Day after day they marched, tens of thousands strong, defiant chanting demonstrators surging through the streets of Tehran, a capital unaccustomed to the shouts and echoes of dissent. The subject of their protest was the policies of Iran's supreme ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some carried signs demanding his ouster. Others called for a return of long denied civil and political liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. A few even demanded the legalization of the Tudeh, Iran's outlawed Communist party. The crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful, sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian society: dissident students in jeans; women shrouded in the black chador, the traditional head-to-foot veil; peasants and merchants; and most important the bearded, black-robed Muslim mullahs, the religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, which commands the allegiance of 93% of Iran's 34.4 million people.
The challenge to his leadership stunned the Shah and outraged his generals, who argued that the demonstrations were surely eroding his authority—and in turn the army's—and must be stopped. Declared an army officer: "We told the Shah, as Lincoln once said, a house divided cannot stand by itself." Said a general to the Shah: "It is against our military honor to stand the present situation." A lengthy late-night Cabinet meeting followed, and on the morning after, Premier Jaafar Sharif-Emami proclaimed a curfew and martial law for six months. Not in a quarter-century had Tehran been under the rule of troops.
Next day the demonstrations began again and this time ended in fatal, fiery riots. Many marchers apparently had not yet heard the martial-law proclamation over Radio Iran or else they chose to defy it. Jaleh Square in downtown Tehran was packed with thousands of protesters. A local religious leader appealed to them to disperse. They refused. A cavalcade of motorcycles, followed by groups of women and young children, began to proceed toward squads of armed soldiers. After repeated warnings, the soldiers lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd, then shot into the air. As the throngs advanced, the troops lowered their guns and fired. At nightfall, after the bodies of the victims had been loaded into army trucks and carried away, the government announced that 86 people, mostly women and children, had died, and 205 others were wounded.
For the proud Shah, as for his distressed people, it was a sorry week, yet one that had been a long time coming. For months the Shah's opposition had been growing more demonstrative, especially the Shi'ite mullahs and their followers. Three weeks ago, the militance took on a mad and sinister cast: terrorists set fire to a movie house in Abadan, killing 377 people. In an attempt to placate the religious conservatives, the Shah two weeks, earlier had installed Sharif-Emami as Premier, largely because he was respected by Iran's moderate Muslim clergy. Sharif-Emami closed gambling casinos and restricted other practices considered offensive by the Shi'ites. He also lifted a ban on the formation of political parties. Only the Communists remained outlawed. Said one of the mullahs at the time: "Our Prague spring cannot last long. But will the Shah understand that?"
The Shah's problems are magnified by the fact that the opposition does not arise from a single political sector, like the communists, or a single cultural group, like the religious conservatives, who remain his most vocal and articulate foes. The dissent cuts across class, religious and political divisions, ranging from Marxist students on the extreme left to Western-educated intellectuals, professionals and businessmen in the center to religious zealots on the far right. The mullahs, for all their abhorrence of the decadent excesses of modernism, have traditionally been political progressives and nationalists in their outlook.