Peyman Vahabzadeh, For Land and Culture: The Grassroots Council Movement of Turkmens in Iran, 1979-1980 (Fernwood Publishing, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Peyman Vahabzadeh (PV): The direct answer is: the originality of this grassroots movement and, in retrospect, its “anticipatory” character—the fact that some world-historical autonomous movements of more recent times have emerged and sustained themselves through participatory ways with striking resemblances to the forgotten movement of the Turkmen peasants in 1979 Iran. In the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, Iranian society witnessed some unique experiments in social mobilization, cooperation, grassroots self-organization, and struggle for participatory democracy and social justice. This is indeed an unstudied period (1979-1980) deserving a study of its own, the time of many creative social and political experiments when the new state in the country was still weak. The grassroots self-organization of Turkmen national minority in the Caspian-northeastern region of Iran stands out as a most fascinating struggle. The Turkmens occupied and distributed land and fought for cultural and national autonomy within a federal Iran. I am inclined to mention that the majority of the post-revolutionary grassroots efforts, before the final consolidation of power by the Shi‘i clerics circa 1982, were ignored by subsequent historiography of contemporary Iran. Iranian political historiography is largely orientalist and fixated on the state. As such, the invaluable knowledge about the Turkmen and other post-revolutionary movements seems to be lost. This book intends to bring this forgotten movement back to life.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
PV: The Turkmen peasants’ council movement was a direct response to colonial land dispossession under the Pahlavi monarch. This was a process that had started as early as the 1920s, with many land registry laws that aimed at transforming land into capital (forming a “land capitalism”), and eventually brought Iran into the orbit of global capitalism as a peripheral participant through industrialization backed by petro-dollars after the Shah’s 1960s land reform.
During the prolonged process of land registry, the Turkmen masses, who had mainly engaged in agriculture and sheepherding on their ancestral lands for centuries, were systematically dispossessed of their means of survival. With an area of 16,375 square kilometers (over half of Belgium’s land mass), the Planes of Turkmen stands as one of the most fertile lands in Iran’s mostly arid geography. Turkmens also suffered from state-sanctioned discrimination under the Pahlavi’s “Persianization” policy that banned non-Persian languages and customs. Traditionally, land was mostly collectively owned by Turkmen village communities and private landownership did not generally exist. The affairs of the village were managed through the council of elders known as Yashuli or Aq Saqqal. Land dispossession destroyed both of these traditions, and Turkmens’ fertile lands were registered to the royal family, top-ranking army generals, and non-Turkmen and Turkmen urban bourgeoisie.
Within days after the 1979 Revolution and encouraged by the absence of landlords who had fled the region or country, some Turkmen villagers took back their ancestral lands. During the months prior to the Revolution, Turkmen organic intellectuals had begun to create cultural and political associations. Most of them were supporters of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrilla (OIPFG), originally an underground, Marxist, urban guerrilla group (founded in 1971) that by this time had abandoned militantism and sought to reemerge as a political party. The Turkmen intellectuals rushed to assist the peasants and within a few weeks they created a sophisticated council system that spread throughout the Planes of Turkmen. Grassroots councils in villages and towns, councils of rug-weavers, women, and fishermen, were also organized under two main Turkmen organizations. The movement took serious measures to improve women’s status in the region. The Planes of Turkmen became a semi-autonomous region with the two Turkmen organizations being its de facto governing bodies, despite the presence of the regime’s newly-forged militias. The Turkmens advocated federalism for Iran and autonomy for Turkmen Sahra. The OIPFG, Iran’s most popular leftist organization and second most popular political party outside of the state orbit, stood behind the movement at this time, propagating its cause nationwide. The Turkmens took back land as commons and managed it collectively through elected councils (no longer elderly councils). Field activists assisted the peasants with their day-to-day affairs. In its heyday in Autumn 1979, the Turkmen council movement practically managed many affairs of between 500,000 to 800,000 residents of the region. Through the councils, a three-tier sophisticated participatory and democratic structure for popular decision-making was created.
The ruling Islamist regime could not tolerate this experiment in democratic collective life. The regime imposed an armed conflict on Turkmens in March 1979, but with the wisdom of Turkmen leaders this conflict was ended within a few days. Interestingly, the Islamists who had promised social justice before the Revolution allied themselves with the landowners. Between this time and February 1980, the Turkmen movement expanded, despite the adversities and intrigues of the regime’s and landowners’ thugs who continuously caused mayhem and murdered villagers. In Spring and Fall 1979, Turkmen peasants collectively harvested wheat and produce in a collective and egalitarian fashion.
The regime cunningly imposed a second armed conflict in the region in February 1980: it descended on Turkmen organizations with a heavy hand and kidnapped and murdered four Turkmen leaders, thus effectively destroying the movement. Peasant councils were appropriated by the state, transformed into “Islamic councils,” before effectively vanishing. Turkmen lands were privatized again or appropriated by the state.
