil society organizations, Islamic modernists were able to remain “actively involved in a number of intellectual movements, including a dialogue with the clerics on the meaning of government, a critique of Marxism and an elaboration of a modern interpretation of Islam.”Footnote 41 With organizational origins in the 1940s, the Islamic Education Society continued working through the 1970s. The society provided a model that other private foundations emulated, and its inter-personal links and financial networks helped to underwrite the establishment of Alavi and Kamāl during the 1950s.
Institutionalism at Alavi and Kamāl
The climate for expanding the network of private Islamic schools became more favorable during the decade after the 1953 coup. The Alavi and Kamāl schools for boys were established during this period, a decade prior to the Refāh school for girls. Alavi and Refāh were located near the parliament building, and Kamāl High School was in the Narmak neighborhood in east Tehran. The early history of Alavi and Kamāl —from their establishment in the mid-1950s through the events of 1963–64 —indicates how religious groups worked through the Pahlavi state to advance their pedagogical and political agendas. In mid-century Tehran pre-university religious schools formed the institutional base of Islamic modernism.
When it came to institution building, there was a relationship between the political capital of Tehran and the spiritual center of Qom. Until the early 1960s, Qom was guided by Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi. A quietist with regard to state affairs, he nonetheless presided over a “religious subculture” whose goal was the “politicization of Islam.” For that reason, he oversaw “the ‘rationalizing’ reform moves undertaken by the Iranian clergy in the aftermath of World War II.”Footnote 42 While no modernist, the grand ayatollah supported the private school network through his reliable agents. Individuals known to attend the meetings of Borujerdi during the 1940s and 1950s used his reputation to build support for their own initiatives in Qom, Tehran, and other cities.Footnote 43 Both Alavi and Kamāl were established with his blessings and financial support.
Ali-Asqar Karbāschiān, known as “Allāmeh,” was one such confidant. He believed that the construction of schools and an understanding of science and religion were requisites to living in the modern world. After consulting with Borujerdi, Karbāschiān moved to Tehran, where he found supporters in the mosques and bazaars, including the father of future foreign minister Kamāl Kharrāzi. To support their educational endeavor, they established the Bonyād-e Alavi (Alavi Foundation) and received a license to open a school for boys. While organizationally distinct, many of Alavi’s financial backers were also supporters of the Islamic Education Society. With this support, Alavi school opened in 1956.Footnote 44 Karbāschiān’s partner and co-founder was Rezā Ruzbeh.
Ruzbeh was the lead administrator at Alavi. As a career teacher employed by the Ministry of Education, Ruzbeh was Alavi’s principal and laboratory manager. He mentored students and advised them to study medicine, pharmacy, and other technical and scientific subjects when they went to university. At the same time, his religiosity intrigued the students, and many turned to him for counsel as they charted their paths. Though not all of Ruzbeh’s advisees were convinced by his “effort to derive scientific matters from religious scriptures,” they were nonetheless influenced by his views. Although the government mandated that the school observe all national educational regulations, Islamic teachings were central to the curriculum. As one scholar summed up Alavi: “It was to be a school at which academic pursuits were to be taken seriously, but religious socialization and acculturation were to be taken even more seriously.” For that reason, Alavi was a school where “one could be modern without having to compromise one’s cultural and religious views.”Footnote 45 Ruzbeh and his colleagues offered a rigorous academic program within a religious paradigm for middle class students in Tehran.Footnote 46
Life at Alavi was not initially political. Ayatollah Tāleqāni’s son attended both Alavi and Kamāl, and he recalled that the prevailing mood at the former was “extremely anti-communist.”Footnote 47 The students were not supporters of other forms of anti-monarchical politics, either. In June 1963 Karbāschiān and Ruzbeh restrained their students from joining the Khomeini movement. In Iran the school’s apolitical position has been criticized by revolutionaries, including some of their partners in the private school network.Footnote 48 The apolitical stance of the early 1960s derived, in part, from the amenable relationship between conservative religious leaders and the crown that continued from the preceding decade. For that reason, Alavi did not stimulate the interest of SAVAK and survived for a quarter-century. However, education that related modern pedagogies to Islamic paradigms sent a generation of graduates into society with a religious identity that, over time, translated into revolutionary action. While not active as youths in the early 1960s, many of the school’s graduates entered universities during the 1970s and were absorbed by radical groups.Footnote 49 Some Alavi graduates joined the guerrilla movement, and others “were the equivalents of Mao’s Red Guards” during the revolution.Footnote 50 Alavi’s institutional legacy continued after the revolution as its alumni contributed to the intellectual life of Iran and, as the case of Kharrāzi indicates, the governance of the Islamic Republic and its relationship with the world.Footnote 51
