Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution shaped the modern Middle East. It flipped the region’s primary power from a Western-aligned secular monarchy to a revolutionary Islamic republic. It played a pivotal role in altering the region’s dynamics. Replacing nationalism with Islamism as the primary peddle of legitimacy, it re-birthed a dormant struggle between fractured Islamic and Abrahamic factions for regional hegemony.
The causes of the Islamic Revolution are poorly understood. Why Iran’s secular middle class revolted in favour of a theocracy is perplexing, especially given the relative prosperity of the 1970s. This paper will clarify.
The Shah had dealt with an existential legitimacy crisis since the United States returned him to power in 1953. To legitimise his rule, a national vision based on Iran’s imperial past had been enforced. Its basis was an Iranian state that hadn’t existed since the 7th century. It ignored the stark inequalities and class divisions of contemporary Iranian society, and 1300 years of Islamic history.
Astounding economic and social progress papered over these cracks. The Shah expanded the middle class, but his refusal to extend political participation alienated them. His rule lacked institutionalisation, which allowed corruption, mismanagement and foreign exploitation to flourish. He instead invested in a vast security apparatus. Its crackdowns maintained Imperial rule but also fostered well-organised terrorist networks comprising both “red” socialists and “black” Islamists with supporters across civil society. By 1978, this mix had torn government control to pieces.
The subsequent interregnum saw socialist and Western-friendly liberal factions undone by an Islamist purge. The “blacks” weaponised their societal influence and institutional network to crush secular aspirations, instituting an Islamic republic.
This essay will analyse four papers from 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1980 to expand, explain and underline these points. It should help those seeking to better understand the revolution by engaging with contemporary narratives. Modern analyses are often caught up in the sectarian politics of today’s Iran. This won’t be. However, the providence of its sources must be remembered.
The Coming Crisis in Iran
Hossein Mahdavy
Foreign Affairs
Published on October 1, 1965
In 1964, Hossein Mahdavy was an economist in Iran’s Economic Bureau. According to Gregory Brew, he was tasked with developing Iran’s “Third plan”, an economic scheme worth $1 billion.. A year later, in October 1965, he published this paper in Foreign Affairs. His senior bureaucratic position gives him a remarkable insight into the social, political, and economic problems which plagued Iranian society in the 1960s. They provide a basis for understanding Imperial Iran’s fall 14 years later.
Mahdavy lays out his view that in 1965, Iran was at the precipice of political instability. He contends that the Shah’s coup against Mossadegh’s government in 1953 had created an enduring legitimacy crisis.
“When the Shah decided to participate in the overthrow of the national government of Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, he could hardly have underestimated the risks involved in challenging the most popular government Iran had known in its recent history. The underlying malaise, characteristic of the period of the Shah’s personal rule which followed, stems from the difficulty of “normalizing” a political situation which does not originate in the consent of the majority”
The Shah kept power primarily because of his vast security services.
“A small ruling oligarchy, which had supported the Shah in the overthrow of Mosaddeq, had to rely heavily on the army and the security police (Savak) to control a rapidly increasing middle- and lower-class urban population. Merchants, shopkeepers, civil servants, intellectuals, students and workers comprise the bulk of those who, under the leadership of the National Front, have presented and continue to present a formidable opposition to the régime.”
To combat detractors, the Shah moved to rapidly expand the economy through Iran’s booming oil wealth, which had expanded from “$18.5 million in 1954 to nearly $290 million in 1960”. This was buttressed by $900 million in US economic and military grants, helping the economy, which “grew at a rate of perhaps 5 to 6 percent per annum”.
Economic growth stagnated to just 2 or 3 per cent in 1960 and 1961, which, given the rapidly expanding population, inflicted considerable pain on the growing middle class. This caused discontent. Sharif Imami’s government collapsed in 1961 amid mass demonstrations and a teachers’ strike.
