The Revolution of 1979 and the Islamic Republic

By the mid-1970s, Iran was awash in oil money. After the oil-price surge of 1973, the country's foreign-currency revenue multiplied within a short span, and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi promised to bring Iran to "the gates of the Great Civilization." According to historians such as Ervand Abrahamian and Michael Axworthy, this sudden flood of wealth bred not stability but instability: galloping inflation, soaring housing costs in Tehran, a vast migration of villagers to the margins of the cities, and a widening gulf between the benefiting elite and the masses left behind.

To curb inflation, the government launched an "anti-profiteering campaign," fining and arresting many of the bazaar merchants—a measure that, according to researchers, alienated the traditional bazaar, with its long-standing ties to the clergy, still further from the state. At the same time, the establishment of the single "Rastakhiz" party in 1975, with the declaration that opponents must either join it or leave the country, closed the political space even tighter.

Political repression was another pillar of this era. SAVAK was known for the surveillance, torture, and imprisonment of opponents; human-rights organizations protested repeatedly in those years over the condition of political prisoners. The exact number of these prisoners and victims differs across various sources and is a matter of dispute, but on the point that open opposition was effectively impossible, the accounts agree.

The opposition of 1979 arose not from a single current but from a broad and heterogeneous coalition. Leftists—from the Tudeh Party to the Fedai Guerrillas—demanded class justice and an end to dependency. Nationalists and the heirs of Mossadegh's National Front sought a return to the Constitutional-era constitution and political freedoms. The bazaar merchants had been worn down by economic pressure. And the Islamists, with a network of mosques and pulpits, possessed a capacity for mass mobilization that no other group had.

What held these discordant forces together was, more than any shared program, a shared enemy: the monarchy. Various intellectuals—among them Ali Shariati, with a revolutionary reading of Shi'ism, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, with his critique of "Westoxification"—had provided a language that was at once religious and oppositional; a language that, for broad segments of society, seemed more familiar than the secular discourse of the left or the liberals.

Among this spectrum, the figure who ultimately gained undisputed leadership was Ruhollah Khomeini—a marja' who, since 1964, had gone into exile over his opposition to the capitulations bill and the Shah's reforms, and had resided for years in Najaf.

During his years of exile in Najaf, in lectures later published under the title "Islamic Government," Khomeini developed the theory of velayat-e faqih: that in the absence of the Infallible Imam, the fully qualified jurist must take the reins of government. According to scholars' analysis, this idea was at the time unconventional and controversial even among many traditionalist clerics, and part of the Shi'a religious leadership did not agree with the direct intervention of the jurist in governance.

In 1978, under pressure from the Iraqi government, Khomeini was compelled to leave Najaf and settled in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, on the outskirts of Paris. This move, which on the surface might have appeared a defeat, became—according to historians—his launching pad: free access to the world's journalists and Europe's open telephone lines allowed him to convey his messages to Iran without intermediary.

The cassette tapes of his speeches—smuggled from Paris to Iran and reproduced in mosques and homes—became the key media instrument of the revolution; a decentralized network that state censorship had no power to rein in. In these messages Khomeini emphasized the general concepts of freedom, independence, and justice more than the particulars of velayat-e faqih; a point that later gained importance in the dispute over the revolution's outcome.

The year 1978 was a chain of crises. Protests began in late 1977 with a reaction to an insulting article against Khomeini in a state newspaper and turned violent in Qom. Then the rite of mourning on the fortieth day for those killed became a recurring pattern: every forty days, ceremonies that themselves led to fresh demonstrations and fresh deaths, keeping the cycle of protest alive.

The bloody turning point was September 8, 1978, which became known as "Black Friday." In Tehran's Jaleh Square, military forces opened fire on the crowd. The number of those killed that day has been disputed from the very start: opposition accounts at the time spoke of thousands, whereas later research and official figures have estimated far lower numbers—from dozens to around ninety. Regardless of the figure, this event nearly extinguished any hope of compromise.

In the autumn and winter, a wave of strikes paralyzed the country. The strike by oil-industry workers severed the regime's economic artery. The Shah wavered between repression and concession; in the end he appointed Shapour Bakhtiar of the National Front as prime minister. But it was already too late.

On January 16, 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi left Iran, officially "for rest and medical treatment." The images of him at the airport and the street celebrations following the news of his departure became enduring symbols of those days. He never returned to Iran and died in Egypt in 1980.

