The role of rural people in Islamic Revolution of Iran

This article is to study the role rural people in the victory of Islamic Revolution of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no serious and deep study on the role of rural people in the Islamic Revolution process. The rural community reaction in the process of Islamic revolution considering all its characteristics, and environmental, social, cultural and political structures is not known. There have been limited studies around the role of rural community in the important Islamic Revolution in 1979 that are mostly focused on general political and historical viewpoints from rural community in the process of Islamic Revolution and mostly in monographic and limited form. In this article the author has tried to show the studies made by Eric Hoogland, Ono Morio, Khosrow Khosrawi, Ervand Abrahamian, Ahmad Ashraf, Baqer Mo'meni, McDaniel, Farhad Kazemi, Ann Lambton, Alen Bill, and … are focused on particular angles of political and revolutionary characteristics and action-reactions of rural people toward revolutions, however their viewpoints about Islamic Revolution have not been so much exact because of their lack of accessibility to sufficient documentations. Because in these studies it is emphasized that rural community have had a form of reactionary and conservative point of view and little impact in 1979 Islamic Revolution and it is claimed that Iranian farmers have not been revolutionary. However, the findings of the author's research shows that there is more or less no doubt about rural people's role in the trend of Islamic Revolution but this role did not have the same scale and size all around the country. In some regions there has been overall presence in the village itself and in some regions the rural people would go to the towns and cities and join the people there in street rallies. And in some villages there have been no sensible activity for different reasons. Since emotional aspect of rural behavior usually overcomes on the other ones, it is not easy for them to be permanently engaged in a turmoil. The farmers usually act so slow in transferring from the level of surrendering to unjustified matters to the level of having political participation to get their rights. Consequently, farmers are usually neutral observers in most of the social developments or only watch the political struggles and wait for a messiah. However, in some cases, including the last two final years reaching to the Islamic Revolution victory, they followed the movements in the towns and cities and joined the revolutionary anti-Shah moves.