Islam • 159had done nothing more inflammatory than hand out leaflets
or attend a meeting. In Iran, the Pahlavi monarchs were also
ruthless in their secularism. Reza Shah Pahlavi (reigned
1921-41) deprived the ulama of their endowments, and re-
placed the Shariah with a civil system; he suppressed the
Ashura celebrations in honour of Husain, and forbade Irani-
ans to go on the hajj: Islamic dress was prohibited, and Reza's
soldiers used to tear off women's veils with their bayonets and
rip them to pieces in the street. In 1935, when protestors
peacefully demonstrated against the Dress Laws in the shrine
of the Eighth Imam at Mashhad, the soldiers fired on the un-
armed crowd and there were hundreds of casualties. The
ulama, who had enjoyed unrivalled power in Iran, had to watch
their influence crumble. But Ayatollah Muddaris, the cleric
who attacked Reza in the parliamentary Assembly, was mur-
dered by the regime in 1937 and the ulama became too fright-
ened to make any further protest. Reza's son and successor,
Muhammad Reza Shah (reigned 1944—79), proved to be just
as hostile to and contemptuous of Islam. Hundreds of madrasah
students who dared to protest against the regime were shot in
the streets, madrasahs were closed and leading ulama were tor-
tured to death, imprisoned and exiled. There was nothing
democratic about this secular regime. SAVAK, the shah's se-
cret police, imprisoned Iranians without trial, subjected them
to torture and intimidation, and there was no possibility of
truly representative government.
Nationalism, from which Europeans themselves had begun
to retreat in the latter part of the twentieth century, was also
problematic. The unity of the ummah had long been a trea-
sured ideal; now the Muslim world was split into kingdoms
and republics, whose borders were arbitrarily drawn up by the
Western powers. It was not easy to build a national spirit, when
Muslims had been accustomed to think of themselves as Ot-
toman citizens and members of the Dar al-Islam. Sometimes