The Iranian Revolution

1979: a 20th-century revolution made in the name of the 7th. The Middle East has not recovered.

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The brief

In January 1979, the Shah of Iran — one of Washington's most heavily armed regional allies, ruler of an oil-rich, militarily powerful, modernizing state — left his country on a 'vacation' from which he would never return. Two weeks later, an exiled Shia cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini flew home from a Paris suburb to a roaring crowd of millions and set about founding an Islamic Republic. The Shah's secret police, the SAVAK, had jailed and tortured dissidents for years; his White Revolution had modernized from the top down and alienated clergy, bazaar, and poor alike. It was a modern revolution with few precedents: a mass uprising that placed clerical rule at the centre of a major state.

The revolution had an ecumenical coalition behind it — secular liberals, Marxist guerrillas, bazaaris, women's-rights activists, students — united more by hatred of the Shah than by any shared vision. Mass strikes, above all in the oilfields, had paralyzed the state through 1978, and cassette tapes of Khomeini's sermons smuggled in from exile gave the movement a voice the SAVAK could not silence. Within two years, Khomeini's clerical faction had outmaneuvered, purged, exiled, or executed the rest, and installed a constitution built on velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist, that combined elected institutions with a Supreme Leader's veto over them — a structure that has proved remarkably durable. The new regime seized the U.S. embassy and held fifty-two Americans for 444 days, crippling Carter's foreign policy and helping sink his re-election campaign; fought an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, who invaded in 1980 expecting easy gains, that left hundreds of thousands dead and perhaps a million casualties and entrenched the Revolutionary Guard at the heart of the state and economy; built and armed Hezbollah in Lebanon and backed Hamas; pursued a nuclear program that has been the subject of forty years of negotiation, sabotage, and sanctions; and presents itself as the defender of Shia Muslims worldwide — a self-conception that has produced a regional cold war with Sunni Saudi Arabia waged by proxy from Yemen to Syria to Lebanon. Inside Iran, the revolution's promises of social justice and independence have been substantially betrayed; the Green Movement of 2009, the 2019 fuel protests, and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising were each met with lethal crackdowns.

Why nowThe Iranian Revolution is the prior the Middle East has been operating under for nearly half a century. Almost every regional crisis — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Israel-Hamas war, the Iranian nuclear question, the direct Iran–Israel exchanges that began in 2024 and have recurred since — runs through 1979. A regime that built its legitimacy on anti-Americanism and Shia clerical rule has outlived nearly every Western prediction of its imminent collapse, even as its founding generation ages, its proxy network has frayed badly since 2024 under Israeli pressure, and its own population, much of it born after the revolution, grows visibly estranged from it.