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streets. This astounded the nationalists, astounded the shah. We were somewhat shocked
by it at first and then it slipped out of our political consciousness as other events took
precedence, as they exiled people and cleaned out, they thought, the religious opposition.
I can remember at the time, my good friend Hussein Mahdavy telling me that this was a
new force, that we all have to take account of it.
Q: What about – I realize this wasn’t your beat, but you must have been talking to other
people about the army. It’s not that easy to get an army to shoot defenseless people,
particularly religious people. Was the army a different breed of calf than – was it …
MILLER: I think the uprising was so sudden and so violent that it seemed to the military
that criminal elements were in the street. I know that the scale of the disorder was
terrifying. It was premature to connect the uprising with solely the religious leaders of the
country. There were divided views about everything, and religious leaders were way
down on the list of significant opposition to the Shah. Religious leaders were not at the
top of the agenda; they were near the last. The clergy was the last structural organization
in the political system. There were many viable secular structures in between. First were
the democratic nationalists than there were Communists, after the Communists the
religious structures were of least importance, at that time, 1963.
Q: And of course, putting the mob into Tehran really was going right at the jungle of the
Bazaari …
MILLER: Yes, loyalties.
Q: They were going to rip up the shops.
MILLER: No, no. The mob wasn’t going to destroy the bazaar; after all many were from
the bazaar. They were after the shah. The bazaars, they would never touch them, because
that’s where they come from. The bazaar and the religious people were and are almost an
identity.
Q: When you were talking to the – how long were you there after this …
MILLER: This event? ’63? Two more years.
Q: Was this something that was – that came to dominate the thought of the opposition?
MILLER: They thought this was a phenomenon that they had never believed could
happen – it happened. They began to take account of it. They had religious people
involved in their nationalist politics -- they always had religious people among their
ranks. This was religious extremism that arose as a result of an extremist action on the
part of the shah. That was the new equation, that nationalist drew up at the time. At the
time, the National Front couldn’t do anything about it. They didn’t take charge of it. They
had to step aside. The uprising was understood as a signal that in the absence of
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