Iranian Revolution

The 450 plus years of monarchial rule in Iran, which started with the Safavid dynasty in 1501, ended with the 1979 revolution which saw the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Phalvi collapse in the face of an organized popular movement (Hooglund, 2004). It had become difficult for the authoritarian regime, even though backed by the U.S., to survive in the increasingly democratic times. There were widespread movements against the regime throughout the late 1970’s. The main participants of these movements were the working class who had begun to be most seriously affected by the regime. The Shah attempted to suppress all the opposition using his security and intelligence organization, the SAVAK. This resulted in the jailing and torturing of some 20,000 political prisoners in a matter of years (Bhattacharya, 2008). But the determination of this movement can be analyzed from the fact that the protests began to grow both in numbers and in size. Some two million people gathered in Tehran on September 7, 1978 in what became one of the largest demonstrations in history. The movement, although initially started by workers and the urban poor, was joined by the intellectuals and the traditional clergy.

The movement, however, lacked leadership to determine where it was headed. Ayatullah Khomeini happened to be the leader who would be successful in uniting the diverse currents of discontent into a strong and unified anti-shah, anti-monarchy movement (Hooglund, 2004). Himself being exiled from Iran in 1965, Khomeini had had a history with the Shah and had been spreading his teachings in Iran through his students and his books. People saw in him the leader who would guide them to liberation from the authoritarian Shah regime. It is argued that, though his own teachings being based on fundamental Islam, Ayatullah Khomeini was accepted as the leader more because he was the solution to the Shah problem and not because of his own ideology (Bhattacharya, 2008). Khomeini himself did not even start the uprising; rather he only began to support it after it had started.

Shah’s absence from Iran in February of 1979 provided Khomeini the opportunity to return from exile. He refused to recognize the existing government (under Shahpur Bakhtiar) and rather appointed a provisional government headed by Mehdi Bazargan. This appointment was the proof of the existence of democratic elements in the revolution. These elements were not strong enough at the time to take on the Shah; therefore they had to support the Islamic movement which seemed at that time to be the quickest solution to the problem. The appointment of Bazargan, a liberal and a democrat, was also the indication of Khomeini’s ambivalence about the idea of a clerical rule (Bowden, 2009). Democrats, communists, socialists and plenty of “not so religious” were the participants of the constitutional convention convened to decide the shape of the future government. Khomeini had two options; secular leaders like Bazargan on one side and ambitious clerics on the other. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy by the Islamist students and the crowd’s support that they received allowed Khomeini to chose the clerics over the secularists. Thus religious oligarchy in the form of the Velayat-e-Fiqh (Islamic Government Authority of the Jurist) was the solution provided by Khomeini to the post-revolution Iran. Through this, he claimed supremecy of the clerical judges and claimed the supreme leadership in political as well as religious decision-making. He became the unquestionable supreme authority of the state, thus the religious monarch (Bhattacharya, 2008).