Revolution
In January 1978, incensed by what they considered to be slanderous remarks made against Khomeini in
Eṭṭelāʿāt, a
Tehrān newspaper, thousands of young
madrasah (religious school) students took to the streets. They were followed by thousands more Iranian youth—mostly unemployed recent immigrants from the countryside—who began protesting the regime’s excesses. The shah, weakened by cancer and stunned by the sudden outpouring of hostility against him, vacillated between
concession and repression, assuming the protests to be part of an international
conspiracy against him. Many people were killed by government forces in anti-regime protests, serving only to fuel the violence in a Shīʿite country where martyrdom played a fundamental role in religious expression. Fatalities were followed by demonstrations to
commemorate the customary 40-day milestone of mourning in Shīʿite tradition, and further casualties occurred at those protests, mortality and protest propelling one another forward. Thus, in spite of all government efforts, a cycle of violence began in which each death fueled further protest, and all protest—from the secular left and religious right—was subsumed under the cloak of Shīʿite
Islam and crowned by the revolutionary rallying cry
Allāhu akbar (“God is great”), which could be heard at protests and which issued from the rooftops in the evenings.
The violence and disorder continued to escalate. On September 8 the regime imposed
martial law, and troops opened fire against demonstrators in Tehrān, killing dozens or hundreds. Weeks later, government workers began to
strike. On October 31, oil workers also went on strike, bringing the oil industry to a halt. Demonstrations continued to grow; on December 10, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tehrān alone.
During his exile, Khomeini coordinated this upsurge of opposition—first from
Iraq and after 1978 from France—demanding the shah’s abdication. In January 1979, in what was officially described as a “vacation,” the shah and his family fled Iran. The Regency Council established to run the country during the shah’s absence proved unable to function, and Prime Minister
Shahpur Bakhtiar, hastily appointed by the shah before his departure, was incapable of effecting compromise with either his former National Front colleagues or Khomeini. Crowds in excess of one million demonstrated in Tehrān, proving the wide appeal of Khomeini, who arrived in Iran amid wild rejoicing on February 1. Ten days later, on February 11, Iran’s armed forces declared their neutrality, effectively ousting the shah’s regime. Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find exile in
France.
Aftermath
On April 1, following overwhelming support in a national referendum, Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic republic. Elements within the clergy promptly moved to exclude their former left-wing, nationalist, and
intellectual allies from any positions of power in the new regime, and a return to conservative social values was enforced. The Family Protection Act (1967; significantly
amended in 1975), which provided further guarantees and rights to women in marriage, was declared void, and mosque-based revolutionary bands known as
komītehs (Persian: “committees”) patrolled the streets enforcing Islamic codes of dress and behaviour and dispatching
impromptu justice to perceived enemies of the revolution. Throughout most of 1979 the
Revolutionary Guards—then an informal religious militia formed by Khomeini to forestall another CIA-backed coup as in the days of Mosaddeq—engaged in similar activity, aimed at intimidating and repressing political groups not under control of the ruling Revolutionary Council and its sister Islamic Republican Party, both clerical organizations loyal to Khomeini. The violence and brutality often exceeded that which had taken place under the shah.
The militias and the clerics they supported made every effort to suppress Western cultural influence, and, facing persecution and violence, many of the Western-educated elite fled the country. This anti-Western
sentiment eventually manifested itself in the November 1979 seizure of 66 hostages at the U.S. embassy by a group of Iranian protesters demanding the extradition of the shah, who at that time was undergoing medical treatment in the United States (
see Iran hostage crisis). Through the embassy takeover, Khomeini’s supporters could claim to be as “anti-imperialist” as the political left. This ultimately gave them the ability to suppress most of the regime’s left-wing and moderate opponents.
The Assembly of Experts (Majles-e Khobregān), overwhelmingly dominated by clergy, put a new constitution to referendum the following month, and it was overwhelmingly approved. The new constitution created a religious government based on Khomeini’s vision of
velāyat-e faqīh (Persian: “governance of the jurist”) and gave sweeping powers to the
rahbar, or leader; the first
rahbar was Khomeini himself. Moderates, such as provisional Prime Minister
Mehdi Bazargan and the republic’s first president,
Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, who opposed holding the hostages, were steadily forced from power by
conservatives within the government who questioned their revolutionary zeal.
Janet Afary The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
