Language of Opposition Politics in Late Pahlavi Iran

Abstract

The discourse of opposition in Pahlavi Iran essentially pivoted around contemporary concerns pertaining to modernization and progress that provided the Pahlavi regime its legitimacy. The manner in which the regime under both Reza Shah and Muhammad Reza progressively manipulated and established control over the entire apparatus and the institutional space of the state made it very difficult to challenge the regime directly. Hence, the opposition slowly began to adopt a language and moved into a discursive space that the regime had vacated. It decided to confront the Pahlavi vision of Iran as a modern state with the counter-vision of Iran as a just state. The features of “justice” were understood and enunciated differently by different protagonists, but the underlying principle that defined such superiority had a common strand. Almost every opponent of the regime charged the state with being at odds with the people it was supposed to represent.