The Iranian Revolution
Women marched alongside mullahs to overthrow the Shah. Within a year, the mullahs made the veil mandatory.
Open
It started with a newspaper article. One smear piece, about a cleric almost nobody under thirty could remember, placed in a state paper on the order of a government ministry.
Thirteen months later a monarchy that traced itself back two and a half thousand years was gone.
The mechanism in between is the part worth knowing, and it is not political. It is a funeral custom.
Scene 1Forty days
The seventh of January, nineteen seventy eight. The paper Ettela'at runs an article calling Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile for fourteen years, a British agent and an adventurer with an unknown past.
Two days later theology students march in Qom. Security forces fire into them. The government says two people died. The opposition says seventy two.
And now the custom. Shia mourning requires the community to gather on the fortieth day after a death.
Forty days later the mourners fill the streets of Tabriz, and the security forces fire again.
Forty days after that, the mourning is in Yazd, in Isfahan, and in thirty other cities at once.
Each massacre produced a mourning. Each mourning produced a massacre. The state could not stop shooting and could not stop the calendar, and the calendar was setting the pace.
Scene 2Where the money went
By September the rhythm breaks open. On the eighth, at Jaleh Square in Tehran, troops fire on a crowd. The government counts eighty four dead. The opposition says four thousand. The careful estimates land between eighty four and three hundred.
Martial law is declared and does not hold.
Then the oil workers walk out. Abadan, Ahvaz, Tehran. Iranian production falls from five point eight million barrels a day to four hundred thousand.
That is the hinge. The Shah has one of the best equipped armies in the world and no revenue to run it.
By December, somewhere between six and nine million people are in the streets. As a share of a national population, it is the largest protest anyone has recorded.
Scene 3A man with cassettes
The man they are marching for has not been in the country since nineteen sixty four. Turkey, then Najaf in Iraq, then a rented house in a village outside Paris.
He does not use television. His medium is the cassette tape. Sermons recorded abroad, copied in the thousands, carried in by hand and distributed through mosque networks, where the state has no way to jam them and no way to confiscate them all.
On the sixteenth of January, nineteen seventy nine, the Shah leaves. He tells the country he is going on holiday. He is fifty nine and he takes a box of Iranian soil with him.
He never comes back. Every country he asks for permanent asylum refuses him, and he dies in Cairo the following year.
Scene 4The eleven days
On the first of February, Khomeini lands at Mehrabad airport, and between three and five million people line the twenty six kilometres from the runway to the cemetery where he speaks.
There is still a government. There is still a prime minister, appointed by the Shah, sitting in his office.
Ayatollah Khomeini opened by dealing with that.
· Speech at Behesht-e Zahra · February 1, 1979
“I shall kick their teeth in. I appoint the government. I appoint a government with the backing of this nation.”
The government fell eleven days later.
The slogan the crowds had been chanting all through it had three words in it, and the argument of the next forty years is about the order they came in.
· Late 1978 - early 1979
“Esteqlal, Azadi, Jomhuri-ye Eslami. Independence, freedom, Islamic republic.”
Five accounts
Five accounts of thirteen months.
victorIslamic Republican / Khomeini
The Islamic Republic
The first is the winner's, and its foundation is a piece of theology that was new.
The doctrine is velayat-e faqih, guardianship of the jurist. In the absence of the Twelfth Imam, who Shia tradition holds went into hiding in the ninth century and will return at the end of time, the most learned and just jurist should govern in his place.
For centuries the dominant position in Shia thought had been the opposite. Political authority was not legitimate until the Imam returned, so the clergy stayed out of it.
Senior ayatollahs in Najaf and Qom rejected the new doctrine, including the highest ranking Shia cleric in the world at the time.
Khomeini did not need their approval. He had the streets, and the constitution written that year built the state around the idea: an elected president and parliament, underneath a Supreme Leader nobody elects.