Dr Ali Amina then formed a government promising a wide range of economic, social and political reforms, but was barred from implementing pertinent political changes by the Shah. Hence, he hedged his bets on successful economic and social policies, which culminated in a mass land reform. This “White Revolution” aimed to provide such extensive social and economic reforms that it would dissipate the need for revolution. As rural Iran had maintained a structure of quasi-feudalism, the reforms aimed to redistribute land en masse to the impoverished peasantry.
Mahdavy asserts that this land reform was a disaster.
The Shah’s government planned to buy or seize what the Iranian bureaucracy had identified as “villages” from Landlords, transferring the ownership to the tenant peasantry. However, the Landlords were a significant component of the Shah’s support base, so he provided exemptions so extensive that “out of 48,592 villages in Iran, 13,904 were estimated to be partially or totally affected”. To compound this, the peasants had to pay the government back, and only those who owned oxen were even eligible. As much of the rural population lived in abject poverty, “nearly two-thirds of the rural population belong to those classes that either have no land at their disposal or have less than four hectares”, they were either unable to acquire anything or couldn’t hold the land they were given.
On a personal note, my great-grandfather was one such landowner in Fars province, southern Iran. His land was taken by the imperial government in the early 1960s and redistributed. The rural farmers who were granted the land lacked the resources to cultivate it and couldn't afford to maintain it. As a result, his brother was able to repurchase the land at a low price and give it to my grandfather. The peasants used the money to move to the nearby city of Shiraz, where they lived in slums.
Mahdavy asserts that these land reforms both undermined the Shah’s support among the landowners and infuriated the rural peasantry, whose hopes had been betrayed. He theorised that their resulting poverty would force them into cities in greater numbers, which “could constitute a revolutionary force of some consequence.”
He then considered the increasingly anti-American nature of the growing resistance and, in his view, their inevitable turn to violence. I have inserted the following passages directly, as they could not be summarised any better.
“The identification of the régime with the West, and especially with the United States, has helped to make the concept of a war of national liberation more appealing. Professor T. Cuyler Young wrote in Foreign Affairs (January 1962): “During the last decade, . . . the United States has furnished Iran more than a billion dollars in economic and military aid. Like it or not, justly or unjustly, this has served to identify the United States with the Shah’s régime, together with responsibility for what that régime has done, or failed to do. . . . For this reason the United States is distrusted, if not indeed thoroughly disliked, by all those who have come to distrust the Shah and oppose his policies.”
“Since then, this distrust has been intensified, especially after the United States applied pressure and obtained from the régime in 1964 a status-of-forces agreement granting American military personnel in Iran diplomatic immunity. Not only all Iranian nationalists vehemently opposed this measure, but when Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s most prominent religious leader, voiced concern and was summarily exiled to Turkey, the sentiments of the religious masses also turned sharply against the United States. It is probable that the American position in Iran will continue to deteriorate along with the growing unpopularity of the Shah’s régime and that the United States will replace Britain as the prime target of nationalist attacks. The urge for political freedom, which has already proved stronger than the attraction of recent social and economic reforms, is likely to be reinforced by an attempt to free Iran from all foreign domination.”
These quotes from Cuyler Young in 1962 and Mahdavi’s analysis in 1965 accurately portray the course Iranian politics would take over the next two decades. Indeed, anti-American sentiment would grow in line with Washington’s support of the Shah, and Ayatollah Khomeini would play his role.
Oil Power in the Middle East
John C. Campbell
Published on October 1, 1977
Campbell had been a senior US State Department official. He conducted an oral history interview with the Harry S Truman Library in 1974, providing an insight into his experience, politics and background. Frankly, the oral history is a fascinating record of State Department operations throughout the early Cold War, but relevant to Iran is that Campbell’s career was entirely focused on Eastern Europe and not the Middle East. Hence, he viewed the Middle East through the prism of power politics in relation to the Soviet Union. His appreciation lacks depth, but it provides a useful overview of how American officials viewed Iran’s deteriorating political situation in 1977.