Unlike Alavi, life at Kamāl High School of Narmak was explicitly political. In addition to enrolling older students more inclined to political activity, the school was founded by Sahābi, supported by Bāzargān, and frequented by leaders of the anti-shah movement. After observing how schools affiliated with the Islamic Education Society attracted students from religious middle class families, Sahābi worked with his friend, Abbās-Ali Eslāmi, to obtain a low-cost plot of land in Narmak. Prominent financial support came from the bazaar, board members of the Islamic Education Society, and other sources. To receive a school charter, these individuals established the Bonyād-e Akhlāq (Ethics Foundation). In addition to financing from the bazaar, Kamāl was blessed by Qom and authorized by Tehran. In 1956 Borujerdi replied to a request from Sahābi and authorized the use of the sahm-e imām to establish a school in Narmak. In November 1957 the Iranian government authorized the opening of Kamāl High School. The permit was conditional and, as in other cases, mandated that the school observe government regulations and accept principals from the Ministry of Education. Another condition was that the school remain at its Samangān Street location.Footnote 52
Urban planning was important to Pahlavi-era technocrats, and Narmak —or the “new city” —was a quintessentially “modern” neighborhood for government employees, teachers, and others in the rising middle classes. Analysts have written about the “unexpected social consequences” of the Narmak project, but missing from all accounts is how Kamāl High School contributed to a redefinition of public space and religious discourse. In a government-planned neighborhood dotted with public schools, Kamāl offered a private alternative. However, the high school was not isolated from the surrounding community. In Narmak residents forced a “compromise between the image of the modern ideal” and experiences on the ground, “where the modern vocabulary was adapted and applied to daily life,” including at schools. In these ways, the educational network contributed to a spatial reorientation of a rapidly modernizing city.Footnote 53
Although the main goal of Kamāl High School was to instill religious values into students, the faculty debated a range of curricular and extra-curricular questions. They engaged in the debate about vocational education versus the liberal arts that one finds among pedagogues across time and space.Footnote 54 While he valued book learning, Sahābi argued for the importance of students acquiring vocational skills for societal use and material advantage. Rajab-Ali Zamānpur disagreed, stating that such matters were only appropriate for technical schools. If the students at the high school needed to learn manual skills, Zamānpur responded, they should use the equipment in the science laboratories. Beyond the debate about ideal and practical learning, the Kamāl faculty stressed the importance of extracurricular activities. Abbās Sāheb-Zamāni and his colleagues reported on the athletics program, which included soccer/football, volleyball, basketball, and mountain-climbing teams. All of these programs, Sahābi agreed, benefited the students and the community.Footnote 55 Kamāl also boasted a range of student organizations with faculty advisers that circulated newsletters and other forms of print material. In the early 1960s school offices were used to print and disseminate the work of the school and the views of the faculty and students.Footnote 56
These activities helped to make Kamāl High School an important institution in Narmak. In the early 1960s it was joined by the Kārāmuz Technical Institute, and there was a harmony of interests between these schools and their leaders. Also important was the Kamāl mosque that served the people of Narmak. In the late 1960s Sahābi oversaw the renovation of the mosque to accommodate the growing needs of the neighborhood. Community members gathered at these locations for Friday prayers, to celebrate religious holidays, and to hear sermons by figures such as Mortezā Motahhari. In addition to religious rituals, the Islamic Engineers Association met at the high school and technical institute in Narmak.Footnote 57 In these ways, institutions moved the neighborhood away from the imaginings of Iranian planners and toward the modernism espoused by the private school network.