Read the full account
Narrative
Khomeini had been writing about Islamic government since 1970. His lecture series in Najaf, published as Hokumat-e Eslami (Islamic Government), laid out the doctrine of velayat-e faqih: in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, who went into occultation in 874 CE and whose return Shia theology holds will occur at the end of time, the most learned and just jurist must govern. This was a theological innovation. For centuries, the dominant Shia clerical position, called quietism, held that political authority was illegitimate until the Imam's return. Senior ayatollahs in Najaf and Qom (including Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, then the highest-ranking Shia cleric in the world) rejected velayat-e faqih as a distortion of Shia jurisprudence. Khomeini did not need their approval. He needed the streets.
The cassette tape was his medium. In Najaf, and later in Neauphle-le-Chateau outside Paris, Khomeini recorded sermons and messages that were copied by the thousands and smuggled into Iran through mosque networks, bazaar merchants, and returning pilgrims. In an era before satellite television, before the internet, before social media, the cassette tape was uncensorable: cheap, copyable, portable, impossible to trace. By 1978, his voice (measured, authoritative, monotone) was heard in living rooms and prayer halls across Iran. He had been in exile for 14 years. Most Iranians under 30 had never seen his face. They knew only the voice.
From Paris, Khomeini played foreign journalists with precision. Between October 1978 and January 1979, he gave 132 interviews. He told Le Monde that the Islamic Republic would protect the rights of minorities and women. He told The Guardian that there would be freedom of speech and press. He told ABC News that he had no personal desire for power and would return to Qom after the revolution to resume his scholarly life. On February 1, 1979, he returned to Tehran. He did not return to Qom. He became Supreme Leader. He held the position until his death on June 3, 1989.
The revolution's speed was its own argument. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had ruled for 37 years. His army numbered 413,000. His SAVAK secret police had agents in every ministry, every university, every mosque. The CIA and MI6 had restored him to power in 1953, overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The United States had sold him $20 billion in weapons during the 1970s. He had nuclear ambitions and American backing. He fell in 13 months. The Supreme Military Council declared neutrality on February 11, 1979, meaning: the army would not fire on the revolution. By evening, the Pahlavi dynasty was over. On April 1, 1979, a national referendum on the Islamic Republic received 98.2% approval on a turnout of 90%. The ballot offered two options: Islamic Republic, or monarchy. A blank line was provided for objections. The Guardian Council later reported that 99.3% of eligible voters had participated. No international observers monitored the vote.
For the Islamic Republican perspective, the revolution was not a political event but a divine one. Khomeini's own language framed it this way: the Iranian people, guided by God, had overthrown a corrupt tyrant and his imperial patron. The Islamic Republic was the only legitimate government because it was the only government that acknowledged God's sovereignty over human affairs. The constitution's preamble states: "The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran sets forth the cultural, social, political, and economic institutions of Iranian society on the basis of Islamic principles and norms, which represent an honest aspiration of the Islamic Ummah." The revolution succeeded because it was, in this framework, not merely popular but correct.
Arguments
- Velayat-e faqih was a theological innovation that broke with Shia quietism, but Khomeini argued it was the only legitimate form of governance in the absence of the Twelfth Imam
- The cassette tape was the revolution's uncensorable medium, cheap, copyable, and impossible for SAVAK to trace through mosque and bazaar networks
- The Shah's 37-year, US-backed, 413,000-strong military apparatus collapsed in 13 months; speed as evidence of divine or popular legitimacy
- The 98.2% referendum result established the Islamic Republic as the will of the people, though no international observers monitored the vote
Sources
- Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e Faqih (Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist)
- The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran
- Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah
vanquishedSecular / Leftist: Hijacked Revolution
The secular left
The second account says the revolution was made by people who did not get it.
Count who was actually in the coalition. Marxist guerrillas who had been attacking police stations since nineteen seventy one. The communist party, which had organised the oil workers since the nineteen forties. A movement that fused Islam with Marxism and had been at armed struggle since sixty five. Liberal nationalists who wanted a parliament. And the bazaar merchants who financed the mosques.
Khomeini needed every one of them, and they all needed him, because he was the only figure the whole coalition could stand behind.
