Sociodemographic Characteristics of the Iranian Revolutionary Community in Syria and Lebanon in the 1970s.

Vishnyakova Irina Andreevna ORCID: 0009-0008-7219-113X Postgraduate student, Department of History of the Middle East Countries, St Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, nab. University, 7-9 iranvishnyakova@gmail.com

Due to the active activity in the Levant region of the Palestinian paramilitary groups that were part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), including the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine led by Ya. Arafat (1929-2004), better known by the inverted acronym Fatah, in the 1960s ? 1970s Lebanon (and to a lesser extent Syria) were an object of attraction for revolutionary forces from all over the world. Supporters of a wide variety of political movements from various countries of Europe, the Middle and Far East and Latin America received military training in the Palestinian camps. Gradually, the Iranian Islamic opposition, in particular, representatives of the emerging in the first half of the 1960s, came to the idea of the need for cooperation with the Palestinians. The Islamic Movement under the leadership of Ayatollah R. Khomeini (1902-1989).

The period of active activity of the Iranian Islamic opposition in Syria and Lebanon lasted about 8 years, from the second half of 1970 to February 1979. During this time, the Syro-Lebanese region turned into one of the main foreign centers of the Iranian opposition movement. Nevertheless, the activities of the Iranian opposition in Lebanon have never been the subject of a separate scientific study. The works on the history of the Islamic Revolution and Iran's foreign policy of the second half of the 20th century contain only fragmentary information about the activities of Iranian opposition forces in the Middle East region, in particular in Lebanon ^[1-5]. However, it seems that the study of the history of the creation and functioning of the Iranian revolutionary underground in the Levant, in particular, the study of the socio-demographic composition of revolutionaries, can be an important step towards recreating the processes that took place in Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, as well as contribute to the study of the modern history of the Middle East region as a whole.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the biographical data of members of the Iranian revolutionary movement and create a socio-demographic portrait of revolutionaries based on them. The source base of the study was made up of the memoirs of active participants in the Iranian revolutionary movement who operated in Lebanon. It should be noted that over the past three decades, Iranian researchers and oral history specialists have published many autobiographies and memoirs of figures of the Islamic Revolution. The genre of "memoir-biographies" (memoirs of departed comrades) and fictionalized biographies written on the basis of interviews with participants and eyewitnesses of revolutionary events is also very popular. As part of this study, the memoirs and interviews of Asghar Jammalifard (born 1945) ^[6], Ali Jannati (born 1949) ^[7], Ibrahim Yazdi (1939-2017) ^{[8, 9]}, Jalaladdin Farsi (born 1934) ^[10], Marziye Hadidchi-Dabbagh (1939-2016) were analyzed ^[11] and other members of the Islamic Movement active in Lebanon in the 1970s.

In the course of this study, it was found that in the 1970s, there were from several hundred to several thousand Iranian illegal revolutionaries operating in Syria and Lebanon. Such a wide range of data on the number of members of the revolutionary underground is explained by the very nature of their activities, in the implementation of which conspiracy was of paramount importance. As a result, the only source of information about the approximate number of revolutionaries operating in Syria and Lebanon are the memoirs of members of the opposition movement.

As a result of the analysis of sources, it was possible to identify the names of 52 revolutionaries who operated in the 1970s in Syria and Lebanon. For 38 people (four of whom are women), it became possible to restore and analyze general biographical information and compile their social portrait. The systematization of the data obtained was carried out using the methodology proposed in the works on the history of the populist movement in the Russian Empire and the activities of the Socialist Revolutionary Party ^[12-14]. This choice was primarily due to the presence of certain typological similarities between Iranian revolutionary groups and Russian underground organizations of the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. It seems that this similarity is expressed in the conspiratorial and elitist nature of these organizations, their installation in armed struggle, conducting large-scale activities abroad and a number of other signs.

Based on the analysis of data on the age of revolutionaries, it can be concluded that the backbone of the revolutionary underground in Syria and Lebanon were people born in the second half of the 1940s (7 out of 38, or 18%) and the first half of the 1950s (14 out of 38, or 37%), that is representatives of the so-called "second generation of the revolution" - the youth of the 1970s.. British-American researcher E. Abrahamyan, who dealt, among other things, with the issue of the age and social composition of the Iranian opposition, noted that unlike the "first generation of the revolution", for whom the main reason for dissatisfaction with the authorities was the coup d'etat of 1953 and the subsequent course of the Shah's government towards rapprochement with the United States, the youth of the 1970s. She was mainly dissatisfied with the socio-economic development of the country, the establishment of even closer cooperation with the United States and Israel, as well as the widespread penetration of Western values and Western culture ^{[15, p. 17]}.