The book begins by offering some reflections on the global experience of councils—workers councils in particular. Then it probes the question of land in Persia, which the book links to state formation in Iran and its colonial modernization, a process that involved the modernization of land registry laws and land reform. The Turkmens were adversely affected by these processes. It is only then that the book meticulously attends to the Turkmen council movement, its formation in 1979, its incredible thriving, and its subsequent defeat by the state in 1980. The book concludes by offering the conceptual connections between this movement and the autonomous movements of today.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
PV: My empirical field of study has been the political and intellectual history of the Iranian Left in the 1970s. Prior to For Land and Culture, I had published four books and a number of articles on this subject, tracing the development of the militant Left in this period. Three of my previous works focused mainly on organizations and personalities of this time, while another attended to the dialectical connection between the arts and the militants of the 1970s. The study of the Turkmen council movement seems like an appropriate bookend to my studies of the 1970s political history of the Left.
However, For Land and Culture offers a much sharper critique of colonial-capitalist modernization in Iran than my previous works. It “de-naturalizes” the concepts of “modernization” and “development,” and by focusing on the prolonged dispossession of Turkmens from their land and culture, my study tries to bring to life the victims of colonial modernity. I developed from the literature of the Turkmen movement the concept of “ancestrality.” The Turkmens believed their right to land was ancestral and that took priority over any land registry law. Ancestrality provides a needed concept akin to indigeneity as an ethical relation to land and place. My book shows the Turkmen movement’s “connection” with today’s indigenous movements. In retrospect, the Turkmen movement “anticipated” the Zapatistas in Mexico and Rojava autonomous movement in Syria.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
PV: This book is written for a global audience. I am hoping that it will be read by students and researchers of contemporary Iranian history, as well as those interested in popular, peasant, or autonomous movements. The book is written in an accessible narrative, tracing the history of the Turkmen movement in 1979 back to the 1920s, and it reveals several unstudied aspects of the immediate post-revolutionary atmosphere in the country. The general audience interested in this field will also find the book relatable and useful. The reader, I hope, will appreciate the diversity of the views and efforts of the Iranian Left in democratization and social justice that was lost after the consolidation of power by the ruling Islamists.
J: What does the Turkmen council movement have to offer to our times?
PV: The Turkmen peasants’ council movement presents a rare grassroots movement of people who have been adversely affected by colonial-capitalist development, both economically and culturally. It was a movement of cultural revival that offered practical solutions such as communal landownership, turning land into commons, and managing the affairs of people through democratic, participatory councils in a semi-autonomous system. This, in my judgement, is one of the blueprints for future humanity beyond the tripartite oppressive structures of state, capitalism, and patriarchy.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
PV: Right now, I am working on a monograph that takes me back to my phenomenological roots as a social theorist. For a long time, I have been wondering about why the idea of universal humanism has continuously failed throughout the world, especially in cases of conflict and, in particular, the ongoing human tragedy in Gaza caused by the Israeli war machine. Usual approaches (rightfully) blame international politics, unilateralism, and failed policy implementation for upholding universal human rights in conflicts and similar situations, but I think that these approaches mistake the effect for the cause. I intend to launch a phenomenology of the very concepts of human and humanism and critically examine the connection between humanism and violence. This is a counter-intuitive and theoretical book. Phenomenology informs my approach this work, but I will also use the postcolonial theoretical literature that is critical of colonial and Eurocentric epistemologies.
Excerpt from For Land and Culture (from “Introduction: Against Oblivion,” pp. 2-6)
Back to the Watershed
In February 1979, the seeds of a unique social and cultural movement in Iran were sown by the Turkmen peasants and activists who have been the ancestral inhabitants of the fertile plateaus, known as the Plains of Turkmen (in Persian: Turkman Sahra; note different spelling of Turkmen/Turkman) — a region stretching from the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea to the northeast. This self-governing, council movement, primarily and mainly of Turkmen peasants but also of different social groups and non-Turkmens of urban dwellers, workers, fishermen, high school students, and professional sectors was launched at a historic moment: the dawn of a brief but life-altering “Spring of Freedom” in 1979–1980 when Iranians were gradually grasping the enthralling, if challenging and precarious, reality of a post-monarchical era, on that shone with incredible possibilities for a better Iran, before the Islamists consolidated the state power that equipped the rising ruling oligarchy with the necessary apparatuses to brutally suppress social movements and spread their clerical black robe all over a diverse, colourful nation.
For the duration that this historic moment lasted, however, “Iran” was the floating signifier of unrivalled, creative, and imaginative social experiments — namely, experiments in participatory self-governance and semi-autonomous social organization (as opposed to hierarchical, colonial, and dominating power structures). In the transitional period when one dictatorship had collapsed and the next had not yet harnessed its imminent heavy hand, workers, teachers, university students, state employees, peasants, and national minorities reverted to the most authentic form of grassroots self-governance: the councils.