The first prime minister of the republic, Mehdi Bazargan, was a French educated engineer and a liberal, and his cabinet had no clerics in it. He lasted nine months, governing a country where every one of his decisions could be reversed by a revolutionary committee he had no authority over. This is how he described the job, the day he resigned.
“No one listens to me. I am a knife without a blade.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Ervand Abrahamian's Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) counted the participants: the revolution was made by the Marxist Fedayeen-e Khalq (who had attacked the Shah's police stations since 1971), the Tudeh Communist Party (which had organized oil workers and intellectuals since the 1940s), the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK, which fused Islam with Marxism and had waged armed struggle since 1965), the National Front liberals (Mossadegh's heirs, who wanted parliamentary democracy), the bazaar merchants (who financed the mosques and were strangled by the Shah's price controls), and the clergy. Khomeini needed every one of them. They needed him.
Mehdi Bazargan, the first Prime Minister, was a French-educated engineer, a liberal Muslim, a follower of Mossadegh. He lasted nine months. His cabinet included no mullahs. It attempted to normalize relations with the West, maintain the civil service, protect press freedom. Khomeini created parallel institutions: Revolutionary Courts, the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran), the Committee for the Islamic Revolution, each answering to him, not to Bazargan. When students seized the US Embassy on November 4, 1979, Bazargan learned about it from the radio. He resigned two days later. He said: "No one listens to me."
The elimination was methodical. First the monarchists: mass trials, executions broadcast on television. Sadegh Khalkhali, the "hanging judge" of the Revolutionary Courts, ordered 757 executions in his first six months. Then the National Front: its newspaper, Ayandegan, was shut down in August 1979. Then the Kurds: the army shelled Sanandaj and Mahabad in the spring of 1979. Then the MEK: on June 20, 1981, 500,000 MEK supporters marched in Tehran. Khomeini declared them monafeqin (hypocrites) and the Pasdaran opened fire. Over the following two years, an estimated 2,665 MEK members were executed in public and in secret. Then the Tudeh: its leadership was arrested in February 1983, its general secretary Nureddin Kianuri appeared on television to confess to spying for the Soviet Union, and its members were imprisoned or executed after show trials.
The culmination came on July 28, 1988, when Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the execution of all imprisoned MEK members who remained loyal to the organization. Three-member commissions (known as "death committees") were established in prisons across Iran. Prisoners were brought before the committees and asked one question: do you still support the Mojahedin? Those who said yes were taken to a corridor and hanged, sometimes from construction cranes, sometimes from ceiling beams in groups of six. Amnesty International estimates 4,500 were killed. The People's Mojahedin Organization puts the figure at 30,000. The most careful academic estimates, including those by Abrahamian in Tortured Confessions (1999), place the number between 2,800 and 5,000. Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's designated successor at the time, protested the executions in a letter to Khomeini: "Do you know that in the prisons of the Islamic Republic, young women are being raped the night before execution?" Khomeini removed him as successor. Montazeri was placed under house arrest in 1997. He died in 2009. The audiotape of his protest was leaked in 2016.
The revolution's left was present at its birth and absent at every anniversary thereafter. They had organized the strikes, printed the leaflets, attacked the police stations, filled the universities. The Islamic Republic hanged them, and then denied it had hanged them, and then denied that they had participated in the revolution at all.
Arguments
- The revolution had multiple authors (Marxists, liberals, bazaar merchants, students, and clergy), and Khomeini needed all of them to succeed
- Bazargan's liberal government was undermined by Khomeini's parallel institutions within months; he resigned saying "no one listens to me"
- The elimination was sequential and methodical (monarchists, then National Front, then Kurds, then MEK, then Tudeh); each ally was discarded after its usefulness ended
- The 1988 mass executions (2,800-5,000 killed in a few months) were denied by the Islamic Republic until Montazeri's leaked audiotape surfaced in 2016
Sources
- Iran Between Two Revolutions
- Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran
- Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic
vanquishedAmerican / Cold War Blowback
The American account
The third account starts twenty six years earlier.
