What Led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution?

On the morning of February 1, 1979, millions of Iranians lined the streets of Tehran to welcome Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as he returned following 15 years in exile. Two weeks earlier, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Western-backed Shah who had reigned since 1941, had left the country in the face of accelerating protests.

Ten days after Khomeini’s return, his revolutionary allies took power and declared that Iran would move to become an Islamic Republic, with Khomeini in control. The 1979 Iranian Revolution instituted a massive political, social and cultural realignment for the nation of 38 million, with repercussions around the region and the world that continue to play out today.

Although the 1979 revolution grew out of widespread popular dissatisfaction with the Shah’s policies and repressive rule, many of the grievances it sought to address extend much further, to British, Russian and U.S. moves for influence in Iran, from the 19th century through the Cold War.

“The resentment of foreign aggression, of foreigners taking advantage of a weak Iran is a through line through Iranian history of the last couple of centuries,” says Barbara Slavin, a veteran Middle East journalist and Iran policy expert.

The British had helped to install the Shah’s father in 1921, and along with the Soviets had forced him to abdicate in favor of his son in 1941. A 1953 CIA-assisted military coup had helped the younger Shah, who had been briefly sidelined by a nationalist prime minister, to consolidate power. In 1963, the Shah launched the “White Revolution,” which aimed to modernize Iran through land reforms, infrastructure projects, economic controls and the extension of voting rights.

Although the Shah sought approval for these policies in public referendums, he also shored up his status as the country’s sole ruler, taking the title Shahanshah (“King of Kings”) and hosting grandiose celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of the ancient Persian Empire.

Those who protested his actions faced persecution from the Shah’s notorious SAVAK secret police. Nevertheless, opposition movements began to form across the political spectrum. One early notable opponent was a revered Shia Muslim cleric based in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, who had been forced into exile in 1964 after he denounced the Shah for granting diplomatic favors to the United States: Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.

Throughout 1978, a repeating cycle of protests, violent crackdowns and new protests shook the Shah’s hold on power: January in Qom, February in Tabriz, March and May in dozens of cities including Tehran. The opposition movements were diverse—ranging from leftists to pro-democracy centrists to Islamists like Khomeini’s movement. On August 19, arsonists set deadly fire to a cinema in Abadan, killing more than 400. The identity of the terrorists behind the blaze remains disputed, but Khomeini blamed the Shah and SAVAK, and many Iranians agreed. In September, troops fired on a massive Tehran demonstration marking the end of Ramadan, killing dozens more. Workers staged protest strikes, including in Iran’s crucial oil industry, and a nationwide general strike was declared in October.

In an attempt to control the crisis, the Shah appointed a military government and appealed directly to Iranians, acknowledging some of his regime’s missteps and offering to begin working with the opposition to restore democracy. From exile in France, Khomeini—by now broadly viewed globally and in Iran as the spiritual leader of the revolutionary movement—rejected the Shah’s conciliation and called for continued efforts to overthrow him. A few weeks later, the Shah left Iran to seek medical treatment, never to return.

With Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, many in the opposition still assumed that his leadership in a post-Shah Iran would be largely spiritual and symbolic, while a coalition of former resistance parties would govern. Instead, Khomeini and his allies quickly pushed to create a republic that would be solely guided by Islamic teaching and controlled by those who understood the religion best—the clerics.

Over the course of 1979, Khomeini and his allies worked to sideline various elements of the resistance. Some were driven into exile, others formed temporary alliances with the rulers but were later eliminated one by one from Iranian politics. Even so, aspects of civil society have persisted and at times pushed back against government and clerical control and repression.

Iran’s Islamic revolution was cemented by two galvanizing events that it helped to spur. During the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, dozens of U.S. diplomats were held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by hardline pro-Khomeini student protesters. With Khomeini’s eventual endorsement, what was initially planned as a short-term protest to spur the U.S. to return the Shah to Iran for prosecution, stretched for more than a year, creating a global image of a revolutionary Iran unafraid to stand up to outside powers (and likely influencing the outcome of the 1980 U.S. presidential election in the process).

Then in September of 1980, Saddam Hussein ordered Iraqi forces to attack Iran along their shared border, starting a bloody eight-year war that would cost hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives, while providing Iranians an additional outside aggressor to unite against.

One of the ironies of the 1979 Revolution is that Iran displaced one type of autocrat only for another to take over. For Slaven, it fits within the context of Iran’s broader history, but it also isn’t the whole story. Since the Revolution, Iran has maintained democratic elements, held elections (albeit among candidates vetted by the Guardian Council), and allowed a relatively vibrant press compared to many of its neighbors.

“Iran has 3,000 years of history of looking up to authoritarian leaders of one sort or another—whether they're shahs or emperors or kings,” she says. “There is that strain, but there's also the democratic strain dating to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, when Iran had the first elected parliament in the Middle East. It's not a dictatorship, it's not totalitarian, it's just Iran.”