In brief. The White Revolution was a set of reforms announced by Mohammad Reza Shah in January 1963 and approved in a referendum. It brought land reform, women's suffrage and a literacy campaign, and it met opposition from landowners, clergy and political groups.
In January 1963, the shah announced a programme he called the “revolution of the shah and the people”, later known as the White Revolution because it was meant to be bloodless. A referendum approved it by a very large official majority, in a vote that opposition groups boycotted or criticised.
What it included
The best-known measure was land reform. Large estates were limited, and landowners had to sell part of their land to the state, which sold it to the farmers who worked it. Other points covered the nationalisation of forests and pastures, shares for workers in industrial profits, the sale of state factories to help pay for land reform, and a Literacy Corps in which conscripts with secondary education went to teach in villages. The electoral law was changed to give women the right to vote and to stand for office.
In 1963 women in Iran gained the right to vote and to be elected. Women were soon elected to parliament and were appointed to the cabinet.
Winners and losers
Land reform ended much of the old landlord system, which had shaped village life for centuries. But the plots were often small, and many villagers received no land or too little to live on. Government support for farming was uneven. In the years after, many people left villages for the growing cities, especially Tehran.
Historians disagree on how successful the reforms were. Some see a real, if incomplete, change that broke the power of old landlords and expanded schooling and rights. Others stress that the programme strengthened the shah’s personal power and left poor rural families worse off than promised.
Opposition
The reforms were opposed by many landowners and by many clergy, some of whom also objected to women’s suffrage. Leaders of the National Front and other groups criticised the manner of the referendum and the lack of free politics. In June 1963, after a sermon by the cleric Ruhollah Khomeini and his arrest, protests broke out in Tehran and other cities and were put down by force. In 1964 Khomeini was sent into exile after he spoke against a law that gave immunity to American military personnel.
The number of people killed in the June 1963 events is disputed. Estimates range widely, and the figures given by the government, by its opponents and by later scholars differ. We do not give a figure.
A showpiece decade
The decade also brought economic growth, new factories, universities and, in 1967, a formal coronation of the shah and his wife, Farah. The Family Protection Law of the same year limited men’s right to divorce and polygamy. For admirers it was a period of progress; for critics, it was progress without politics, and that gap is part of the background to 1979.
Notes and sources
- Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982).
- Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2003).
- Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017).
- Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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