In August nineteen fifty three the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran's prime minister, who had nationalised the oil industry, and restored the Shah to absolute power. The American station chief handed out cash to army officers and street crowds. The direct cost to the CIA was about sixty thousand dollars.
For the next twenty six years the Shah was Washington's man in the region, and Washington sold him twenty billion dollars of weapons in the last six years alone.
So when the revolution came, its central grievance was not abstract. It was that the country's sovereignty had been bought once already, in living memory.
And it ended with fifty two American diplomats held for four hundred and forty four days, which destroyed an American presidency and set the terms of a confrontation still running.
Read the full account
Narrative
On August 19, 1953, the CIA and British intelligence completed Operation AJAX, the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran's oil industry, and the restoration of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to absolute power. Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the CIA's station chief, personally delivered bags of cash to army officers and street thugs who stormed Mossadegh's residence. The operation cost $60,000 in CIA funds, and $1 million in total including the British contribution. The Shah, who had fled to Rome three days earlier, returned in triumph. For the next 26 years, he was Washington's man.
The investment was strategic. Iran under the Shah was the "gendarme of the Persian Gulf," Nixon's phrase after the 1972 Tehran summit. The Shah purchased $20 billion in US arms between 1972 and 1978, including F-14 Tomcats and AWACS aircraft. He provided intelligence-sharing on the Soviet Union, hosted signals intelligence stations near the Soviet border, maintained oil supplies to the West, and cooperated tacitly with Israel. SAVAK, his secret police, was trained by the CIA and Mossad. It monitored every layer of Iranian society: universities, unions, mosques, newspapers. Between 1963 and 1979, an estimated 3,000-4,000 political prisoners were tortured in SAVAK facilities. The CIA knew. American administrations from Eisenhower to Ford treated the Shah as indispensable and his methods as the price of stability.
The Carter administration arrived in January 1977 with a human rights agenda. In November 1977, during a state visit to Washington, Carter toasted the Shah at a White House dinner: "Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." Thirteen months later, the Shah was gone. Gary Sick, Carter's principal White House aide on Iran, wrote in All Fall Down (1985) that the administration was paralyzed by contradictory impulses: support the Shah (National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski), push for reform (Secretary of State Cyrus Vance), prepare for the worst (the CIA, which had five full-time analysts covering a country of 37 million). When the revolution accelerated in the fall of 1978, Carter sent General Robert Huyser to Tehran in January 1979 to assess whether the military could hold. Huyser reported that the generals were demoralized and that the army would fragment if ordered to fire on the population. Carter declined to give the order.
The hostage crisis consumed 444 days and an American presidency. On November 4, 1979, students calling themselves "Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line" scaled the walls of the US Embassy compound in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage (14 were released within weeks; 52 were held for 444 days). Carter authorized Operation Eagle Claw, a rescue attempt, on April 24, 1980; it ended in the Iranian desert at a staging point called Desert One when a helicopter collided with a C-130 transport, killing eight American servicemen. The wreckage was displayed on Iranian television. Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan in a 44-state landslide. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the hour of Reagan's inauguration. Gary Sick's October Surprise (1991) alleged that Reagan's campaign had secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the release until after the election. Congressional investigations found no conclusive evidence.
The 1953 intervention and its 1979 consequence became the canonical case study in CIA blowback. The agency created a client state, armed it, trained its secret police, and ensured its illegitimacy. When the client fell, the successor regime defined itself in opposition to everything the client had represented, and to the patron that had imposed him. The Islamic Republic's founding narrative requires 1953: without the coup, the revolution has no villain.
