He said he was going to take “a long vacation,” but no one believed him even then. On January 16, 1979, Reza Pahlavi fled Tehran at the controls of his Boeing 727 (“the Shah's falcon”) while millions of Iranians took to the streets to celebrate his departure. Until the previous day he had been known as the “center of the universe and shadow of the Almighty,” but, just a few hours after he took off, the crowd was tearing down statues of him.
The people celebrating those “holidays” were as diverse as the shah's list of enemies: from the Shia mullahs, enraged by his attempts to limit the influence of religion, to the communists, persecuted by his secret police; from the unemployed young people who had fled the countryside to the urban middle class who saw their standard of living continue to decline despite the oil boom; from those who remembered the coup of the Shah and the CIA against a democratic government twenty-five years ago to the families who mourned the protesters murdered only a few weeks ago...
Hope was as great as uncertainty: a country that had been under different monarchies for 2,500 years had been left without a king and it was not clear what was going to happen. In one of his last acts of government, the Shah had appointed Shahpur Bakhtiar, a nationalist leader who had demanded his departure from the country and who had gone to jail, as prime minister.
However, millions of Iranians were already looking at Neauphle-le-Château, a small town on the outskirts of Paris where a septuagenarian mullah named Ruhollah Khomeini had lived for a few months.
Today we know that Khomeini was going to murder thousands of people and establish a theocratic dictatorship that still exists, but that January 1979 many of his future victims enthusiastically received him when he returned to Iran two weeks after the Shah's flight.
He was a symbol: his criticism of the monarch and the influence of the United States in the country had led him, first, to prison and, then, to a fifteen-year exile. Recordings of his speeches on cassette tapes had spread like wildfire among opponents during the dictatorship, and many Iranian democrats considered him an example of resistance.
When the Ayatollah landed in Tehran on February 1, millions of people took to the streets. The communist leader Farrokh Negahdar, who had spent a decade in prison and not precisely because of his religiosity, told the Financial Times, years later, that he and his companions decided to go out into the streets to receive Khomeini. The ayatollah's advisors confirmed the story: “among the crowd I saw the old left-wing activists, those impious communists, with banners welcoming the ayatollah. He made me smile,” Mohsen Sazegara said.
Unlike his advisor, Khomeini was not one to smile and, furthermore, he had a very clear idea of what place awaited those “ungodly” in the new Iran. Since the early seventies he had formulated his theory of “Velayat-e Faqih”, or “guardian Islamic jurist”, which meant that Shiite religious people were the most suitable to lead society. The revolution that had ousted the Shah had been diverse and unitary, but the regime that was going to replace him would be exclusive, claustrophobic, and with a level of repression that would surpass that of the previous dictatorship.
The Bakhtiar government, which had tried to prevent Khomeini's return, was no match for his popularity. He declared martial law and curfew when the ayatollah appointed a parallel government, but he responded by inviting his people to take to the streets and ignore the restrictions.
When the Shah's inherited army announced that it would remain neutral in the conflict, the die was cast: eleven days after Khomeini's arrival, Bakhtiar retraced his path and went into exile in France, where he was assassinated a few years later by agents of the Shah. government of Iran.
However, there was still some hope that the shift would not be towards outright extremism. The provisional government was headed by Mehdí Bazargan, a liberal and moderate leader who had confronted the shah and had also been imprisoned, although he would be the first to later recognize that he had little real power. Just a month after his return, Khomeini had already decreed mandatory veiling for women, but at least the measure still brought tens of thousands of Iranians to the streets.
Soon those types of freedoms were going to disappear. At the end of that same month, Iranians approved the creation of “an Islamic republic” in a referendum in which they were given no other option. A month later, Khomeini created (again by decree) the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the great instrument of repression that would ensure the ultra character of the new republic until today. By the constituent elections that summer, millions of Iranians had already become disenchanted with the march of the revolution, and it showed at the polls.
Faced with the boycott of sectors that had been key to the expulsion of the Shah (nationalists, leftists, women, moderate Islamists...), participation fell, but Khomeini also ensured that the "assembly of experts" in charge of drafting the The new constitution was dominated by religious and fundamentalist figures, who produced a text tailored to their postulates of “Velayat-e Faqih”, or “guardian Islamic jurist”: the last word officially remained in the hands of the ayatollahs.
Just two years before the revolution, in one of the worst-aging phrases in the history of diplomacy, American President Jimmy Carter had toasted the Shah for his “great leadership,” which “had made Iran an island of stability". Nor did the US from then know how to analyze very well what was happening and how Tehran was going to go from being one of its main allies to a declared enemy.
In the midst of the Cold War, the US saw Iran as a key power not only because of its role in the Middle East, but because of the immense border it shared with the USSR. In that context, there were those in Washington who believed that Khomeini, with his religious ultra-conservatism, could be an acceptable guarantee that Iran would not end up being an ally of Moscow, given that the communists had been very active in opposing the shah.
They were wrong in this too. Khomeini was tough against the communists, but his hatred of Washington was also very real. In the early days of Bazargan's provisional government, he had prevented radicals from storming the American embassy, but when news emerged that Carter had allowed the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment, the "revolutionary committees" Fundamentalists who already controlled the streets took over the embassy and took fifty Americans hostage.
Those “students” had the full support of Khomeini, which led to the resignation of the Bazargan government in protest. Far from weakening the ultras, the “official” power vacuum put all real power in the hands of Khomeini and the Revolutionary Guard. Supported by a supposed fight against “Western influence” or the “anti-Islam positions” of leftists and moderates, it is estimated that, in its first ten years, the regime was able to murder twenty thousand dissidents, the vast majority of them young. The eight-year war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq also strengthened the hardline sectors.
Of the broad front that made the revolution against the Shah, only the clerics and their faithful remained. The president who forced the monarch's departure, Bakhtiar, was murdered in France by agents of the ayatollahs. The president of the first provisional government of the revolution, Bazargan, lasted a few months and spent the rest of his life facing the guardians of the revolution, who outlawed his party and did not allow him to run again. The first elected president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhasan Banisadr, was deposed and forced into exile after a year and a half.
Meanwhile, the figure of the “supreme leader” created for Khomeini and his “guardian council” continues to have the ability to prevent candidacies, veto laws and control key aspects of security, defense and the apparatus of repression. Forty-five years after the fall of the Shah, thousands of Iranians who saw hope in it and who fought to make it come true have been murdered, tortured, detained or forced into exile. Forty-five years after the revolution, the vast majority of the promises of January 1979 remain unfulfilled.