Campbell begins his analysis by describing Iran’s regional role: “ In the next few years, it is to assert its dominant role in the Persian Gulf region and the nearby reaches of the Indian Ocean. By 1990, it will attain the status of a Britain or a France in the global hierarchy of powers. Seeing this dream of the future, the Shah is already acting as if it were reality”.
He praises Imperial Iran’s success in playing Russia against the West to maintain its territorial integrity. He also commends the Shah’s development of a resilient Persian national spirit that defies foreign domination. He stated “Iran was no satalite state” and that “the policy of industrialization and modernization, begun by Reza Shah, was carried on with American help by his son with the idea of strengthening Iran against any power, including the United States, which might be tempted to encroach on its independence.”
His assertion that the Shah, whom the US had returned to power in 1953, was rejecting American encroachment by conducting industrialisation and modernisation with American aid is somewhat bemusing. Campbell also asserts that the 1953 coup was a favour as it gifted Iran a better deal regarding its oil. “America’s differences with Britain over the handling of the crisis that followed nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in the early 1950s enabled Iran to come out of the crisis with a new deal on oil, although Mosaddeq himself disappeared from the political scene. The United States was involved in the events that brought the Shah back to the throne he left briefly in those critical days of 1953, and by the mid-1950s was indeed the principal protecting power, providing military, economic and technical assistance”
Though he is correct in that Iran was subsequently granted a fairer share of its oil revenue, the coup had liquidated a regime Madavy described as the “most popular government Iran had known in its recent history”, replacing it with a monarchy that had just been rejected by Iranian society. Hence, his further assertion that such events “fed the fires of Iranian nationalism” rings hollow. Though it isn’t surprising that Campbell held this view as his colleagues authorised the operation.
Campbell discusses Iran’s regional situation, dominated by the rising power of Arab nationalism. To counter this threat, the Shah made “use of the Western connection and even of cooperation sub rosa with Israel”. He also expanded his purchases of American arms, “some $11.8 billion from 1971 through 1976,” which “were the most modern and sophisticated available, including items only recently or not yet issued to the U.S. armed forces”. Iran hoped to protect “the vital oil routes through the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz” and expand its influence deep into the Indian Ocean. Campbell repeatedly asserts that this was in line with an independent Iranian foreign policy, but given the dual importance of such polices to the US, this claim is dubious. “This role lies at the heart of the Shah’s (and presumably his countrymen’s) ambitions”. The use of “presumably” is quite telling.
Though Campbell does not comment directly on Iran’s continuing internal turmoil, he does analyse the structural weakness of the Shah’s administration and its dependence on the United States. “Military and industrial strength is taking place through a process that in fact increases dependence on the West and particularly the United States.” He raises the concern that the advanced military equipment and industrial expansion driving Imperial Iran were dependent on 30,000 American “military and civilian personnel” whose importance “creates a situation of dependence”.
He criticises the governments’ “grandiose and hastily undertaken military and economic projects” which had been conducted with such mismanagement and waste that it had strained the country’s “social fabric”.
This leads Campbell to criticise the Shah’s administration, “Iran’s system of government rests on the monarchy in the person of the present Shah, who has reserved all power to himself.” “he has not developed stable and permanent political institutions and has not given real political responsibility to the talented and growing professional and managerial class”. The lack of political development, especially concerning the participation of the growing middle class, is highlighted as a concern even to the United States.
Campbell then compares the Shah’s Iran to Saudi Arabia to show the Arab monarchy was superior because it at least encompassed the large Royal House of Saud, which afforded it “surprising strength and adaptability”. The house of Pahlavi had no such inclusion. Power was centred entirely around Mohamed Reza Shah himself, latching Imperial Iran’s fate to one man. Campbell concluded that the Saudi monarchy “Has not lost touch with its people”, which was “In contrast to the situation in Iran”.
Iran and the Crisis of ‘78
James A. Bill
Published on December 1, 1978
A year later, the political situation inside Iran had deteriorated. Riots and repression reverberate. The Shah’s government was on the brink of collapse. James A. Bill detailed the chaos and offered his opinion on what stance the US should take.