Arguments
- Operation AJAX (1953) overthrew a democratic government and installed a client monarch, undermining the Shah's legitimacy for 26 years
- The US sold $20 billion in arms, trained SAVAK, and treated the Shah as indispensable, binding American credibility to his survival
- Carter's human rights rhetoric paralyzed US policy at the critical moment; Brzezinski wanted to support a military crackdown, Vance pushed for reform, and the CIA had five analysts covering 37 million people
- The 444-day hostage crisis ended Carter's presidency and inaugurated 47 years of US-Iran antagonism
Sources
- All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran
- October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan
- Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran
- The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Covert Operation that Toppled Mossadegh
vanquishedMonarchist / Shah's Supporters
The monarchists
The fourth account belongs to the people who thought the country was being modernised, and it is not empty.
The land reform gave about three and a half million hectares to three million peasant families, roughly half the farmland in Iran. A literacy corps sent a hundred thousand school leavers into villages as teachers, and illiteracy fell from about eighty five per cent to somewhere between fifty and sixty.
The case against it is not that the reforms were fake. It is the method. The same state that redistributed the land banned every party, and ran a secret police that made opposition possible only inside a mosque, which is exactly where it went.
A moderniser who could not understand why the mosques were filling. Here is Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's own verdict on it, afterwards, in exile.
“I should have been more severe from the start. This would not have happened.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Abbas Milani's The Shah (2011), a biography based on declassified documents, the Shah's private papers, and 130 interviews, presents Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a man destroyed by contradictions he could not resolve: a modernizer who banned dissent, a secularist who could not understand why mosques were filling, a leader whose reforms were real but whose method of imposing them ensured their rejection.
The White Revolution, launched in January 1963, was a program of six reforms (later expanded to nineteen). Land reform redistributed approximately 3.5 million hectares to 3 million peasant families, roughly half of Iran's agricultural land. The Literacy Corps sent 100,000 high school graduates to rural villages as teachers between 1963 and 1979; illiteracy fell from 85% to approximately 50% (government figure; independent estimates say 60%). Women gained the right to vote and run for office in 1963. By 1978, Iran had 22 women in parliament, 333 women in local councils, and 1 woman in the cabinet, more female political representation than any neighboring country. The Family Protection Act of 1967 restricted polygamy and gave women the right to initiate divorce. University enrollment rose from 24,885 in 1963 to 154,215 in 1978. GDP per capita rose from $176 in 1963 to $2,160 in 1978.
The Shah's error was the inverse of his achievement. SAVAK, established in 1957 with CIA and Mossad assistance, maintained an estimated 5,000 full-time agents and 60,000 informers. Political prisoners were held at Evin Prison and at SAVAK's Komiteh facility, where methods included extended solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and electric shock. The International Committee of the Red Cross was denied access. Amnesty International estimated 3,000-4,000 political prisoners were held at any time during the 1970s. The Shah created a single legal party (Rastakhiz) in 1975 and declared that anyone who did not join was either a traitor or could leave Iran. He closed the political space that might have channeled discontent into reform rather than revolution.
The monarchist diaspora is concentrated in Los Angeles ("Tehrangeles," population estimated at 500,000-800,000 Iranian-Americans by 2020), London, and Paris. It maintains that the Shah's modernization was the best path Iran had. They point to the Islamic Republic's record: GDP per capita fell 30% between 1979 and 1988 (World Bank data). The rial, which traded at 70 to the dollar in 1979, traded at 420,000 to the dollar in 2023. Brain drain: an estimated 4-5 million Iranians left the country after 1979, including a disproportionate share of engineers, doctors, and academics. Before 1979, Iran had 4 universities with international rankings. None has since entered the global top 200.
The monarchist counter-narrative is simple: Iran was imperfect but ascending. The revolution stopped the ascent. Women who had walked without veils in 1978 were required to cover by 1980. Students who had studied in London and Paris were interrogated for having done so. The Shah tortured thousands. The Islamic Republic executed thousands, and then denied it, and then denied that the executed had ever been revolutionaries at all. Reza Pahlavi, the Shah's eldest son and self-styled heir (born 1960), broadcasts from suburban Washington, calling for a secular, democratic Iran. He has never set foot in the country he claims.