The prevalence of religious rituals did not, at first, alarm Iranian officials, but the anti-monarchical tone did. While the shah ensured that the public system was secular and saturated with nationalistic rituals, the students at Kamāl High School and the schools of the Islamic Education Society rarely sang the monarchical anthem, refused to pray for the shah or hang his picture, and were reluctant to fly the Imperial Iranian flag.Footnote 58 As Narmak began to bustle with revolutionary activity, the explicitly anti-shah politics of Kamāl’s leadership attracted the attention of Iran’s new security organization—SAVAK. Although it was, at first, directed by the same individual, Teymur Bakhtiār, SAVAK was different and more aggressive than the military government of the mid-1950s. During the first half of the 1960s, particularly after Khomeini’s public denunciations of the shah in 1963–64, SAVAK opened a file on the Islamic Education Society and related schools. Agents were especially interested in Kamāl High School.Footnote 59
During the early 1960s, SAVAK was concerned with Mohammad-Hossein Beheshti. He held a degrees in literature and theology, knew English and German, and studied with Borujerdi and Khomeini in Qom. Beginning in 1954, Beheshti was the principal of the Din va Danesh (Religion and Knowledge) school in Qom.Footnote 60 He was also one of the leading advocates for an expanded model of Islamic education after Borujerdi’s death in the early 1960s. This was a “fertile period of internal debate” about the nature of religious authority and the place of Islam in modern society. Motahhari, a religion professor at the University of Tehran, led formal debates, and “reform of the religious education system” was among the “cardinal issues.”Footnote 61 Despite the fact that Beheshti was employed by the Ministry of Education, he was a popular anti-government writer and speaker. In late 1961 Beheshti delivered a series of lectures on Islam to hundreds of attendees at the monthly meetings of professional organizations at Narmak schools. Over the years, he became popular among Mehdi Bāzargān’s Islamic Engineers Association. In 1961 his audience was diverse and his theme straightforward. Beheshti declared that it was the responsibility of the people to transform society into one modeled on Islamic values. In that task he urged the audience to consider alternatives to Pahlavi rule. Prior to the Khomeini-led uprising of June 1963, SAVAK officials opened a file on Beheshti and warned him that the consequences would be severe if he continued to pen letters and deliver oppositionist speeches. One year later, in spring 1964, Beheshti was relocated from Qom to Tehran.Footnote 62
While worried about the activist clerics among the private school network, SAVAK was more concerned in the early 1960s with the Freedom Movement. Its members were arrested in 1963, and Bāzargān, Sahābi, and Tāleqāni received prison sentences at their trials.Footnote 63 Bāzargān's imprisonment removed him from the classrooms of Kamāl High School, and the principal and assistant principal were arrested and replaced by the Ministry of Education.Footnote 64 More broadly, SAVAK learned through its investigations of the mid-1960s about the extent of the Islamic Education Society’s extended network. Before this point, security organizations were ill-informed, with their records documenting only a fraction of the schools.Footnote 65 In response to these discoveries, SAVAK charged informants with the collection of intelligence and regular reporting on the private education network, especially at Kamāl and the institutions in Narmak.Footnote 66 SAVAK now understood the institutional base of the private education network, the relationship between pedagogy and politics at some of the schools, and the differences of opinion that existed between them.
