How the Media Gets It Wrong

Ten Nights: Poetry and Revolution in Tehran

by Iran Prism 9 min read

The Garden

In October 1977, on the grounds of the German-Iranian Cultural Association on Pahlavi Avenue in Tehran, something happened that had not happened in Iran for twenty-five years. Writers read their own words aloud, in public, to an audience of thousands.1

The Dah Shab — Ten Nights — ran for ten consecutive evenings. Co-organized by the Iranian Writers’ Association and the German Goethe Institute, it brought fifty-seven of the country’s most prominent poets and writers to the stage. The event was not supposed to be political. Baqer Momeni delivered a lecture on “Censorship and its consequences” — ignoring the Goethe Institute’s own request that the word “censorship” not be used. The audience understood. Armed personnel carriers surrounded the venue. No violence occurred.2

On one of those evenings, Saeed Soltanpour — poet, playwright, recently released from prison — stepped to the microphone. He was in his late thirties. He had spent years in the Shah’s prisons. He addressed the crowd: “Salam, you broken by the black years, you thirsty for freedom, brothers and sisters, Salam!” The applause was frenetic and lasted minutes.3

Imagine the last time you heard someone say publicly what everyone already knew but no one was allowed to say. Multiply that feeling by twenty-five years of enforced silence. That was the Dah Shab. Tapes of the readings were copied and sold in thousands across Iran and abroad.

Ervand Abrahamian’s observation has become one of the most quoted lines in revolutionary historiography: “Nineteenth-century European revolutions often started in opera houses; the Iranian Revolution can be said to have begun in poetry-reading sessions.”4

How did this evening become possible? And how did the freedom it represented survive for less than four years before the regime born from that revolution murdered the poet at his own wedding?

Carter’s Opening

In January 1977, Jimmy Carter entered the White House with human rights as his signature foreign policy cause. His actual bilateral pressure on Iran was remarkably gentle — when Warren Christopher prepared briefing papers for Carter-Shah meetings, human rights appeared last among objectives. A classified May 1978 memo urged merely to “encourage the Shah to continue the positive course.” Patricia Derian, Carter’s activist Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, pushed for restrictions on riot control equipment exports to Iran but was repeatedly overruled.5

But the Shah perceived enormous pressure from the mere existence of a human rights policy attached to a president who made it his brand. His regime had been rebuilt by the CIA in 1953. Any hint that American backing was conditional struck at the regime’s psychological foundations. Charles Naas, the State Department’s Iran Country Director, later explained: “Many Iranians saw the Carter human rights policy as a signal that we were weakening in our support of the Shah.”6

The Shah responded with a series of concessions: amnesty for 357 political prisoners in February 1977, pardons for an additional 555 detainees by March, permission for the International Red Cross to visit prisons — the team counted 3,087 political prisoners in eighteen jails across the country. SAVAK received orders to reduce surveillance and moderate interrogation. Press restrictions loosened. Opposition newspapers published increasingly bold material — for the first time in almost twenty-five years.7

The political space that opened was unprecedented. The National Front revived. Open letters to the Shah’s prime minister appeared in major dailies. The Writers’ Association became active. And in October, the Dah Shab became possible — ten nights of literary expression in a country where literary expression had been, until months earlier, grounds for imprisonment.8

The armed personnel carriers that surrounded the Goethe Institute but did not act were themselves a product of the liberalization moment. In previous years, SAVAK would have shut the readings down before the first poet reached the microphone. The restraint was a measure of the Shah’s uncertainty — and a preview of the paralysis that would define his final year.9

Here is a framing worth naming before it shapes how you interpret what follows: the stability thesis. It holds that Carter’s human rights rhetoric destabilized a stable ally and caused the revolution. This framing treats the Shah’s regime as fundamentally sound rather than structurally fragile — and requires ignoring the oil boom’s economic devastation, the SAVAK-created political vacuum, and the Shah’s cancer-compounded indecision. Carter’s pressure did not create the fragility. It revealed what was already there.10

On New Year’s Eve 1977, just weeks after the Dah Shab, Jimmy Carter raised a glass at Niavaran Palace and called Iran “an island of stability.” One week later, a government-planted article denouncing Khomeini as a “British agent” triggered seminary riots in Qom. The Shi’a forty-day mourning cycle that would escalate into revolution had begun.11

The Literary Infrastructure

The Dah Shab was the most dramatic expression of a literary culture that had been building for decades, mostly underground.

Ali Shariati had lectured weekly at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad from roughly 1967 to 1972, filling a hall designed for 1,700 until crowds spilled into surrounding streets. His lectures were transcribed into approximately fifty pamphlets and booklets. First editions ran over 60,000 copies and sold out quickly. The Hosseiniyeh Ershad’s library held approximately 60,000 volumes and 350 periodical subscriptions. His collected works eventually reached thirty-one volumes and over 15,000 pages.12

Tapes of Shariati’s lectures circulated through the same cassette culture that would later distribute Khomeini’s sermons from exile — and that would be turned against the revolution when Kate Millett recorded women’s protest voices in March 1979. Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi documented the phenomenon in their landmark study Small Media, Big Revolution: “Cassettes could reach a preliterate audience in a way that print never could.” Iran’s adult literacy rate in 1976 was only 37 percent. The cassette tape was a revolutionary technology precisely because it bypassed the literacy barrier.13

Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi — “Westoxification” — circulated through hand-copying, photocopying, and anonymous printings after SAVAK banned it following its 1964 underground publication. Unauthorized photocopies reached Iranian students in California by 1965. The Confederation of Iranian Students (CISNU), founded in Heidelberg in April 1960, was active in over ten countries and became “the most active and persistent voice against the Pahlavi regime.” Its founding members included future Islamic Republic leaders: Banisadr, Sadegh Qotbzadeh, and Mostafa Chamran.14

