The Iranian Revolution (Persian: انقلاب ایران or Enqelâbe Irân), also known as the Islamic Revolution or 1979 Revolution, was a turning point in Iran's history, marking the end of the country's long monarchy and the beginning of the current Islamic theocracy that rules the country.
The revolution sparked off in 1977, when the chief aide and eldest son of Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric who had been exiled from Iran due to his opposition to the Shah and Iran's close cooperation with Israel and the extension of diplomatic immunity to US government personnel in Iran, mysteriously died in Najaf, Iraq on the 23rd of October, 1977. Though the Iraqi government claimed his death was due to a heart attack, many believed that SAVAK, a now-defunct Iranian secret police, domestic security and intelligence service established by the Shah, were responsible for it. While Ruhollah Khomeini remained silent, a wave of protest and mourning ceremonies were held in major cities as the news was broken. However, these ceremonies went beyond the religious credentials of the family, and the mourning was given a political cast by Khomeini's political credentials, their enduring opposition to the monarchy and their exile.
Protests began in 1978, with the denouncement of Khomeini as a "British agent" and a "mad Indian poet" conspiring to sell out Iran to neo-colonialists and communists in the national daily Ettela'at newspaper. This angered religious seminary students in the city of Qom, resulting in them clashing with police, with casualty figures varying between 2 to 70 with over 500 injured. Khomeini then encouraged radical Shi'ite clerics to pressure the mosques and moderate clergy to commemorate the deaths of the students, with demonstrations breaking out in many Iranian cities, during which "Western" and government symbols such as cinemas, bars, state-owned banks, and police stations were set ablaze in Tabriz, with deadly riots occurring.
The Shah, though taken completely by surprise, continued his plan of liberalization that had started in 1977. The protests seemed to have died off in the summer of 1978 after remaining at a steady rate for four months, but it didn't last long. On August 8th, in the city of Abadan, Cinema Rex was set ablaze by four arsonists who had barred the door. Over 400 people were burned to death in the theatre, with the event being the largest terror attack in history until 9/11. The public blamed the Shah for the deaths, despite the government insisting they had nothing to do with the fire, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets with protests escalating in major cities, shouting "Burn the Shah!" and "The Shah is the guilty one!". Making matters worse was that this was the month of Ramadan, and the Amuzegar administration cut spending and reduced business in an attempt to dampen inflation, but the cutbacks led to a sharp rise in layoffs, particularly among young, unskilled, male workers living in the working class districts, leading to the working class joining the protest in massive numbers.
Protesters started calling for Khomeini's return and the establishment of an Islamic republic after Eid-e-Fitr, the 4th of September, during which an Islamic clergy directed a crowd of thousand of people on a large march through the center of Tehran, and even larger protests started in the following days. Martial law was declared by the Shah in Tehran and 11 other major cities throughout the country at midnight on the 8th of September, with all street demonstration being banned, and a night-time curfew being established. However, 5,000 protesters took to the streets anyways, and faced off with soldiers at Jaleh Square. After failing to disperse the crowd with warning shots, the soldiers opened fire on the mob, killing 64 people, and later clashes brought the death toll to 89, with the opposition to the Shah calling the day Black Friday.
The deaths shocked the country, and damaged any attempt at reconciliation between the Shah and the opposition, with Khomeini declaring that 4,000 innocent protesters were massacred by Zionists. While the Shah was horrified by the events and harshly criticized them, it did little to shift the blame of the shooting from him in the eyes of the public. The government decided not to break up any more demonstrations or strikes despite martial law still officially being in effect, instead attempting to negotiate with protest leaders. The day after Black Friday, 700 workers at Tehran's main oil refinery went on strike, followed by other workers in five other cities and central government workers in Tehran over the next few days. By October, a nationwide general strike was declared, with workers in virtually all major industries walking off their jobs, most damagingly in the oil industry and the print media, and special "strike committees" being set up throughout major industries to organize and coordinate the activities.
Khomeini soon left Iraq and moved Neauphle-le-Château in France. There, he continued his sermons, and thanks to superior French telephone and postal connections, his supporters flooded Iran with recordings and tapes of them. Khomeini was also brought into the spotlight by Western media, especially the BBC, portraying himself as an "Eastern mystic" who did not seek power, but instead sought to "free" his people from "oppression", and became a household name, while also eroding the influence of other, more moderate clergy. The now official alliance of the clergy and secular opposition was signaled in November, when National Front leader Karim Sanjabi flew to Paris to meet Khomeini, with the two signing an agreement for a draft constitution that would be "Islamic and democratic", hiding Khomeini's intentions to create a theocracy by placing Westernized figures as public spokesmen of the opposition.
The 5th of November became known as "The Day Tehran Burned", with Tehran breaking into a full scale riot after demonstrations at the University of Tehran became deadly after a fight broke out with armed soldiers, with block after block of Western symbols such as movie theaters and department stores, as well as government and police buildings, being seized, looted, and burned, including the British embassy. In December, the Muharram protests began, with over two million protesters taking to the streets, and the number quickly grew to six-to-nine million on the days of Tasu'a and Ashura (the 10th and 11th of December).