These problems notwithstanding, Alavi and Kamāl schools remained institutional vehicles through which Islamist groups negotiated modernity and bargained with the Pahlavi state. This was true for the “Islam of Qom” and the “Islam of Tehran.” While this section identified points of cooperation between the two in their support for expanding the reach of religious schools, the latter was “more liberal” because it “emerged in Tehran from within the context of modern institutions.”Footnote 67 In addition to the University of Tehran, the Hosseiniyeh-ye Ershād, whose intellectual foundation and architectural design represented a fusion of Islam and modernism, has garnered considerable attention from scholars. Alavi and Kamāl are part of this history. They were sites that, in addition to mosques, “served as spaces for the daily practice of religion, as places of socialization, and as institutions mediating between the state and its urban populace.”Footnote 68
The Age of Refāh
The organizational structure and institutional foundations of the private religious school network contributed to the move “from Islamic government to sovereign state.” As Rasoul Namazi has argued about Ayatollah Khomeini, religious ideas “played an important transitional role and prepared the ground for later political doctrines.”Footnote 69 Beyond Khomeini’s ideas, to borrow from another scholar, “The need was perceived for a cultural and educational programme to provide sufficient challenge to the state.”Footnote 70 During the 1960s and 1970s, the school network provided a means by which Islamists further leveraged their influence vis-à-vis the Pahlavi state. Individuals affiliated with Refāh school contested the state by creating a rival welfare network and by promoting armed struggle. Moreover, there was considerable overlap between the Refāh administration and the Kamāl faculty, and these individuals held discussions about everything from religious governance to foreign policy. This section situates the school network and its evolving cast of supporters at the center of a movement that constructed a viable religious alternative to monarchy during the last decade of Pahlavi rule. The religious schools were, therefore, critical to the age of Refāh, understood as a liminal space for Islamic modernism between the nationalist imaginings of previous decades and what would become the Islamic Republic’s sovereign bureaucratic state.
While Alavi and Kamāl were established during a period of clerical quietism, Refāh was established at a time when anti-shah activists eclipsed the quietists. During the years following the Ayatollah Khomeini's exile in 1964, an increasing number of teachers in the religious school network were dissidents, and some were affiliated with the pro-Khomeini Coalition of Islamic Societies (Heyʾat-e moʾtalefeh-ye eslāmi). In the mid-1960s, when security forces arrested and incarcerated members of the coalition, these activist clerics determined that welfare and educational work could more safely and effectively challenge the Pahlavi state.Footnote 71 Upon release, they exploited their proximity to the state bureaucracy to advance Islamist educational and political agendas.
Especially important were Mohammad-Javād Bāhonar and Mohammad-Ali Rajāʾi. These longtime friends were close to Sahābi and Bāzargān, early career teachers at Kamāl High School, and pillars of the private school network. For years, Bāhonar and Rajāʾi met weekly to discuss educational matters. During the early 1960s, Rajāʾi split time teaching in his hometown of Qazvin and in Tehran. Because of his education in mathematics, he also did book-keeping for the schools.Footnote 72 Bāhonar, who had the religious training that his friend lacked, taught at the same schools, wrote on religious issues, and remained in touch with Khomeini throughout his exile.Footnote 73 Their intimate involvement with the Refāh project is a reminder that the “cooperation between the militant clerics and petty bourgeois intellectuals” was a significant part of both the private school network and the revolutionary movement.Footnote 74 In addition to this work, Bāhonar and Rajāʾi, along with Beheshti, wrote textbooks for the Ministry of Education.Footnote 75
Because they worked in the Ministry of Education, the task for arranging the distribution of licenses for the new wave of schools was delegated to them. Refāh was similar to other private religious schools in that it was established through official channels and with the support of private benefactors. In 1967 individuals associated with the Coalition of Islamic Societies chartered the Bonyād-e Refāh (Welfare Foundation). The foundation, which was financially supported by the Tehran bazaar, originally provided social services to poor residents of the city. But its portfolio expanded to include a girls’ school. The group purchased a plot of land near Alavi, and Refāh elementary and high schools began admitting students in 1969. The Refāh board of trustees constituted a list of future revolutionaries, most of whom had earlier been imprisoned or were active against the regime, and they named Rajāʾi as director.Footnote 76 As was the case with the other private religious schools, Refāh had an organizational structure with constituent parts dedicated to instruction, religion, accounting, hiring, and additional functions.Footnote 77
