On anniversary of Mossadegh’s downfall, neither Iranian, American nor British authors can agree on its significance, says Gareth Smyth

This week’s 62nd anniversary of the coup upending Mohammad Mossadegh comes with interest as strong as ever in Iran’s best-known prime minister. But while historians and journalists see the coup of 19 August 1953 as a pivotal event for Iran, they agree on little else (including the transliteration of his name into Latin letters).

The central point at issue in a flurry of books published in recent years is whether the overthrow of Mossadegh led somehow to the Islamic Revolution 26 years later. Given the close subsequent relationship of the Shah with the US, and Washington’s later hostility to the Islamic Republic, the American and British hands in the coup have left a bad smell for many Iranians, stirring nationalism and suspicion of foreign interference.

In Musaddiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, published in 1990, historian Homa Katouzian argued Mossadegh took up where the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-9 had left off before Reza Shah established the Pahlavi monarchy. For Katouzian, the overthrow of Mossadegh broke the link between constitutionalism, if not democracy, and national self-determination, so paving the way for a growing Islamic opposition to the Shah’s increasingly dictatorial rule.

Following Katouzian, Stephen Kinzer and Christopher de Bellaigue, American and British journalists respectively, argue their governments made a terrible mistake in toppling someone who shared their values. In Patriot of Persia (2012), de Bellaigue lauds Mossadegh as “the first liberal leader of the Middle East...a rationalist who hated obscurantism and believed in the primacy of the law”.

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In All the Shah’s Men (2003), Kinzer’s argues that Iran’s current rulers have taken up Mossadegh’s emphasis on national sovereignty, in the form of anti-Americanism, while rejecting his beliefs in secularism and pluralism. Visiting Iran in 2002, Kinzer mused:

Islamic leaders do not know quite what to make of Mossadegh. They take his defeat as proof of their view that Iran is the eternal victim of cruel foreigners. Because he was a secular liberal, however, they cannot embrace him as a hero.

In the preface to the 2008 edition of All the Shah’s Men, Kinzer added:

If the United States had not sent agents to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, Iran would probably have continued along its path towards full democracy. Over the decades that followed, it might have become the first democratic state in the Muslim Middle East ... In 1953 the United States deposed a popular Iranian nationalist who embraced fundamental American principles and replaced him with a tyrant who despised much of what the United States stands for.

Rather than root the clash of 1953 in ideas and ideals, Ervand Abrahamian, one of Iran’s most distinguished historians, sees the coup as “firmly located inside the conflict between imperialism and nationalism, between First and Third Worlds ...between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped countries dependent on exporting raw materials.”

In The Coup, published in 2013, Abrahamian paints a picture of Mossadegh as as a well-meaning, slightly naive man, “an Iranian version of a nineteenth-century Whig”, who was out badly of his depth given the forces unleashed against him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mohamed Mossadegh, bundled in a camel’s hair coat over pajamas, flailing a furious fist at court. Photograph: Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Abrahamian argues there was no room for compromise over the ownership of oil. He rejects Kinzer’s claim that Mossadegh’s inflexibility – “the Shi’i ideal of pursuing justice even to the point of martyrdom”, as Kinzer describes it – brought his downfall. For Abrahamian, this was a battle only one side could win:

Nationalization initiated a zero-sum struggle. For Mossadeq and Iran, nationalization meant national sovereignty, and national sovereignty meant control over the exploration, extraction, and exportation of oil. For Britain and the AIOC [Anglo-Iranian Oil Company], nationalization meant the exact opposite. It meant loss of control over the exploration, extraction, and exportation of the same oil. Political conflicts usually leave some room for compromise; this left little such room.

As they later battled the Shah, Islamic revolutionaries reached a similar conclusion. In 1981, notes Abrahamian, Ali Khamenei, later to become the supreme leader, declared: “We are not liberals, like [Salvador] Allende, willing to be snuffed out by the CIA.” While Khamenei referred to the socialist Chilean president topped in 1973, he might just as easily been thinking of Mossadegh.

Whatever the disagreements between Kinzer, de Bellaigue and Abrahamian, they all emphasise the role of foreigners in the coup. By contrast, in Iran and the CIA (2010), Darioush Bayandor argues that 19 August “had essentially an indigenous character and resulted from Iran’s internal dynamics”.

Contrary to Abrahamian, Bayandor asserts that the British were ready to compromise over oil when Mossadegh ended talks in March 1953.

...the decision Mossadeq took on that day to break off the oil talks was portentous in his historical ramifications. Had he not given in to vague and shapeless fears or vain nationalist pride, the course of Iran’s contemporary history might well have been different.

Bayandor argues that by 19 August, earlier plans hatched by the CIA for a coup had fallen through, and that Mossadegh fell to a coalition of Iranians. There was “residual support among ordinary Iranians” for the Shah – not just among the thugs hired by the CIA – as well in an army worried about instability and the restive left-wing Tudeh party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iranian soldiers chase rioters during civil unrest in Tehran in August 1953. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

There were also the clerics. While some supported Mossadegh, most senior ones did not. Ayatollah Mohammad-Hossein Borujerdi, the leading reference of the day, welcomed the Shah back to Iran after the coup as “the well augured return of your majesty”. The most politically visible cleric, Ayatollah Abdolqassem Kashani, moved from supporting Mossadegh to a fatwa in July 1953 condemning his proposal for a referendum and eventually to a call for Mossadegh’s execution for treason.

Aside from the Shia establishment, Fadayeen-e Islam, a militant group inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, opposed Mossadegh as a secularist. While the Fadayeen differed from moderate clerics in assassinating figures it opposed, all believed that the main threats to Islam came from communists, secularists and atheists, many of whom supported the partly French-educated Mossadegh.

Katouzian quotes the newspaper of Fadayeen-e Islam on 20 August, 1953, hailing Mossadegh’s downfall:

Yesterday Tehran was shaking under the manly feet of the soldiers of the Muslim and anti-foreign army. Mussadiq, the old blood-sucking ghoul, resigned...under the annihilating blows of the Muslims...All government centres were captured by the Muslims and the Islamic army.

Among Fadayeen-e Islam’s lesser known sympathisers was a mid-ranking cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. Later he would identify the Shia clergy with an assertive nationalism imbued with suspicion of the US and its allies. Under the Islamic Republic, national ownership of upstream oil and gas would be required under the constitution, while both Kashani and Fadayeen-e Islam would be celebrated and Mossadegh’s memory dropped from public view.

The legacy of conspiracies is often conspiracy theories. The Shah supposedly told the CIA conspirator Kermit Roosevelt he owed his kingdom to him (as well as to “God, my people, my army”), and he feared to the end that the British were trying to undermine him. Likewise, rulers under the Islamic Republic have long denounced a satanic hand directing plots against them.

Could it have been different if Mossadegh had succeeded? While some writers like to imagine a different history, Ervand Abrahamian writes that the many ‘what ifs’ of 1953 remain speculative.

We can fantasize endlessly without reaching any firm conclusions. We do, however, know that the coup did produce the following four substantial legacies: (1) the denationalization of the oil industry; (2) the destruction of the secular opposition; (3) the fatal delegitimizaton of the monarchy; and (4) the further intensification of the already intense paranoid style prevalent throughout Iranian politics. In other words, the coup left a deep impression on the country – not only on its politics but also on its popular culture and what some would call mentality.