Arguments
- The White Revolution was a genuine modernization program, land reform for 3 million families, women's suffrage, illiteracy reduced from 85% to 50-60%, GDP per capita rising twelvefold between 1963 and 1978
- SAVAK's repression (3,000-4,000 prisoners, systematic torture) provoked the opposition that overthrew the Shah; the error was strategic, not ideological
- The Islamic Republic's 47-year record vindicates the monarchist position; GDP per capita fell 30% by 1988, the rial collapsed, 4-5 million emigrated, women lost rights they had held since 1963
- Carter's human rights pressure withdrew American support at the moment the Shah needed it most. He was not overthrown by his people alone but abandoned by his patron
Sources
- The Shah
- Answer to History
- The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
vanquishedWomen's Rights: Liberation and Betrayal
Women's rights, given and taken
The fifth account has the shortest timeline in this whole catalogue. Twenty seven days.
Women were in the crowds all through nineteen seventy eight, in enormous numbers, including women who had never been political before.
On the sixth of March nineteen seventy nine, Khomeini announced that the hijab would be compulsory.
On the eighth, International Women's Day, somewhere between fifteen thousand and a hundred thousand women marched through Tehran against it. Some in chadors, some in headscarves, some bareheaded, which was itself the point.
Revolutionary guards and vigilantes went at them with knives and clubs. Many of the women being attacked had marched beside the men attacking them, four months earlier, against the same police.
And the law moved the other way fast. The family protection act, which had let a woman initiate divorce and required a court's permission for a man to take a second wife, was gone.
Read the full account
Narrative
On March 8, 1979 (International Women's Day, 27 days after Khomeini's return from Paris), between 15,000 and 100,000 women marched through the streets of Tehran. They marched against the mandatory hijab decree that Khomeini had announced on March 6. Some wore chadors, some wore headscarves, some were bareheaded. Kate Millett, the American feminist author of Sexual Politics (1970), flew to Tehran to join them. Simone de Beauvoir sent a message of solidarity. Revolutionary guards and Hezbollahi vigilantes attacked the marchers with knives and clubs. Women who had participated in the revolution, who had marched alongside the very men now attacking them, were told to go home and cover.
The timeline is the argument. Under the Shah's Family Protection Act of 1967 (amended 1975), women could initiate divorce, polygamy required court approval, the minimum marriage age was raised to 18 for women and 20 for men, and women gained custody rights. By 1978, 33% of Iranian university students were women. Women worked as lawyers, judges, engineers, and members of parliament. Farrokhroo Parsa, Iran's first female cabinet minister (Minister of Education, 1968-1974), oversaw the expansion of girls' schools from 4,600 to 8,300. After the revolution, Parsa was arrested. She was charged with "corruption on earth" and "warring against God." She was executed by firing squad on May 8, 1980. She was 58 years old.
The Islamic Republic's changes were codified. Mandatory hijab was enacted by decree on March 7, 1979, made law by parliament in 1983, and enforced by the gasht-e ershad (guidance patrol, or "morality police"). The minimum marriage age for girls was lowered to 9 (later raised to 13 with judicial permission for younger). Women were barred from serving as judges. A woman's testimony in court was valued at half a man's. A woman needed her husband's permission to travel or obtain a passport. The Family Protection Act was repealed. Polygamy required no court approval. In matters of inheritance, daughters received half the share of sons. Stoning was codified as a punishment for adultery, and applied disproportionately to women.
Azar Nafisi, a professor of English literature at the University of Tehran, was expelled from her position in 1981 for refusing to wear the veil. She continued to teach, then left Iran in 1997. Her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) describes organizing a secret book club for seven female students, reading Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen, and James behind drawn curtains. "The regime had turned the veil into a flag," she wrote, "and my refusal to wear it into a form of treason." Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2000) documents the same betrayal from a child's perspective: the veil imposed at school, the parties held in secret, the punk cassettes hidden under jackets at checkpoints.