While Refāh was supported by the guilds, mosques, and intellectuals that had for decades endowed the private religious school system, the network operated in a new socio-political context. Refāh offered a private alternative to families concerned that the educational situation in late Pahlavi Iran was inappropriate for Muslim girls and young women. At the time, Refāh’s students were among the more than 1.5 million girls attending elementary schools —public or private —in Iran; this compared to 80,000 female students two decades earlier. Refāh was thus established amid a proliferation of women’s educational initiatives.Footnote 78 However, in contrast to public schools, all who entered Islamic schools for girls were required to wear the veil. This was true for the schools of the Islamic Education Society, too. For its part, Refāh strictly enforced Islamic law and, for that reason, individuals such as Beheshti sent their daughters there.Footnote 79 As with other private schools, the students at Refāh studied material mandated by the state curriculum alongside lessons in politics and religion. All students participated in daily prayer sessions, which were often led by Bāhonar. The school’s program included Friday trips to the outskirts of Tehran for religious reflection and recreational activities. On religious holidays and other occasions, the students were bussed to mosques for worship. And like other schools, a range of extracurriculars including film sessions and poetry readings were made available to the students.Footnote 80
Despite the male-dominated board, the school’s administrators and teachers consisted entirely of women. The principal was Purān Bāzargān. She had for years taught at another school in Tehran, but in the late 1960s Bāhonar introduced her to the Refāh group. She was responsible for overseeing a cadre of talented and ideologically disciplined staff and faculty. Zahrā Mirkhāni was an administrator and head librarian. She was from Mashad and, in addition to her formal education, Mirkhāni regularly attended a religious study group led by Bāhonar and two other ayatollahs. The Afrāz sisters, who hailed from Jahrom, were especially important to the day-to-day operations of the school during its first five years. In addition to serving as a vice principal, Raʾfat Afrāz taught courses in the Islamic religion and the Arabic language. Her sister, Mahbubeh, taught courses in the natural and physical sciences. A third sister, Behjat, had a history of teaching in the public school system and also taught mathematics at Refāh.Footnote 81
In addition to offering an educational program, the school and its supporters did charity work to provide for the community and develop an alternative to the emergent welfare state of the Pahlavi government.Footnote 82 Refāh offered a transportation service to families and provided students with two free meals each day. The parents who sent their children to the school knew that the education was rigorous and religious, but also that the health and well-being of the student body were priorities. To ensure these aspects ran smoothly, the administrative structure included specific offices dedicated to transportation and meals.Footnote 83 Whether in welfare or educational work, Refāh’s goal was “to enable families which could not afford to educate their daughters to do so.”Footnote 84
The founders of Refāh had precedents for establishing a private religious school for girls supported by a philanthropic foundation. Javād Fumani Hāʾeri established a school for girls that he supported financially through a community cooperative. The bylaws mandated board members to give “a penny a day” and place donation boxes in their workplaces and at their homes. The boxes were collected every few months and served as the primary source of funding for local educational endeavors during the 1950s.Footnote 85 In the late 1960s and early 1970s a range of individuals were drawn to similar religious foundations that were “self-sufficient,” with “deep roots in the community,” and “involved in charitable works such as running orphanages and religious schools for children or taking care of the poor.” To put it a different way, the social codes on “being modern in Iran” moved the religious school network into the realms of welfare and proto-state building.Footnote 86 Nowhere is this more evident than with the Refāh Foundation and its school for girls.
