Kenneth Glad
Iranians face one of the most tumultuous periods since 1979. The nation’s future once again feels uncertain, and it is worth looking back at the revolution that reshaped Iran and continues to define its politics today.
On winter nights in 1978, chants of “Allāhu akbar” echoed from rooftops across Tehran. Oil workers were on strike. Shops were shuttered. Soldiers stood at key intersections as funeral processions wound through cities like Qom and Tabriz. Within months, one of the Middle East’s most heavily armed monarchies would collapse.
The Iranian Revolution was not triggered by a single spark. It emerged from years of political repression, rapid — and often jarring — modernization, economic strain, and deep resentment of foreign influence.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the uprising of 1978–79 drew in a strikingly broad coalition: Secular leftists, religious conservatives, students, merchants, intellectuals. The movement was described as cutting across class lines, reflecting how varied grievances converged into a single national revolt.
A Political System Under Strain
By the 1970s, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi governed through a tightly managed political system. Opposition parties were marginalized or banned outright. Critics risked censorship, detention, and surveillance by SAVAK, the regime’s security service.
The monarchy’s vulnerability, however, stretched back further. In 1953, the United States and Britain supported a coup that restored the shah to power after nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry.
That episode left a deep mark on Iran’s political memory. For many Iranians, it reinforced the idea that the monarchy’s survival depended on Western backing.
That perception lingered for decades. The shah’s close relationship with Washington — and ties with Israel — were portrayed by opponents as evidence of foreign influence over Iranian affairs. By the late 1970s, frustration with domestic repression had blended with long-standing suspicion of outside interference.
Growth, Oil Wealth — and Uneven Gains
The shah’s White Revolution, launched in the 1960s, aimed to modernize Iran at high speed. Land reform weakened traditional landowners. Infrastructure expanded. Literacy and public health campaigns reached rural areas. Industrial development accelerated, especially after oil prices surged in 1973.
Oil revenues multiplied several times over during the decade. Yet inflation rose sharply as well. Rapid rural-to-urban migration strained housing and employment markets. Many working-class families who had left villages for cities found themselves economically insecure and socially dislocated.
Britannica notes that the speed of change unsettled established institutions. The state became wealthier and more centralized, but political participation did not expand in step with economic transformation. The imbalance fed resentment — particularly among bazaar merchants, segments of the clergy, and students.
Then, in early 1978, unrest began to gather force.
Ritual, Protest and Escalation
Demonstrations erupted in January 1978 after a newspaper published remarks seen as insulting to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric exiled since 1964 for opposing the shah’s reforms. Security forces opened fire. Protesters were killed.
In the cities, mourning ceremonies turned into mass marches. In Shi‘i Islam, gatherings are traditionally held 40 days after a death. Each commemoration became an opportunity for renewed protest. Those protests sometimes produced further casualties — and further memorials. Religious ritual, in effect, substituted for banned political organizing. The calendar itself sustained the movement.
United States Institute of Peace describes this pattern as a rolling cycle of unrest. By late summer, demonstrations were drawing tens of thousands. On September 8, 1978 — a day remembered as “Black Friday” — troops fired on demonstrators in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. The exact death toll remains disputed, but the event marked a decisive break. Prospects for compromise faded.
Strikes spread across key industries. In October, oil workers walked off the job, sharply reducing production and cutting into the state’s main source of revenue. By December, massive crowds filled Tehran’s streets. News agencies at the time reported turnout in the hundreds of thousands in the capital alone.
This uprising differed in important ways from many 20th-century revolutions. It was not led by a military faction or a secular nationalist party seeking to capture the state. Khomeini advanced a theory of governance — velayat-e faqih, or rule by an Islamic jurist — that proposed placing ultimate authority in the hands of a senior religious figure.
The concept departed both from hereditary monarchy and from Western-style republicanism, grounding political sovereignty in clerical oversight. Unlike Marxist-inspired revolutions in Cuba or Vietnam, which framed their struggles primarily in class terms, Iran’s movement fused religious authority with populist politics, giving faith a central constitutional role rather than a symbolic one.
From Monarchy to Islamic Republic
The shah alternated between limited concessions and harsher crackdowns. Neither stabilized the country. In January 1979, he left Iran, officially on vacation. He would not return.
Khomeini came back on February 1 to a triumphant public reception by vast crowds in Tehran. On February 11, the armed forces declared neutrality. The monarchy fell.
On April 1, 1979, a national referendum overwhelmingly approved the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the months that followed, clerical leaders consolidated power. Revolutionary committees and the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reshaped the security structure. A new constitution formalized the authority of a supreme religious leader, embedding clerical oversight at the core of the state.
Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica; United States Institute of Peace