The lower age threshold for revolutionaries from the specified sample at the time of departure to Syria and Lebanon was 17 years (2 out of 38 people), the upper one was 36 years (1 person). Most of them, namely 22 out of 38 people, that is, 58%, were between the ages of 20 and 30 at the time of their trip to the Syrian-Lebanese region.

A significant number of revolutionaries from this list, namely 22 people (60%), were born in the provinces of Tehran and Isfahan, the largest economic and industrial regions of the country. Analyzing the data on the place of birth in aggregate, it can be concluded that for the most part the participants in the sample under consideration were natives of cities – metropolitan Tehran, provincial and county centers (10, 9 and 11 people, or 27%, 24% and 29%, respectively). Only 4 out of 38 people (11%) were born in villages. Nevertheless, by the time they joined the opposition movement, all 34 people whose place of residence was established lived in cities.

Speaking about the social composition of the Iranian revolutionary underground in Syria and Lebanon, it is worth noting that the socio-class structure of the rapidly modernizing Iranian society in the 1970s (especially its urban strata) was characterized by indistinctness and vagueness of borders, therefore, the distribution of revolutionaries by estates and class groups seems to be a very difficult task. The criteria proposed by E. Abrahamyan in the work "Radical Islam. The Iranian Mojahedin" ^{[15, p. 17]}.

Most of the revolutionaries whose class affiliation was established, namely, 20 out of 38 (53%), belonged to the "modern middle class", which was based on employees, specialists, students of higher educational institutions ? that is, for the most part, people from other estates and class groups. It is noteworthy that according to the data of the state census of 1976 The "modern middle class" comprised only 10% of the adult population of Iran, which is in stark contrast to the sample data ^{[15, p. 16]}.

On the contrary, representatives of the lower urban strata (workers of large and small industrial enterprises, employees of shops and shops, small traders, servants, seasonal workers, the unemployed), who accounted for 32% of the adult population of Iran, accounted for only 10% in the analyzed sample (4 out of 38 people). Peasants, whose share among the population of the country was 45% ^{[15, p. 17]}, were not among the considered group of revolutionaries at all. An approximate correlation between the census data and the sample data is observed only in the case of representatives of the "traditional middle class" from among the owners of small and medium–sized businesses - craft workshops, market shops, etc. (10% according to the census data ^{[15, p. 16]} and 8%, that is, 3 people out of 38, according to the sample).

A significant proportion of the sample received, namely, 24%, or 9 out of 38 people, were representatives of the clergy. According to the 1976 census, the number of representatives of the clergy out of 23 million Iranians aged 10 years and older was only a few tens of thousands of people ^{[16, p. 14]}. It is noteworthy that the majority of the clergy from the analyzed list, namely 6 out of 9 people, were students of Islamic theological academies-madrassas. Their share among the total number of revolutionaries was 16% (6 out of 38 people). In total, by 1975 in Iran there were about 10 thousand students of theological academies (tulliabs) aged 15 to 31 years, and about 6.5 thousand of them studied at the largest religious and educational center of the country - the Hauz (traditional Shiite theological academy) of the city of Qom, consisting of several theological academies-madrassas ^{[17, p. 47]}.

The disproportionately high proportion of representatives of the clergy, in particular, students of madrasahs in the sample obtained can serve as another evidence of the high degree of politicization of the Iranian Islamic clergy of the 1970s. In addition to the Islamic academic disciplines proper, the Tulliabs of the 1960s-1970s were actively interested in secular knowledge. Many students tried to attend classes at an ordinary secondary or high school after classes at the madrasah, and at the Haggani madrasah, which had 4 tullyaba revolutionaries from the analyzed list, a special curriculum was introduced, which included history and philosophy, fundamentals of psychology and international relations, foreign languages, etc. In addition, there was an increased interest among the Tulliabs in reading newspapers and listening to radio broadcasts, which had previously been considered an unacceptable occupation for a representative of the clergy. A radio receiver was considered a luxury item at that time, and therefore individual activists were engaged in distributing radio among madrasah students ^{[7, p. 57]}.

Another large group of revolutionaries in the resulting sample were students of higher educational institutions. In absolute terms, their share was 39%, or 15 out of 38 people. Relative to the total number of representatives of the "modern middle class", students made up 75%, or 15 out of 20 people.

 The high level of political activity of the student youth was mainly explained by the fact that during the 1960s - 1970s there were rapid changes in its qualitative and quantitative composition. Due to the increase in the number of state scholarships and the approval of new rules of study in higher educational institutions, the social base of students has expanded ^{[15, p. 85]}. If earlier the children of large landowners, high-ranking civil servants and wealthy entrepreneurs mainly studied at universities, then since the 1960s the bulk of the students came from families of junior civil servants, small traders and artisans, clergy and even peasants. This trend can be seen in the data of the sample obtained. Since religion was an integral part of everyday life in many of these families, the social transformation of universities contributed to the significant Islamization of the student environment ^{[17, p. 48]}.