In addition to the educational program and welfare services, after 1971 many of the administrators, teachers, and students at Refāh contested the authority of the state through armed resistance. Prior to his arrest in 1974, Rajāʾi supported the Mojāhedin and used his position as board director to recruit for the organization. There were likeminded individuals on the Refāh faculty, many of whom had been educated in the schools of the Islamic Education Society, attended university, and became radicalized early in their careers. One example is Tāhereh Sajjādi Qayurān. She taught at the school and her husband was on the Refāh board. The couple’s home was a shelter for guerrilla fighters, and for that they were arrested. The Afrāz sisters also joined the Mojāhedin.Footnote 87 Alongside them was Purān Bāzargān, the principal of Refāh school. In 1973 she went underground, at which point her colleagues removed her belongings from the school. SAVAK became aware of her flight, and in 1974 agents arrested the school’s teachers and administrators, including Rajāʾi. Interrogators asked him a range of questions, including why the Refah principal possessed subversive literature and how the school became a recruiting ground for the Mojāhedin.Footnote 88
Refāh avoided closure, but the school was reconfigured after the departure of the original faculty cohort. In addition to turnover in personnel, the government discontinued secondary classes at Refāh in 1974. The change was part of a broader educational reorganization that, in addition to making schooling free and compulsory through the intermediate level, placed all upper schools under government control. Still, elementary-level classes continued at Refāh.Footnote 89 In the mid-1970s there were 34 teachers and 565 students at the school. With Rajāʾi in prison, Bāhonar oversaw the reorganization of the elementary school’s administrative structure to maintain educational standards, retain the government-issued license, and more quietly channel politico-religious enthusiasm.Footnote 90
While Refāh Elementary School remained open after 1974, Kamāl High School was closed that year. Beyond changes to government educational policy, Kamāl did not survive the turmoil of the mid-1970s for at least two additional reasons. The first related to the school’s nationalist roots, its ties to the Freedom Movement, and the involvement of Mehdi Bāzargān and Yadollāh Sahābi.Footnote 91 In 1967, shortly after his release from prison, Sahābi organized a mourning ceremony for Mosaddeq’s passing.Footnote 92 Four years later, in 1971, he and his colleagues planned ways to commemorate Mosaddeq’s life and leadership.Footnote 93 The shah’s concern with the nationalist and left-wing opposition meant that SAVAK considered Kamāl High School a security concern. The second and more important reason was that, in the early 1970s, members of the private school network began to discuss the characteristics of their preferred alternative to the Pahlavi state.
More specifically, Kamāl-affiliated teachers and individuals associated with the Refāh group began to debate the merits of velāyat-e faqih, or the “guardianship of the jurist,” which Khomeini introduced from Najaf in 1970.Footnote 94 In Tehran, deliberations on Islamic government took place in 1971–72 at monthly meetings of the religious educationalists. The meetings were held on Fridays, rotated between homes, and often included families. Rajāʾi hosted an early meeting, and Bāhonar moderated the discussion on models of religious statehood and leadership. Rajāʾi and Bāhonar coordinated the meetings, and regular discussants included Mohammad Behforuzi, Sāheb-Zamāni, and Zamānpur, among others.Footnote 95 Deliberations also took place at meetings of the Islamic Engineers Association at Kamāl High School in 1971–72. Beheshti was the lead discussant with the group of approximately thirty engineers and an audience that included Bāzargān and Sahābi. Beheshti lectured on theoretical perspectives, provided case studies to consider, and linked interpretations of the Quran to critiques of monarchical power and government corruption. In these ways discussions of an Islamic state took place within a broader critique of Pahlavi governance.Footnote 96
They also took place within an emerging analysis of other affairs of state, most notably foreign policy. The Arab–Israeli relationship was a subject of discussion, and the educationalists studied and taught the Arabic language. An instructor who taught Arabic classes in the evenings at Refāh asked his advanced class to practice by translating anti-Israeli radio broadcasts from Arab nations. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, teachers and students alike expressed animosity toward Israel and favorable views of Gamal Abdel Nasser.Footnote 97 Such views were shared by others in the educational network who mourned the passing of the Egyptian leader in 1970.Footnote 98 Other Arab leaders were not viewed in as positive a light.Footnote 99 Closer to home, the Kamāl–Refāh cohort spent considerable time debating the Iranian government’s policies in the region and their connection to the superpowers. Sāheb-Zamāni saw the Iranian occupation of three Persian Gulf islands in late 1971 within the strategic context of the region, and others understood Iranian radio broadcasts as a means by which a government could build domestic support for foreign policy. Sāheb-Zamāni noted the power dynamics between the United States, Soviet Union, and China, and the discussants used the framework of neocolonialism to understand US interventions in countries ranging from Israel to Vietnam.Footnote 100 At a meeting of the Islamic Engineers Association in Narmak, the attendees heard about social conditions in communist societies and compared cults of personality in the Soviet Union and Iran.Footnote 101 These examples indicate how far from pedagogical matters the religious school network strayed during the 1970s.