Bill was an American academic specialising on Iran. He was connected with Iranian society, having worked there throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His academic importance was such that after the revolution, he advised US policy makers on their stances towards the hostage crisis. He demonstrates a superior understanding of Iranian society than Campbell. Though not as clear-eyed as an Iranian such as Mahdavy, he nonetheless provides a valuable insight into the turbulence unfolding in 1978.
Bill centres his analysis on the mass unrest pervading throughout the 1960s and 1970s. “Rule by force dominated Iran between 1954 and 1960, and again between 1966 and 1976”. He asserts that between 1971 and 1976, the Shah enabled hardliners to oversee security services and “did nothing to stop the reign of terror, which included the systematic use of torture. Prisons were full and hundreds were executed.”
This had proliferated terror networks as resistance groups moved to violence. ”Violence became commonplace in the streets of Tehran, and well-organised guerrilla operations began to take their toll. In 1971, a powerful military prosecutor was assassinated after he sentenced 13 young Iranians to death. That same year witnessed a kidnapping attempt and an attack on the son of the Shah’s twin sister. In 1972, the Deputy Chief of Police was assassinated. A year later, a plot to kidnap the Shah, the Empress, and the Crown Prince was uncovered in Tehran. Americans whom the opposition believed to be assisting the Shah’s intelligence forces also became targets. In June 1973, an American military adviser was killed in Tehran. Two U.S. Air Force colonels were assassinated in May 1975, and in August 1976, three American employees of Rockwell International were killed by terrorists in Tehran.”
In 1978, “The estimated death toll resulting from these public displays was over 3,000 persons. The total casualty figures were four times this number. Martial law was instituted, and during the course of the year’s disturbances, the Shah ordered his troops to fire on demonstrating crowds in Tehran.“ He blames this on a new alignment between the “black” Islamist, “red” socialist and a swelling Iranian middle class who “now make up over 25 percent of the population.”
The middle class had been denied any meaningful role in the state’s administration “Though Iran did have a cabinet, a parliament (Majlis) and senate, and a political party system”, these served only performative roles as “the political parties have been invented and then imposed from above.”
Though the Shah’s economic expansion had benefited them greatly, doubling their size “between 1956 and 1976,” they “place a very high priority on basic individual freedoms and human rights.” Hence, the Shah’s refusal to expand political participation and routine use of forceful repression had rendered them hostile to his administration. They played a protaganistic part in the unrest. “An analysis of the social background of several hundred active opponents of the regime apprehended, imprisoned or executed by the Iranian police between 1972 and 1976 indicates that well over 90 per cent were young men and women of this professional middle class.”
The Islamists had also enhanced their opposition. Unlike the middle class, they played some role in the Shah’s government. Iran’s constitution of 1906-1911 required the Shah “to promote and protect Twelver Imam Shi’ism”. Many clergymen had held positions in Imperial universities and bureaucracy. This included leading figures in the future Islamic Republic, such as Ayatollah Beheshti. Under the Shah, they had maintained an array of semi-independent religious institutions that penetrated Iranian society. This “religious network provides a ready-made informal organization for opposition”.
They boasted extensive influence across Iranian classes. “The resurgence of Islam in Iran has been propelled by the return of the middle classes to religion. Young women by the tens of thousands have gone back to the black veil as a symbol of their discontent, while educated professionals have returned to prayer meetings in homes and mosques where the content of the discussion is heavily social and political in nature”
They considered elements of the liberal and social movements a threat to the Islamic establishment and so previously maintained an interest in continuing Imperial rule. However, the Shah’s push for social progress concerned them; “they feel threatened by the forces of modernization.” And though Bill, an American, refrained from saying it, the Shah’s seeming subservience to the United States, and especially the law granting American military and diplomatic personnel immunity, had aggrieved them.
