The State and Rural Development in Post-Revolutionary Iran (review)

Ali Shakoori: The State and Rural Development in Post-Revolutionary Iran. New York and Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001. 217 pages. ISBN 0-333-77613-5. $65.

The new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press, Palgrave, continues to deliver excellent books to readers starved for sound, scholarly treatment of important Middle Eastern subjects. Last year it was Kirk Beattie's Egypt during the Sadat Years (reviewed by me in the spring 2001 issue of this journal), and now arrives The State and Rural Development in Post-Revolutionary Iran, by Ali Shakoori of the University of Tehran.

Shakoori's treatment of his subject conforms to high standards of international social science scholarship and exhibits his personal commitment to improving the performance of the agricultural sector and the well-being of its participants in the very dynamic national environment of contemporary Iran.

The author makes note of three revolutions in Iran during the past century: (1) the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), marking the start of the modern nation-state of Iran and its continuation through the reign of Reza Shah (1925-41); (2) the White Revolution (1962), during the reign of Reza Shah's son, Reza Shah Pahlavi, which marked the startling impact of oil on Iran's economy and agricultural development; and (3) the Islamic Revolution (1979), representing "a continuation of the earlier nationalism but expressed in terms of Islam." Shakoori's focus is on the third revolution and its aftermath, but he by no means neglects the shah's ambitious agricultural reform in the White Revolution. He analyzes development in Iran after 1979 both in the macro terms of national and local policy and in the micro terms of household experiences in six villages in the province of Eastern Azerbaijan. By any academic standard, Shakoori's treatment of his subject is a tour de force.

Iran's agricultural reform began on a high-priority basis, but over time various changes in domestic political alignments and in foreign policy—chiefly, the Iran-Iraq War—affected not only the shape and scope of this reform but its status as well. The 1979 revolution was "a mass protest against the social and economic policies of the monarchical regime, as well as the relations of power and authority that sanctioned the regime's policies," and the postrevolutionary rural and agricultural policies attempted to reverse the old regime. At both the national and the local policy levels, "The prerevolutionary agricultural administration was reorganized, and a number of new organizations were set up to implement the rural development programmes: the service centres, the revolutionary organization (Jihad-e Sazandegi), Islamic rural councils and the mosha cooperatives." Shakoori reviews these governmental efforts in chapter 3. His candid verdict is that "a review of the agricultural policies shows that they were far from successful" in achieving the revolutionary regime's original objective of self-sufficiency by 1990. In broader terms, he concludes, "Most agricultural and rural policies initiated after the revolution were politically motivated, and once the short-term political objectives had been attained such projects . . . were either abandoned or left to fade away."

The Jihad organization, later to become the Ministry of Jihad, provided the one authentic revolutionary deviation from the state organization inherited from the White Revolution. Facing possible leftist opposition in the countryside after 1979, the Islamic leadership moved quickly to spread the message of its revolution, essentially an urban phenomenon, to rural people on the society's margins. Despite this early revolutionary impulse, however, it was the war against Iraq that facilitated the most noteworthy expansion of Jihad's role, since its task "involved engineering works. . . . It also mobilized and dispatched so-called volunteers to the front, produced equipment for the war, collected money, clothes and food, provided medical facilities and distributed propaganda material." However, "despite its numerous and varied activities, to date there has been no comprehensive evaluation of the Jihad's performance." In personal interviews conducted by Shakoori, several senior...