Today, Iran is the world’s only major theocracy.
The so-called Islamic Republic is ran on Shi’a
Muslim principles, and the state’s most
powerful figure is a Muslim cleric,
currently the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But
until 1979, Iran was a secular monarchy,
under a ruler called the Shah, so then, what made
his political system fail and why did the people
of Iran replace monarchy with religious rule?
What was it that caused the Iranian Revolution?
Well, Iran actually experienced three
different revolutions over the course
of its tumultuous 20th century. The first two
set the stage for the infamous events of 1979.
Before that revolution, Iran, known outside of
the country as Persia, had been at the centre
of a succession of empires going back for some
three thousand years. A variety of different
imperial dynasties ruled over Iran during
that time, though the most important ones,
when looking at the modern state, were: the
Safavids who brought Shi’a Islam to Persia,
as well as the Qajars, and the
final Iranian dynasty, the Pahlavi.
Iranians had been Muslim in one way or another
for centuries before the Safavids, but Islam
has a number of different sub-denominations.
The largest of which, by far, is Sunni Islam
(which the Safavids largely wiped out in Iran). In
a distant second place is their favoured Shi’ism.
To oversimplify considerably, the main
dispute between the Sunni and the Shi’a
surrounds the right to lead the Islamic
community, with the Shi’a believing that the
grandson of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, Husayn
ibn Ali, was wrongly denied that leadership,
and that only his descendants have the legitimacy
to lead the faith. Though, the first Safavid
Shah was mostly interested in Shi’ism because
his rivals, the neighbouring Ottoman Empire,
were Sunni. That choice saw Persia become one of
the few Islamic countries with a Shi’a majority.
And it stayed that way under the Qajar dynasty
which ruled for a long time and did a lot of
things, but importantly for our purposes, it
stuck to autocracy until the early 20th century,
and it allowed Persia to come under the
influence of foreign, non-Muslim, powers. Which,
not surprisingly, made both secular and religious
Iranians quite unhappy. And that brings us to the
first of our three Iranian revolutions,
the Constitutional Revolution of 1905.
So, the most important consequence of the
Constitutional Revolution was the creation of the
Majlis, or an elected Persian parliament, which
actually still exists under the Islamic Republic
today. The second most important consequence
was that the revolution was messy; no one liked
autocracy, but different liberal, conservative,
secular, and religious factions of revolutionaries
wanted very different futures for Persia.
(That’s going to be a common theme, by the way).
The new Majlis was divided and thus weak, so
Mohammad Ali Shah, the 2nd to last Qajar Shah,
struck back with the help of Russia;
that made the Qajars even more unpopular.
For the next decade and a half Persia
was in a near-constant state of chaos.
It didn’t help that the British and
Russian empires had formally split
Persia into spheres of influence in 1907, only
for WW1 to break out less than a decade later.
The Persian theatre saw Russians and Brits face
off against the Ottomans in northern Persia,
despite the fact that the Qajar state was
officially neutral. Famine and disease, partly
caused and partly exacerbated by the war, killed
at least a quarter of the Persian population.
The Constitutional Revolution, on the whole
then, failed; it flirted with democracy,
but didn’t fundamentally change
the system that governed Iran.
However it did discredit the Qajar dynasty
completely, and in 1921 a prominent
officer in the imperial army, Reza Khan, carried
out a coup against them. The Majlis would make him
the new Shah, as Reza Shah Pahlavi, in 1925. In
spite of the fact that he was formally installed
by an elected body, Reza Shah was very much
an autocrat, in part because Shi’a clerics
saw democracy or republicanism as a threat to
religiosity. However, their insistence on keeping
power in a Shah’s hands ultimately was not one
that served their interests. Reza Shah set out
to modernise his country including by enhancing
education, building rail transport, developing
Iran’s oil reserves, and removing aristocratic
elements from Persia’s bureaucracy and military;
obviously his support for meritocracy didn’t
extend to his position as Shah. In regards
to religion, Reza Shah saw Shi’ism and Islam
generally as foreign concepts, and emphasized
Persia’s pre-Islamic history as a key part of
Iranian identity. Following in that vein, he
officially changed the country’s English name from
the exonym “Persia” to the traditional “Iran”.
Reza Shah failed to solve the problem of
foreign influence in Iran though, and in 1941,
fearing that he might give Germany access
to Iran’s newly-exploited oil reserves,
Britain and the Soviet Union (Russia had gone
through its own revolution) invaded. Reza Shah
was deposed in favour of his son, Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi. Often referred to as just
“the Shah” as he was the last one. Mohammad Reza
was much more willing than Reza Shah to support
the westernisation of his country. Notably, he
helped Britain and the United States carry out
a coup against his own government in 1953, after
that government, led by a prominent republican,
Mohammad Mosaddeq, had coerced him into taking
control of Iran’s oil industry from the British.
Okay, so because of Western help, the Shah
was now effectively in total control of Iran,
and with that power, he began our 2nd Iranian
Revolution: the White Revolution. It kicked off
in 1963 and it lasted until the Shah’s overthrow
in 1979. The revolution consisted of 19 reforms
that struck at the very heart of Iranian
society and the economy. The Shah essentially
took his father’s modernization efforts and
ramped them up to eleven. Among other things,
the White Revolution saw millions of peasant
families become property owners as the state
purchased land from feudal landlords and
redistributed it to them. Literacy and
health services were built in the countryside, and
secular education was mandated for all children.