The Shah inevitably cracked down on such opposition, reducing the autonomy of religious institutions and harassing clerics, regularly breaking up religious gatherings. On January 9th, 1978, a march of religious students in Qom was fired on by security forces, killing “dozens” and injuring “hundreds”. The influential cleric Shariatmadari asserted that “troops of the regime had entered his home and killed one of his followers before his very eyes.”
Bill viewed the fall of the Shah as essentially inevitable. He actually believed that the subsequent Iranian government wouldn’t be hostile to the US. He considered the perception of American meddling in Iranian affairs to be “grossly exaggerated”. He asserted Iran wouldn’t turn to socialism because “Communism is anathema to the Shi’ite religious leaders as well as to the masses of Iranian people.” Moreover, “The Iranian economic and military infrastructures are American in design. Any successor regimes to the Pahlavis will need U.S. technology, markets and continued military advice and materièl.”
Hence, Bill advocates for abandoning the Shah. This would, in his view, undercut anti-American sentiment, paving the way for a new government to emerge that would maintain American interests. “There is still an excellent if somewhat diminishing chance that an Iran directed by such a group would desire very close relations with the United States.”
This is the worst part of Bill’s analysis. Ending support for the Shah after imposing him upon Iran in 1953 and maintaining his rule for 25 years would do almost nothing to curtail the visceral anti-American sentiment which resonated across the opposition. Mahdavy asserted in 1965, “It is probable that the American position in Iran will continue to deteriorate along with the growing unpopularity of the Shah’s régime and that the United States will replace Britain as the prime target of nationalist attacks.” Bill articulated the string of terror attacks and assassinations targeting Americans throughout the 1970s. This had inexplicably alighted his analysis. Such misinterpretations affected American policy. Bill was an adviser to US officials, and their subsequent actions allowed the Shah’s disposal, while facilitating Khomeini’s involvement in the new government.
Khomeini’s Iran
Eric Rouleau
Published on September 1, 1980
Born to an egyptian Jewish family in Cairo, Eric Rouleau became a prominent left-wing French journalist. He supported anti-colonial narratives and was an unapologetic proponent of Palestinian independence. He started his career as an obscure journalist but became one of France’s most iconic. In this capacity, he was an authoritative analyst of the Islamic Revolution as it unfolded, interviewing Khomeini before his return to Iran. He would subsequently advance to senior diplomatic postings, becoming the French ambassador to Tunisia in 1985, then to Turkey in 1986.
His admiration of anti-colonial movements rendered him predisposed to Imam Khomeini’s pursuit of sovereignty. His analysis paints him favourably. It provides a necessary contemporary perspective of the events that rearranged Iran’s revolutionary anarchy into an Islamic Republic.
Rouleau explains the grievances of Iranian society in 1979. These were “foreign domination, despotism, injustice”.
He asserts that foreign domination, primarily by the United States, had aggrieved the population. The law granting Americans diplomatic immunity was an example. So was the economic confinement in American businesses and exports that “contributed to the ruin of countless small farmers, aggravated rural unemployment and swelled the migration to the cities.” The thriftless purchase of billions in needless weaponry, which Iranians “viewed as another means of looting their country’s resources.” The coup that “restored Mohammed Reza Shah to his throne in 1953”. It all carried an air of subservience that stalked imperial rule.
The Shah was viewed as despotic. His security forces had crushed dissent throughout his tenure. “During the 37 years of Mohammed Reza Shah’s reign, over half a million people are estimated to have been arrested, imprisoned or detained.” “Thousands were the victims of summary executions or assassinations, or died under the systematic practice of torture”. Society had become fatigued of such oppression. As this was latched to American meddling, it was doubly humiliating.