Another natural consequence of the expansion of the social composition of the student body was an increase in the total number of students in the country. In the period from 1960 to 1976, it increased almost 8 times, from 24 to 190 thousand people. At the same time, the territorial concentration of students has increased. By the mid-70s, more than 40% of all higher education students were concentrated in the eight largest universities in Tehran and provincial centers ^{[17, p. 48]}. In particular, of the 15 students on the list, 2 people studied at universities in Tehran, 3 at Isfahan University and 3 more at Tabriz University. In addition, in the 1970s there was a rapid increase in the number of Iranians who received education abroad. In 1975, their number amounted to 38 thousand people, that is, more than 20% of all Iranian students ^{[17, p. 48]}. About half (7 out of 15) of the student revolutionaries from the sample studied abroad – in the USA (5 people), France and Germany (one person each, respectively). Due to the increase in the number and concentration of students in major cities of Iran, as well as in foreign educational centers, the consolidation of student youth has also increased, which, in turn, also contributed to the radicalization of the student environment.

Despite the large number of students in the sample, 8 revolutionaries (21%) received only secondary education (which was also quite highly regarded in Iranian society), and 3 more people (8%) for various reasons were able to graduate only from the first 6 grades (the stage of basic general education) ^{[18, p. 3]}. Nevertheless, regardless of the level of secular education received, all revolutionaries from the sample were united by an interest in Islam. Most of them were born into traditional and religious families and were familiar with the basics of faith and the Koran from childhood. For revolutionaries, Islam was not just a religion or ideology, but a way of life and a means of salvation not only in the future, posthumous life, but also in earthly life. It is quite natural that they tried to find answers to questions about the principles of a just world order in religion ^{[11, p. 73]}.

According to the data received, 12 out of 38 people, whose level of secular and religious education was established, attended a course of lectures at madrassas at different times. Another 21 people attended classes on the interpretation of the Koran and public lectures by theologians in mosques and various Islamic societies and cultural centers. Pro-Islamic students from Tehran listened to lectures and religious debates at the famous cultural and educational center "Hosseiniyeh-ye Ershad" (Persian: "a place of assembly [for] instruction"), in which the philosopher Ali Shariati regularly spoke from 1967 to 1973 ^{[7, pp. 68-71]}. Residents of the commercial and craft districts of the capital and provincial cities attended classes in local mosques and assembly halls ^{[19, p. 75]}. Such classes often discussed not only religious, but also pressing political and economic issues. For example, M. Borujerdi described his experience, who began studying Islam at a very early age – about 7-8 years old:

"When I went to these classes, read the Koran and understood the meaning of its verses, my eyes and ears were opened to many questions... I understood who Imam [Khomeini] was and why he was expelled from the country" ^{[20, p. 3]}.

Analyzing the question of the place of residence of the participants in the sample at the time of their trip to Syria or Lebanon, it was found that most of them – namely, 14 out of 38 (37%) people lived in Tehran. Another 13 people (34%) lived in large provincial and county centers of Iran (in particular, in Isfahan, Qom and Tabriz). There were 10 revolutionaries living abroad, and 6 of them were in the United States.

Speaking about the marital status of the revolutionaries operating in Syria and Lebanon, it is worth noting that in the sample obtained, the number of married men exceeds the number of single men (14 and 13 people, respectively). 10 of the married men already had children by the time they left for abroad. Each of the four women on the analyzed list was also married at the time of the trip, and three of them also had children. The revolutionary M. Khadidchi Dabbagh, who left her husband, eight children and grandchildren in Iran, went to Syria alone, while the three remaining girls, who were students at the time of the trip to Syria and Lebanon, accompanied their husbands on this trip ^{[11, p. 109]}.

Thus, it can be concluded that most of the revolutionaries who operated in Syria and Lebanon during the 1970s, whose biographical information was established during this study, were people born in the second half of the 1940s ? the first half of the 1950s. At the time of the trip to the Syro-Lebanese region, they were between 20 and 30 years old. Most of the revolutionaries of both sexes were married at the time of departure, and a significant number of them had children at the time of departure. At the time of departure, most of them lived in major Iranian cities or abroad, mainly in the United States. By occupation, they were students, madrasah students, unemployed, representatives of the trade sector and workers of small craft workshops. A significant part of the revolutionaries had higher or complete secondary education, as well as experience in receiving spiritual education or self-education. The vast majority of them took part in the activities of semi-legal organizations for Islamic education.

It should be noted that the history of the Iranian revolutionary underground in Syria and Lebanon leaves room for further research. In particular, information about the activities in the Syro-Lebanese region of representatives of other movements of the Iranian opposition, especially pro-communist forces, and a comparative analysis of data from representatives of the Islamic Movement and the "left" wing of Iranian political thought are of great interest.