It was the politics of the network, in addition to the educational reorganization of 1974, that explains the closure of Kamāl High School. With SAVAK advising, the Iranian government shuttered the school in spring 1974. The rationale was that the school and its faculty deviated from their educational work and, therefore, were in violation of the state-issued operating permit.Footnote 102 The trustees of the high school’s parent organization contested the closure order.Footnote 103 In June 1974, with exams complete, the Tehran Department of Education reaffirmed that the school was to be dissolved.Footnote 104 Despite their differences, the students and faculty of the private religious school network trended toward the revolutionary movement during the 1970s.
Conclusion
This history illustrates how educationalists, clerical reformers, lay intellectuals, and bazaar merchants engaged with the Pahlavi bureaucracy to promote a pedagogical and political vision that subverted the authority of the state. The Islamic Education Society and the broader private religious school network forged an alternative, not just to public schools, but to the Pahlavi state and the institution of monarchy.
When the Pahlavi dynasty collapsed in 1978–79, the network’s proto-state was transformed from a means of opposition to the basis of a new government. In 1978 Mehdi Bāzargān provided Ayatollah Khomeini with a list of individuals capable of leading a post-shah government, and he included the names of lay intellectuals such as Sahābi and clerical allies like Beheshti.Footnote 105 Bāzargān served as prime minister in 1979, but by 1980 the radical wing of the pre-revolutionary school network carried forward the most consequential work. Until their assassinations in summer 1981, Beheshti was head of the courts, and Bāhonar and Rajāʾi directed the Ministry of Education before serving briefly together as president and prime minister. When they were assassinated, international newspapers wrote about how the tandem “emerged from obscurity” and were “largely unknown in the West.”Footnote 106 What is known to many is that, upon Khomeini’s return to Iran in February 1979, he and the Revolutionary Council made their headquarters at Refāh school. It was on the roof of the school that, in spring 1979, revolutionaries carried out the executions of Pahlavi-era officials.Footnote 107 The point of this article is less about the ideas that motivated such behavior than it is about why Refāh became the physical site that served as the headquarters for the revolution and a springboard for the Islamic Republic.Footnote 108
This research adds to the educational history of Iran and complicates the history of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his many opponents. It is hoped that the article will, along with other new research, “open the ‘black box’ of the Pahlavi state.”Footnote 109 The shah, preoccupied with fears of a communist-inspired “red revolution” rather than “black reaction” from the ulema, underestimated the ability of religious educationalists to harness the power of “modern” learning. Yet that is precisely what happened nationally with the Islamic Education Society, and in Tehran at the Alavi, Kamāl, and Refāh schools. Contrary to the shah’s expectations, educationalists, reformist clerics, religiously oriented intellectuals, and bazaar merchants used their financial and cultural clout to establish a network of private religious schools. To borrow from a Khomeini biographer, it was “through the creation of private Islamic primary and secondary schools for boys and girls” that the religious opposition to the shah “managed to maintain their activities, both under and above ground, despite the repression suffered by other political groups.”Footnote 110
Rather than a reactive response to Pahlavi modernism, the history of the Islamic Education Society and the network of private religious schools supports the collective action and competitive engagement theories of state–society dynamics in mid-twentieth century Iran.Footnote 111 Such schools were licensed by the Iranian government, and their teachers and supporters were, in many cases, employed by government ministries and councils. In the 1940s cultural and religious foundations filled a void created by the weakness and fragility of the Pahlavi state. During the 1950s, political conditions necessitated that the government retain the good graces of the ulema, and religious leaders cooperated with the court to combat communist influence among middle class youth. The shah’s government also sought to enhance its appeal throughout society and otherwise address legitimacy questions in the wake of the 1953 coup. Over time, however, private religious schools became centers of socio-political activity. As a result, and especially after the establishment of SAVAK, conflict emerged between the schools and the regime’s security agencies. For these reasons, an analysis of private religious education at the pre-university level is more than a history of education —it sheds light on some of the most important socio-political features of late Pahlavi Iran.