The Shah stepped down from power later in December, and in January, 1979, left with his family to exile in Egypt, with Shahpour Bakhtiar coming into power as Iran's prime minister. Virtually every remaining sign of the monarchy was torn down, and SAVAK was dissolved. Khomeini returned to Iran on the 1st of February to the fanfare of millions of Iranians, and made clear his rejection of Bakhtiar's government in a speech, declaring a provisional revolutionary government on the 5th of February in the Refah School of Tehran and appointing opposition leader Mehdi Bazargan as his own prime minister, while commanding Iranians to obey Bazargan as a religious duty.
Tensions between the two rival governments ran high, and members of Bakhtiar's government defected to Khomeini's, with the military crumbling due to its leadership being paralyzed, with many soldiers unsure of whether to support Bakhtiar or act on their own, and becoming demoralized or deserting. On the 9th of February, a rebellion of pro-Khomeini air force technicians broke out at the Doshan Tappeh Air Base and captured machine guns from a nearby weapons factory, giving them to civilians who had joined in on the fighting. The non-Islamist government's final collapse came on the 11th of February, when the Supreme Military Council declared itself "neutral in the current political disputes... in order to prevent further disorder and bloodshed.", ordering all military personnel back to their bases, essentially handing Khomeini the keys to the country. Government buildings, TV and radio stations, and palaces of the Pahlavi dynasty were taken over by the revolutionaries, marking the end of the Iranian monarchy, and Baktiar was chased out of the palace, fleeing Iran under disguise, with the period in-between the 1st and 11th of February in Iran being celebrated every year as the "Decade of Fajr", with the 11th being declared a national holiday called "Islamic Revolution's Victory Day".
Of course, the revolution had consequences. The Iranian army was purged by the Mullahs, with the traditional military being sidelined in favor of new, ideologically motivated militias, such as the Pasdaran—"The Revolutionary Guards", the air force was crippled, and the U.S. suspended the supply of spare parts. Khomeini crushed the rival factions who had piled onto the movement to grab power and consolidated his own power, and the Iran hostage crisis started later in November 1979. Iran's Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf were alarmed by Iranian Islamic revolutionaries calling for the overthrow of monarchies and their replacement with Islamic republics, kicking off the Iran–Iraq War. Iran ran into difficult relations with some Western countries due to the overthrow of the Western-friendly monarchy, coming under constant unilateral sanctions by the US, which were tightened under Bill Clinton's presidency, and the UK suspending all diplomatic relations.
To this day, the Iranian Revolution is primarily viewed in a negative light in the west, owing in large amount to the overt anti-American philosophies of Khomeini and his followers; the phrase "death to America" still defines western perceptions of the country to this day (though as residents of Iran will be quick to point out, "death to America" typically means something closer to a "fuck you" than a literal call for death; PBS travel writer Rick Steves once reported that it's common in Iran to shout things like "death to traffic" during rush hour). When TIME Magazine picked Khomeini as their person of the year in 1979 for his leading of the revolution, they saw such heavy backlash that they immediately reoriented the "Person of the Year" category to favor people who wouldn't stoke much controversy among readers, save for their traditional picks of newly-elected US presidents (most notably Donald Trump, whose pick was similarly mistaken for an endorsement at first). The US has never gone to outright war with Iran in the decades since the revolution, but political relations between the two still remain at fierce odds, long after Khomeini's death in 1989.
In the Eastern Bloc, meanwhile, things were more complicated; while the Soviet Union was quick to recognize the new regime, Khomeini denounced the USSR as a "Lesser Satan," beaten out only by the "Great Satan" that was the United States. Consequently, the Soviets sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (helped by Saddam Hussein officially positioning himself as a socialist), though still ended up funneling arms to Iran through North Korea. Russo-Iranian relations would improve in the last years of the Soviet Union, with Khomeini even writing
to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 urging him to make Russia an Islamic theocracy like Iran, claiming that Marxism was "a materialistic ideology" that "cannot meet any of the real needs of mankind" and that "true faith in God" was necessary to defend against capitalist encroachment. While neither Gorbachev nor his successors followed up on the idea, with Vladimir Putin instead building connections with Eastern Orthodox Christian leadership, this allyship would only further strengthen in the years following the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991.
In hindsight, the Iranian Revolution radically changed the way revolutions as a whole were perceived. The event was marked by absolutely none of the circumstances or motives that had characterized previous revolutions (e.g. wartime defeat, military discontent, or economic/class struggle), occurred in a country that was already economically prosperous before its onset, produced a radical amount of social change within a short span of time, and instituted a theocratic government rather than a secular democracy or secular dictatorship (academics generally characterize Khomeini as a dictator, but one who ruled through fundamentalist interpretation of religious law). Even though the aftermath of the revolution was marked by violence, the fact that the event itself was one without direct military conflict also directly contrasted the common image of revolutions as armed uprisings, having a noticeable impact on the way later revolutions were conducted (for better or for worse). Among other things, events like the June Democracy Movement in South Korea and the anti-Soviet demonstrations in the Eastern Bloc owed a great deal to the relative nonviolence of the Iranian Revolution and its demonstration that it is indeed possible to take down a government without the need for military conflict.