Iran’s cities were revitalised with the building
of new infrastructure, as well as libraries,
parks and schools, and women’s rights were
enshrined in law, including the right to vote.
All though, to be fair, that right was more
symbolic than anything else given that the
Shah was unelected, he did what he wanted,
and the Majlis had no real power to stop him.
His secret police, the SAVAK, enforced his will
across Iran, and anyone who spoke up against the
Shah was not in for a good time. In the early
years of the White Revolution, his power was
absolute. The Shah’s reforms caused his
economy to boom, the material benefits of
which placated much of his secular opposition,
and created a new middle-class. That being said,
it was also very much the case that a lot of
Iran’s new wealth ended up in the pocket of
the Shah personally, as well as the western
oil companies whose governments backed him.
However as the 1960s became
the 70s Iran’s economy,
and subsequently Mohammad Reza Shah’s
appeal, began to take a turn for the worse,
and while many Iranians were unhappy
with their government, one man quite
literally became the face of opposition to
the Shah: the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
While wealth may have temporarily pacified some
reformists, it did not appeal to the Shi’a clergy
who, not wrongly, believed that the Shah wanted
them sidelined. Khomeini was a politically-minded,
respected clergyman who was exiled from Iran
after inspiring failed protests against the
reforms of the White Revolution. In neighbouring
Iraq, he developed a system of government called
the Guardianship of the Jurist under which
secular governments would be wiped away,
and experienced clergy (which, funnily enough,
included himself) would rule on Earth until a
descendant of Shi’ism’s Husayn ibn Ali revealed
himself. It should be noted that while Khomeini’s
views were to become popular in Iran, not all
Shiites, including not all Iranian Shiites,
believe that separation of church
and state is incompatible with Islam.
That being said, despite him being outside
the country, Khomeini’s ideas began to gain
significant traction amongst Iranians, and that,
combined with Pahlavi Iran’s economic downturn
(as it would happen, basically relying on a bunch
of oil money isn’t the best way to run an economy)
saw the country’s political stability start to
crumble. In response, the Shah, under US pressure,
decided to back down… as little as he possibly
could. What’s important is that a previously
outlawed democracy-supporting organisation,
the Freedom Movement of Iran, was allowed to
reorganise. By late 1978 then, the seeds of
our third and final revolution, the Islamic
Revolution of 1979, were sown. It’s commonly
referred to as just the Iranian Revolution.
The economically repressed youth of
Iran, democrats, and the Shi’a community,
rallying around Khomeini, were now
ready to openly oppose the Shah.
In August, public protests against the
operations of the SAVAK broke out, and
the Shah declared martial law. So, in September
more protests erupted in the capital against,
well, martial law. The protesters called for the
end of the monarchy and the return of Khomeini to
Iran. By then he was operating out of France, and
had become an internationally noteworthy figure.
The revolutionaries clashed, often violently,
with the Iranian army, which was actually a fairly
well-equipped and trained force due to western
aid. The United States, in particular, had no wish
to see an Islamic government take over Iran, and
while it did occasionally criticise his tactics,
the US most definitely was on the Shah’s side.
The same could not be said about the army that
it helped build, parts of which abandoned the
Shah and joined the revolutionaries in December.
Without them, Mohammad Reza Shah, in the
face of near-universal public opposition,
realised, quite rightly, that his time
was up, and he fled the country for Egypt,
never to return. Ayatollah Khomeini arrived
triumphant in Iran on February 1st, 1979.
But his job was not quite done; the Shah was
gone, but Iran adopting the Guardianship of the
Jurist as its new political system was far from a
certainty. Most Iranians did, at least nominally,
want an Islamic Republic, but whether or not they
understood and wanted what Khomeini was offering,
and what Iran ultimately got, remains
a matter of scholarly debate. It was a
secular provisional government that initially
replaced the Shah. One led by a democrat,
and a member of the Freedom
Movement of Iran, Mehdi Bazargan.
But Khomeini, by using his widespread support with
the population, was able to pressure Bazargan’s
government into doing basically whatever he
wanted. So, Iran’s new constitution would have
an elected president and a prime minister, not
dissimilar to western democracies like Germany,
France, or Italy, but it would also have another
position, one that would be held for life by
Khomeini. He became the first Supreme
Leader of Iran, the paramount religious,
social, and political authority in the country.
New Supreme Leaders were to be chosen by a
so-called Assembly of Experts made up of Shi’a
Clerics. While the Majlis would remain, and even
be given more power than it had under the Shah, a
new Guardian Council, half of the members of which
are directly appointed by the Supreme Leader,
was given power to oversee and veto legislation.
Over the course of the 20th century,
the Iranian people demonstrated themselves to
be quite unwilling to put up with oppression.
They’ve now been trialling their
Islamic Republic for over forty years.
Whether they will allow for it to persist
into the decades to come remains to be seen.
While Iran’s monarchy was toppled, another
Middle-Eastern state, Saudi Arabia,
retains a powerful one to this day. To find
out how that happened, you can check out the
video to the left. If you enjoyed this one,
though, don’t forget to subscribe for more,
and as always, I’ve been James and thank
you for watching Look Back History.
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