Development, or modernization, of the Iranian countryside became an ideological imperative at the very outset of the post-revolutionary period. Both the religious and secular leaders of the Islamic Revolution believed that the deposed Pahlavi monarchy deliberately had neglected agriculture and rural economic development in its efforts to create in Iran an imitation of a European urban, industrialized society. Consequently, revolutionary ideologues perceived the rural sector as “deprived” and deserving of remedial programs. The rural inhabitants were the true mostazafin (downtrodden), an Islamic term given a new ideological meaning by Ali Shariati (1933-1977), the admired French-educated intellectual who first used the term in his Persian translation of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and later in many taped and clandestinely circulated sermons calling upon his countrymen to demonstrate their religious faith by struggling against injustice. [1] In addition, 53 percent of Iran’s total population lived in rural areas in 1979, so the new government’s attention to the rural mostazafin was politically expedient as well as ideological. Nevertheless, the revolutionary coalition was comprised of diverse political and social groups, and while everyone gave lip service to the ideal of social justice, many senior clerics, most merchants in the urban bazaars, the large, absentee landowners, and most peasants who owned more than ten hectares of land opposed radical changes, especially land redistribution, which the majority of small and landless peasants tried to implement forcibly in many villages throughout 1979. [2]

By 1983, those opposed to any major land redistribution program would gain political dominance at the national level, but in 1979 the proponents of rural social change had the upper hand and exerted sufficient pressure on the provisional government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan (r. February to November 1979) to force it to create a special organization, the Jehad-e Sazandegi (Struggle for Construction), with a mandate to wage “war” against rural deprivation. In practice, this mandate translated into a mission to provide a basic infrastructure for all of the country’s 70,000 villages. Jehad attracted and trained several hundred idealistic young men (mostly in the age group 18-25) and, later, women. Many of these men -- between 30 and 40 percent of them -- were from villages, and enjoyed a measure of local respect due to their education and/or the reputation of their families. Up to 40 percent more Jehad members were men who had migrated with their parents to and been raised in cities but still retained ties to their natal villages. Because Jehad’s philosophy stressed local participation in development projects, the personal ties of so many of its trained cadres proved to be an asset in mobilizing thousands of villagers in cooperative efforts that eventually brought modern amenities to and transformed the appearance of most villages