Injustice became endemic. Rouleau believed the Shah’s modernisation programmes created “a consumer society for privileged elites-quickly enriched the members of the royal family and the court, the entrepreneurs (almost all subcontractors for the large Western firms)”. This inflicted pain on the lower classes, “the small manufacturers and craftsmen squeezed by foreign competition, the workers (albeit well paid), the rapidly expanding middle classes, the millions of wage earners whose buying power was being eroded by a galloping inflation (over 50 percent in the two years preceding the fall of the monarchy).” Rouleau orated an economic scaffold of “unbridled capitalism worthy of the nineteenth century.”
Such national grievance had synthesised the crisis of 1978 that Bill had articulated in October. The Shah sustained himself into 1979, but the precarious scaffolds upholding imperial rule had buckled. He fled on January 16th. Iran was turned over to a melee of competing factions. Its fate rested with the strongest.
Khomeini landed in February. The Shah’s deserted government, led by Shapour Bahktiar, rejected his leadership. Society was split into a coalition of opposing liberal, Islamic and socialist groups, all intending to mould the chaos. But Khomeini’s vision was set. It was a statue he would hammer Iran into.
His opposition was formidable. “The Marxists-orthodox communists, Maoists, Trotskyites” had hardened their secular stances. They formed militias. In particular, the “Peoples Fedayeen” and the “Peoples Mujahedin (MEK) who “were armed to the teeth and sought to outflank the Islamic movement.
The middle class supported “secularism, advocating the maintenance of a liberal (social democratic) economy and the establishment of a parliamentary system based on the Western model.” The Islamic “Shi’ite clergy was just as divided as the secular”.
Baktiars’ government still clung to the Shah’s blessing.
The Ayatollah selected Bazargan as President on February 5th. Baktiars’ government had collapsed by the 11th. Bazargan was conservative, not revolutionary. Rouleau asserts that Ayatollah Khomeini used Bazargan to tame Iran’s imploding society while destroying remaining elements of Imperial power to straighten the path towards theocracy. Beneath Bazargan’s veil, Islamist “Komitahs” shredded the security services.
Progress was made to institute a theocracy, but by October, “Popular discontent-due mainly to economic problems and the duality of power-had reached alarming proportions.” Bazargan facilitated the creation of an Islamic republic, but now “feared a dictatorship of the clergy.” He opposed Imam Khomeini’s developing Islamic constitution and was organising an alliance to repel it.
In November, the American embassy was sacked and its diplomats seized. Imam Khomeini used this to cleave apart liberal influence and force Bazargan to resign. Iran’s revolutionary gales were reinvigorated by anti-American hostility. Imam Khomeini announced the start of a “second revolution.”
Roule asserts that using “more or less convincing documents” retrieved from America’s raided embassy, the Islamist indicted the liberals as Western collaborators. Scores were arrested, executed or forced to flee. Those who opposed such measures were discredited. The Peoples Mujahedin and Fedyaeen were to support it, or mark themselves traitors. It was now a revolution against America, not just the Shah. If it wasn’t always.
In January 1980, Bani-Sadr was elected president with over 70% of the vote. Khomeini denied his request to form a provisional government. He was permitted to preside over revolutionary council meetings instead. The council had become Iran’s government. Under the reins of Beheshti, it empowered Islamic parties and purged the bureaucracy, removing vestiges of secular sympathy. Though Rouleau writes, “President Bani-Sadr resisted at every step”, it didn’t matter. The council had stripped the presidency of power.
The emerging Republic convulsed in street fighting and monetary crisis. Food prices “soared to unprecedented levels,” and state funds “were not even sufficient to pay the civil servants.” Society plunged deeper into anarchy. In April, a failed American rescue attempt to free its hostages added to the sense of anxiety.
In July, Khomeini announced, “None of the present ministers is a revolutionary… and if the next government resembles this one, we can give the Islamic Republic up for lost, for we will be beaten.” His sharpening blades now turned on “moderate nationalists”, whose Western ideals threatened the cradling theocracy.
Rouleau’s analysis ends here. Though he explained how Khomeini consolidated power, he misses Iraq’s September invasion, which shaped how the Islamic Republic dealt with his still vigorous socialist opposition.