The arc closed, or reopened, on September 16, 2022, when Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in custody of the morality police three days after being detained for wearing her hijab improperly. Her father said her body showed bruises. The government said she had a heart attack. Within days, women across Iran were cutting their hair in public, burning their headscarves, and chanting "Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" (Woman, Life, Freedom). The protests lasted six months. The Islamic Republic's security forces killed at least 537 protesters (Iran Human Rights), arrested over 22,000, and executed at least 7. The youngest known victim was Nika Shakarami, 16 years old, whose body was returned to her family with a broken nose, a fractured skull, and bruises consistent with beating. The security forces told her mother that she had jumped from a building. The 2022 protests were the largest since 1979. Women who had been born 20 years after the revolution fought for rights that women had held 20 years before it.
Arguments
- The March 8, 1979 women's march against mandatory hijab, 27 days after Khomeini's return, was attacked by the same revolutionary forces women had marched alongside
- The timeline is the argument; women held rights under the Shah (divorce, custody, education, political office) that the Islamic Republic revoked within months
- Farrokhroo Parsa, Iran's first female cabinet minister, was executed by firing squad on May 8, 1980, charged with "corruption on earth" and "warring against God"
- The 2022 Mahsa Amini protests (Woman, Life, Freedom) were fought by women born 20 years after the revolution for rights held 20 years before it
Sources
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
- Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
- Jewels of Allah: The Untold Story of Women in Iran
- Awakening: The Story of the Iranian Revolution
The turn
And here is what each account cannot afford to say.
The republic's account presents itself as the restoration of tradition, and its founding doctrine was a break with the tradition. The senior clerics who said so are simply absent from the story it tells.
From the record
Khomeini's promises of pluralism and press freedom to Western journalists, abandoned within monthsThe systematic elimination of non-Islamist revolutionary allies between 1979 and 1988Senior Shia clerical opposition to velayat-e faqih from Najaf and QomThe 1988 mass executions carried out under Khomeini's direct orderSecular / Leftist: Hijacked Revolution
The left's account says the revolution was stolen, which is true and incomplete. Most of them backed Khomeini with their eyes open, believing that once the Shah was gone they could manage the cleric. They had years of evidence about his intentions. He had published them.
From the record
The left's own internal divisions and factional violence before the Islamic Republic eliminated themThe MEK's turn toward armed insurrection and alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq WarThe Tudeh's genuine ties to Soviet intelligence, which the regime exploited but did not fabricateThe popular support Khomeini retained even as he eliminated rivals; the clergy were not universally opposedThe American account explains the rage and not the shape. Nineteen fifty three tells you why Iranians were furious. It does not tell you why the mosque network beat the Marxists to the outcome, and a story in which Iran is only something done to it by Washington removes Iranians from their own revolution.
From the record
The Shah's genuine modernization achievements, which American policy also enabledIranian agency; the revolution was not merely anti-American but was driven by internal forces the US could not have controlledThe left and liberal factions whose destruction the US did not causePost-hostage US policy that armed Saddam Hussein against Iran, including tolerance of Iraqi chemical weapons useMonarchist / Shah's Supporters
The monarchist account has real numbers behind it and the wrong conclusion drawn by its own protagonist. Told that his country had risen against him, he said he should have shot more people sooner.
From the record
The Shah's authoritarianism was not merely tactical but constitutional; he never permitted genuine political oppositionThe White Revolution's benefits were unevenly distributed, enriching urban elites while disrupting rural communitiesThe Rastakhiz single-party system (1975) foreclosed the possibility of reform from withinThe monarchist movement's own divisions and its failure to build a credible alternative from exileWomen's Rights: Liberation and Betrayal
And the women's account is the best documented and the least powerful. It is also the earliest warning anybody got. The decree came before the furniture of the old regime had been cleared out.
From the record
Women who supported the Islamic Republic and voluntarily adopted the veil as a rejection of Western cultural imperialismThe Shah's own instrumentalization of women's rights as proof of modernity for Western audiencesConservative women's movements within the Islamic Republic that expanded education and literacyThe class dimensions (the Shah's liberalization primarily benefited urban, upper-class women)
Close
The monarchy fell on the eleventh of February nineteen seventy nine. The Islamic Republic was proclaimed seven weeks later, after a referendum on the first of April, and it is governing Iran still.
