Kurdish Peasantry and Persian Sepah-e Danesh Unrest in West Azerbaijan

In the years following the 1963 White Revolution, Iranians has a wide variety of responses to the top-down land and social reforms of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Between 1964 and 1966, the first and sixth points of the reforms - land and litaracy reforms respectively - received mixed reviews by Iran's rural peoples towards whom the reforms were aimed in general, and by the Kurdish and Azeri peasantry in the Western province of Azerbayjan in particular. While the published accounts of that time period described some of the problems voiced by the countryside or rusta, a number of eyewitness accounts of the American Peace Corps volunteers who were living in the small towns of West Azerbayjan and of the Iranian Literacy Corps or Sepah-e Danesh military volunteers in the Kurdish villages west and south of Mahabad described other issues and deeper problems occurring in reaction to the Land Reform in the region. In addition, the Literacy Corps began to voice their own difficulties with Tehran and Tabriz officials in their educational work in the villages. The reports of the U.S. Consul in Tabriz mirrored some of those problems from the peasantry and Literary Corps now housed in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, MD. The combination of eyewitness accounts and consular reports project a more troubled period of contemporary Iranian history than generally known publicly.