The subsequent eight years would carry war with Iraq and Persian fratricide on a dark scale.
Conclusion
C
To summarise, in 1965, Mahdavy discussed how the Shah’s reign was seen as illegitimate, society was viewed as unequal, and how his White Revolution dashed any notions of fixing it. In 1977, Campbell unveiled the over-centralisation of his regime, which rendered it brittle. Bill talks of how the middle class were empowered but denied any role in governance, rendering them hostile. Rouleau speaks of the Shah’s foreign subservience and, pertinently, the overwhelming anti-western sentiment that flooded the subsequent revolts. All spoke of blanket repression. Only the State Department official spoke of the Imperial national vision he helped impose.
But isn’t much of this analysis well known? Yes, the Shah was repressive. Yes, Iran was unequal. Yes, the monarchy served foreign interests.
But had the Shah not created a secular society that embellished ancient Iranian culture and toiled to expand the middle class? Why, of all people, did Iran’s liberal middle class tear it down in favour of a theocracy?. Though the Shah was repressive, was he more so than Saddam or Assad? Though Iran was unequal, had the people not transcended into the middle classes in unprecedented numbers? Though the Shah was subservient to American interests, had Washington not brought floods of expertise and investment, rendering rapid development possible?
To understand Iran’s revolution, you must look beyond 1980, or 1978, or 1977 or 1965. You have to look at 1953, when Iran’s democracy was subverted because it failed to serve Western interests. You must glance at 1941 when Iran was invaded and nearly split for merely pursuing neutrality. You should survey 1917-19, when an imposed famine massacred several million Iranians. And if you cared, you could examine the preceding century of colonialism, which imposed abuse, lashing, and looting on a people who pride themselves on being the world’s oldest civilisation. The Shah’s existence perpetuated this tome of national degradation.
Now you occupy the mind of a ’70s Iranian student studying in the lush campus greenery of an American university. Alighting your evening’s leisure, you ready yourself to attend an anti-Shah demonstration, even though you owe your entire position to the regime you are slighting.
Iran’s humiliations had become ingrained in Persia’s weighty culture. 1979 wasn’t a revolution only against the Shah. Its roots were cumulative decades of grievance against foreign oppression, watered by a now-powerful middle class, more aware of Iran’s mistreatment and able to enact change. The prosperity brought to Iran by the Shah served only to motivate them. Iran had again the power to assert control over its destiny and a population that willed it. As the Shah had decapitated the strongest liberal parties, the keys to Iran’s revolution were seized by Islamist forces seeking to capitalise on the middle classes’ anti-Western zeal.
If the subsequent Islamic Republic encapsulated one aspect of its revolution’s fervour, it was its intransigent anti-Western spirit. Imam Khomeini would scour Iran for any weapon that could be hurled against America. For Iranians, it stood as certainty. That was enough. The revolution was his.
The Islamic Republic unleashed a storm. A hail of militia and missiles would soak the region in war. From the Gulf of Persia and Aiden to the Mediterranean, its clashes with America would sculpt the region into a colosseum playing host to Earth’s most brutal conflicts. Islam was shaken from dormancy, reforged into an international force that would again move millions and shape the fate of nations. The world would feel the heat of Iran’s humiliation.
Iranians were shattered, split between Islamic resistance and a secular dream of normalcy. The latter’s strongest beholdents were expelled, reshaping themselves into a powerful diaspora. They internalise the revolution as a new humiliation akin to the Arab occupation of millennia’s past. Embracing their position as victims, they offer fierce opposition from abroad.
Bibliography
Mahdavy, Hossein. “The Coming Crisis in Iran.” Foreign Affairs, (October 1965)
Campbell, John C. “Oil Power in the Middle East.” Foreign Affairs, (October 1977)
Rouleau, Eric. “Khomeini’s Iran.” Foreign Affairs, (Fall 1980)
Bill, James A. “Iran and the Crisis of ’78.” Foreign Affairs, (Winter 1978-79)