Within twenty months it was at war with Iraq, for eight years, with chemical weapons used by both sides and somewhere between half a million and a million dead.
In nineteen eighty eight, thousands of political prisoners were hanged on the strength of a single order, and the state denied it for twenty eight years, until a recording of one of its own senior clerics objecting to it was leaked.
And the decree that fifteen thousand women marched against on the eighth of March, twenty five days after the monarchy fell, is still the law.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 13 mosQom protests
- Killed
- Revolutionary phase, January…
- Displaced
- 37MIran's population in 1979: approximately. The revolution…
- Place
- Iran
Key figures
- Ayatollah Ruhollah KhomeiniShia cleric and founder of the Islamic Republic; exiled in Turkey, Iraq, and France from 1964 to 1979; returned to Iran on February 1, 1979; served as Supreme Leader until his death on June 3, 1989; his theory of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) became the constitution's governing principle1902 to 1989
- Shah Mohammad Reza PahlaviShah of Iran from 1941 to 1979; restored to power by the CIA and MI6 in the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh; his SAVAK secret police, trained by the CIA and Mossad, tortured an estimated 3,000-4,000 political prisoners between 1963 and 1979; left Iran on January 16, 1979; died in exile in Cairo on July 27, 19801919 to 1980
- Mehdi BazarganFirst Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic (February-November 1979); liberal nationalist and leader of the Iran Freedom Movement; resigned on November 6, 1979, two days after the US Embassy seizure, saying the government had become "a knife without a blade"; the Islamic Republic had no further use for him1907 to 1995
- Marjane SatrapiIranian-French graphic novelist; Persepolis (2000) documented her childhood in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Tehran, the veil, the war, the executions, the parties held in secret; the book has sold over 2 million copies and is banned in Iran1969 to ?
- Ali ShariatiSociologist and Islamic revolutionary thinker who fused Marxist analysis with Shia theology; educated at the Sorbonne; his lectures at the Hosseinieh Ershad drew thousands of young Iranians in the early 1970s; died in Southampton, England, on June 18, 1977, 18 months before the revolution he helped inspire; SAVAK is widely suspected of involvement in his death1933 to 1977
- Abolhassan BanisadrFirst elected president of the Islamic Republic (January 1980-June 1981); fled to France after impeachment by the Majlis; spent 40 years in Parisian exile; died on October 9, 2021, having outlived the system that expelled him1933 to 2021
Primary sources
· Speech at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, Tehran, February 1, 1979, upon returning from exile · February 1, 1979
“I shall kick their teeth in. I appoint the government. I appoint a government with the backing of this nation.”
· The final version of the slogan replaced earlier variants (some had ended with "Iranian Republic" or simply "Freedom"), reflecting Khomeini's consolidation of the revolution's direction · Late 1978 - early 1979
“Esteqlal, Azadi, Jomhuri-ye Eslami. [Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic.]”
· Statement upon resigning as Prime Minister on November 6, 1979, after failing to prevent the US Embassy seizure · November 6, 1979
“No one listens to me. I am a knife without a blade.”
· Remark to aides during exile, reported in Abbas Milani, The Shah (2011) · 1979
“I should have been more severe from the start. This would not have happened.”
Threads
- The Iran-Iraq WarKhomeini took power in February 1979. Nineteen months later Saddam tore up the Algiers Agreement and invaded, betting that the revolution's purges of the officer corps had left Iran unable to fight. The war became the crucible that entrenched the Islamic Republic the revolution had created.
- The Six-Day WarNasser's secular pan-Arabism died in six days in 1967. The vacuum it left was filled over the next twelve years by political Islam, which took power in Tehran in 1979 and reframed the conflict with Israel in religious rather than nationalist terms
- The Rise of IslamWithin 100 years of the first revelation, Islam stretched from Spain to the borders of China. The Byzantine and Sassanid empires were gone.