This book offers a counter-history: the tremendous experiment of Iran’s Turkmens has been relegated to historical oblivion in the past four decades. By funding and promoting garden variety “research” works that regurgitate state propaganda, the Iranian regime derides the movement as an insignificant ethnic disturbance instigated by sly Marxists […], often calling this popular experiment using derogatory terms like “intrigue” or “sedition” (gha`eleh or fetneh…). As in any ideological historiography, the starting point of all sources sanctioned by the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic is the self-righteousness of the Islamists and their Islamic state, thus rendering all efforts to build social justice–oriented social imaginaries, democratic alternatives, and legitimate resistances against exploitation and autocratic rule to the alleged, self-defeating defects of these movements and foreign conspiracy. This historiography simultaneously justifies and minimizes the state’s murderous measures taken against the post-Revolutionary movements.
On the other hand, the Iranian left has not afforded to the Turkmen council movement the attention and analysis this tremendous experiment deserves. There have been only a few, albeit important, memoirs of the Fadai cadres and Turkmen activists involved in the region at that time, and even then, they mainly focus on the two episodes of armed conflict, allowing these episodes to overshadow the entire year-long movement […].
Some of these accounts narrate history backwards, as their accounts of the past are tainted by their present-day values and stances […]. This is an example of memory erasing itself in the interest of current-day political correctness or values. These memoirs are also coloured by the fact that the movement was vanquished: no one wants to be the bearer of the legacy of a defeat. A welcome and refreshing exception to this trend is the recent two-volume set of documents pertaining to the movement, edited by tireless Turkmen researcher Arne (Amin) Goli and published in exile by the Turkmen Research Centre […]. True embodiments of a labour of love, these volumes (and others on Turkmens edited by Goli) must be regarded, by any party involved, as original sources that contain the documents, reportages, interviews, and press releases pertaining to the Turkmen council movement. Turkmen organizations, newspapers, government press releases, and analyses of leftist and Islamist groups should all see these volumes as invaluable. Like this study, these volumes position themselves as resisting oblivion, as a bulwark against the discounting of the movement of a marginalized people within mainstream historiography of modern Iran. These volumes allow me and other researchers to gain a valuable view from the inside of the movement and its contributions to, as well as how it was received in, public and state-run media at the time. However, there are very few sources in any shape or form about the inner challenges of, and disagreements within, the movement, or about the movement’s assimilation by the Islamic Republic. As such, any study of this kind potentially runs the risk of reconstructing this movement in rather monolithic ways, which I have tried to avoid to the best of my ability and in as much as my sources allowed, by cross-referencing and triangulating the various accounts. In the end, I too construct a narrative about the movement, based on my research, but I emphatically note that no one can ever say the last word in history. History is open to interpretations, and as such it lives on, inspiring future generations to partake in the unfinished projects of past generations. I hope this book will do the same for the younger activists in Iran.
The transformative months following the 1979 Revolution provided the Turkmen minority in Iran with a rare historical opportunity to realize its long-held dream of national self-assertion as a people, a movement aimed at cultural self-expression and linguistic revival as well as a particular mode of self-governance that was based on both Turkmen tradition and modern values that promoted participation, inclusion, negotiation, and above all, a better, collective life. As such, it turned out to be a movement simultaneously for cultural revival and for social justice, with land at its heart. The Turkmen council movement represented everything that the Islamic Republic was not and could have never been. This movement stands out in recent Iranian history due to, first, its sheer size and reach, and second, the radical, sophisticated, all-embracing vision.
Both features render the neglect of this movement by scholars all the more astonishing. In fact, scholars of modern Iran have evidently played their part in relegating this movement to oblivion. In some of the most widely read general histories of modern Iran, references to the Turkmen council movement do not exceed quick notes in passing […], if not nil […], although one these historians clearly advocates minority rights […]. More interestingly, in a book dedicated to the history of the Iranian left, only a paragraph-long quick overview of this movement is offered […]. The only exception to this trend is an article published during the movement’s activity in New Left Review […]. It is fair to say that the continued scholarly empirical neglect and disregard imposes silences on this and other movements that did not register with the (often orientalist) epistemic frames of mainstream historiography.
This omission has clear pedagogical consequences. I wonder how such silences will tint the views of students of Iranian history as well as their understanding of the dynamics of change in a country known — to this day and under a brutally repressive regime — for its people’s tireless defiance of authority. Modern Iran is the land of undying, albeit changing, social movements for social justice and democracy. Such omissions are partly because historians of Iranian politics have largely dwelled in a particular epistemological gaze that directs scholarly focus toward formal and institutional sources of political power as represented by the modern state. These studies have been fascinated by, and focused on, the state as the privileged agent of change. Hence, the generative power of social movements has always been subsumed by the study of formal institutions. Of course, the works of Asef Bayat […] provide refreshing exceptions to this trend. This book resists the dominant and long-rooted lure of concentrating on formal institutions as privileged sites of power and invites the readers to focus on the original makers of politics — social movement activists — and their initiatives.
Never studied prior to this book, the Turkmen council movement lasted for a year before it was crushed by the new, hostile regime that had been actively seeking to destroy this movement right from the start. The process of eradicating this experiment by the state entailed two imposed armed conflicts, continued hostile encroachment in the region, and then a long process of forced assimilation.