Less than two weeks later, on February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran by plane from Paris after years of exile. The crowd that came to welcome him has been described in various sources as numbering in the millions. He delivered a speech at Behesht-e Zahra, declared the Bakhtiar government illegal, and appointed Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of a provisional government; so that for a time two parallel governments existed in the country.

On February 11, 1979, with parts of the army joining the revolution and the collapse of resistance by forces loyal to the former regime, the Pahlavi government effectively fell. This day remains the official anniversary of the revolution's victory.

In March–April 1979 a referendum was held whose question, according to critics, offered a binary and limited choice: "Islamic Republic, yes or no?" The official result was announced as its approval by a very large majority, and the new system was founded. The Assembly of Experts then drafted a new constitution that placed the principle of velayat-e faqih at the center of the power structure and positioned Khomeini as Leader at its summit; a principle that, as noted, had not previously been especially prominent in the public discourse of the revolution.

The months following the victory were a period of bloody rivalry over the definition of the revolution. Yesterday's allies—the leftists, nationalists, and secular forces who had shared in overthrowing the Shah—were gradually pushed out of power or suppressed. Bazargan's provisional government resigned after the crisis at the American embassy; Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president, was dismissed in 1981 and fled; opposition organizations and parties were banned, and many of their members imprisoned, executed, or exiled.

Whether such an outcome—the complete dominance of the Islamist faction—was foreordained from the beginning, or the result of an open-ended power struggle and a series of decisions that could have gone otherwise, is itself one of the central questions in the historiography of this period and has no single answer.

On November 4, 1979, a group of self-styled students "following the Imam's line" seized the United States embassy in Tehran and took dozens of American diplomats and staff hostage. The stated motive was protest against the Shah's admission to the United States for treatment and the fear of a coup like that of 1953.

This crisis dragged on for 444 days and became one of the most decisive events of the early years of the Islamic Republic. Domestically, Khomeini's support for the seizure of the embassy strengthened the radical faction and weakened the position of the moderates. Externally, relations between Iran and America were severed; a rupture that continues to this day. The American military attempt to free the hostages in 1980 failed with an accident in the Tabas desert. The hostages were finally freed in January 1981, following the Algiers Accords.

In September 1980, Iraq under the leadership of Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. According to historians' analysis, Saddam saw the post-revolutionary chaos and Iran's international isolation as an opportunity to encroach upon oil-rich Khuzestan and to contain the influence of the revolution. The Iraqi army advanced at first and captured parts of Iranian territory, including Khorramshahr.

The war became yet another point in the consolidation of the fledgling system: the external threat strengthened internal cohesion and mass mobilization, and turned the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij forces into pillars of the new system. The liberation of Khorramshahr in 1982 was a turning point for morale; but after retaking the lost territory, Iran's leadership decided to carry the war into Iraqi soil, a decision that entailed years of attritional combat and heavy casualties.

This war was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars of the twentieth century; with the use of chemical weapons by Iraq against soldiers and civilians—including at Halabja—and human waves of attack by Iran. The estimate of the number of those killed is severely disputed: the figures fluctuate across various sources from around one hundred and several tens of thousands to more than a million, and there is no independent, agreed-upon count.

In July 1988, after eight years of war and following military, economic, and diplomatic pressures, Iran accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598 and a ceasefire. Khomeini described this acceptance as drinking from the "chalice of poison"; an expression that conveyed the bitterness of the decision for a man who for years had insisted on continuing the war until victory. The war ended without any change to the borders.

In that same summer of 1988, in the weeks following the ceasefire, a number of political prisoners were executed in Iran's prisons. Human-rights organizations and independent reporters have described this event as the mass execution of thousands of prisoners—many affiliated with the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization and leftist groups—on the basis of brief interrogations. The number of victims in these accounts varies from around two thousand to several thousand. The official position of the Islamic Republic does not accord with this account and has generally explained it within the framework of countering armed action; this matter remains, to this day, without an agreed-upon account.

Ruhollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Shortly before his death, he had set aside his designated successor, Ayatollah Montazeri—who had objected to certain policies, including the executions of 1988. After his death, Ali Khamenei was chosen as Leader. For the revolution's supporters, 1979 was the end of absolute monarchy and dependency; for its critics, a revolution that began with the slogan of freedom ended in the suppression of the very forces that had shared in overthrowing the Shah. Bidar, faithful to its emblem, leaves this question open and entrusts the final judgment to the reader.