The underground publishing channels ranged from the heroic to the primitive. Activists stayed awake for two days making carbon copies of entire books. In the fall of 1978, as the regime’s grip loosened, jeld-e sefid — “white cover” books with no title or author on the cover — appeared in Tehran bookstores. Their blank anonymity was itself a message: the Pahlavi state’s control over information was irreversibly broken.15

Behind all of this lay an economic infrastructure that no secular revolutionary could match. Shi’a obligatory religious tithes — khums and zakat — flowed to clerics like Khomeini, amounting to tens of millions of dollars annually. Ahmad Ashraf identified the mechanism: “The bazaari elements provide the economic foundation and financial resources for the clergy. On the other hand, the clergy supports them in their conflicts with the government.” The mosque-bazaar alliance could fund the production and distribution of pamphlets and cassette tapes at a scale no political party could replicate.16

Consider what this means. The Shah built universities that produced the intellectuals who wrote the revolutionary ideology. He built a modernized economy whose bazaar merchants funded the revolutionary infrastructure. He created a political vacuum that ensured only the mosque network survived as organized opposition. Every institution he strengthened became a weapon turned against him.17

The Poet’s Arc

Saeed Soltanpour was a poet, playwright, and activist — a member of the Writers’ Association, a man whose work insisted that literature and political resistance were inseparable. SAVAK arrested and imprisoned him. When Carter’s human rights pressure forced the Shah to release political prisoners, Soltanpour was among those freed.18

At the Dah Shab, he greeted an audience of thousands with words that acknowledged their shared suffering. “Salam, you broken by the black years” was not a slogan. It was a recognition. Everyone in that garden knew what the black years were. Everyone knew what it meant that a former prisoner could stand on a stage and say so aloud.19

The revolution that Soltanpour helped inspire consumed him. In the post-revolutionary purges of 1981 — after Khomeini’s consolidation of power, after the suppression of every faction that had made the revolution possible — Soltanpour was arrested at his own wedding reception in June 1981. He was executed days later.20

His trajectory — prison under the Shah, freedom in the liberalization, poetry at the Dah Shab, hope during the revolution, death under the Islamic Republic — is the trajectory of the revolution itself. The movement that began with poets reading to thousands in a garden ended with the Cultural Revolution shutting every university in the country for nearly three years, firing 44 percent of professors, expelling up to 200,000 students, and driving a quarter of the nation’s post-secondary-educated population into permanent exile.21

Khomeini’s assessment: “They say there is a brain drain. Let these decayed brains flee. Do not mourn them.”22

Theda Skocpol, the foremost structural theorist of revolution, was forced by the Iranian case to concede that ideas must be treated as “an entirely new causal factor.” The structural pressures — oil economics, urbanization, SAVAK repression — were necessary and probably sufficient for some revolution. The intellectual preparation determined that it would be specifically Islamic. And the irony that no structural theory captures: every significant intellectual who contributed to the revolution’s Islamic character would have opposed the theocracy it produced.23

The garden of the Goethe Institute is still there. The armed personnel carriers are gone. The writers who read on those ten nights — some are dead, some are in exile, some are silenced. And somewhere in the recording of Soltanpour’s greeting — “Salam, you broken by the black years, you thirsty for freedom” — is a voice asking when the black years will end, and whether there will be poets left to greet the morning.

This article is part of The Professors and the Prophet. For the full Foucault story, see Political Spirituality. For the women who warned, see The Women Who Saw It First.

Footnotes

  1. Dah Shab from Iranian Writers’ Association accounts and Carter-era liberalization records. ↩

  2. Momeni’s lecture from contemporary accounts; “57 writers” from event records. ↩

  3. Soltanpour’s greeting from contemporary accounts; tape distribution from reporting. ↩

  4. Abrahamian’s observation from his scholarship on revolutionary origins. ↩

  5. Carter’s human rights policy from presidential directives; Christopher’s briefing papers from State Department records; Derian from administration records. ↩

  6. Naas quote from his oral history; perception gap from diplomatic analysis. ↩

  7. Prisoner amnesty figures from State Department records; Red Cross visit and prisoner count from ICRC records. ↩

  8. Political opening from multiple scholarly accounts of 1977 liberalization. ↩

  9. SAVAK restraint from intelligence analysis of the liberalization period. ↩

  10. “Stability thesis” framing from hawkish foreign policy analysis; structural fragility from Abrahamian, Milani, and Cooper. ↩

  11. Carter’s “island of stability” from December 31, 1977 toast; Ettela’at article and Qom unrest from revolutionary timeline. ↩

  12. Shariati’s lectures, publication figures, and library from Rahnema’s biography and institutional records. ↩

  13. Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution (1994); literacy rate from 1976 census data. ↩

  14. Al-e-Ahmad circulation from Katouzian; CISNU from Encyclopaedia Iranica; founding members from CISNU records. ↩

  15. Hand-copying from activist accounts; jeld-e sefid from fall 1978 reporting. ↩

  16. Ashraf’s analysis from his published scholarship on bazaar-mosque symbiosis. ↩

  17. Institutional irony analyzed in Abrahamian and Parsa. ↩

  18. Soltanpour biographical details from Writers’ Association records. ↩

  19. Dah Shab reading from contemporary accounts. ↩

  20. Soltanpour’s arrest and execution from 1981 revolutionary court records. ↩

  21. Cultural Revolution from Ministry of Culture data; brain drain from OECD statistics. ↩

  22. Khomeini quote from October 31, 1980 speech. ↩

  23. Skocpol’s concession from her published revision; intellectual fates from Abrahamian. ↩