Dozens of Iranian football fans defied a Fifa ban and waved the pre-revolutionary “lion and sun” flag during the country’s men’s football World Cup games, despite a court ruling prohibiting the symbol inside venues.
The green, white and red striped flag with the lion and sun represents a time when the country was ruled by the modernising yet authoritarian Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It was replaced in 1979 by the official flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran: green, white and red stripes featuring four crescents and a sword in red with the Arabic inscription “Allahu Akbar”, which translates to “Allah is the greatest”.
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Yet to opponents of the current regime, the pre-1979 flag is a “symbol of resistance”, said the BBC’s Shaimaa Khalil, with the competing banners in the football stands “at the heart of the dispute” about what kind of country Iran should be.
What was life like before the revolution?
The Iranian revolution is regarded as one of the most important geopolitical events of the 20th century. It set the template for a new form of political Islam and ushered in a deeply conservative theocratic state that exists to this day.
But before Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution “transformed every aspect of Iranian society”, Iran was “a very different world”, said International Policy Digest (IPD).
For nearly 40 years up until 1979, the country had been ruled by the pro-Western Shah. During his autocratic reign, “Iran’s economy and educational opportunities expanded” as he “pushed the country to adopt Western-oriented secular modernisation, allowing some degree of cultural freedom”, said Business Insider.
During this time, women’s rights were also greatly expanded. Women were “encouraged to get an education” and were allowed to mix freely with men, said IPD. They gained the right to vote in the mid-1960s and the first female representatives were elected to parliament. The hijab was also outlawed, and women were encouraged to dress in modern Western-style clothing, said the BBC.
However, the Shah’s pro-Western liberalising agenda did not extend to the terms of his own rule. He “sought to modernise Iran from above” while at the same time “denying society durable institutions through which to bargain, dissent or effectively participate”, said Sanam Vakil in the Financial Times.
The Shah “built roads, universities, industries and armies”, but not “a political order capable of outlasting them”. If the aim “was to create a rapidly developed state that could overcome its long history of foreign intervention” then “the result was a state that appeared powerful but quickly succumbed to a popular revolution” from within.
What led to the revolution?
While the Shah’s reforms were welcomed by some sections of society, for many it was too much too fast.
“In his efforts to modernise, the Shah overreached,” said IPD. “Younger Iranians didn’t mind the hijab ban; older members of society had a much more difficult time assimilating. The oppression people felt led to the emergence of leaders who called for a return to traditional values and eventually led to the Revolution of 1979.”
Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile since the early 1960s, became the personification of a growing wave of opposition to the Shah’s brutal rule and lavish lifestyle. While discontent had been brewing for years, many date the beginning of the 1979 revolution to the January 1978 student protests in defence of Khomeini, after the government newspaper Ettela’at labelled him a “British agent” in an article entitled ”Iran and Red and Black Colonisation”.
Despite his later reactionary turn, he was able to mobilise support from a broad coalition of different sections in Iranian society – from religious conservatives in the countryside to left-wing young radicals in the cities – and perhaps most surprising, given what was to come, also a large proportion of women.
Are there parallels between 1979 and today?
Since the 1979 revolution swept away the Shah and ushered in an era of strict Islamic rule, “Iran has been no stranger to protests – or to their violent suppression”, said The Christian Science Monitor.
The latest wave of unrest that started in late December 2025 – initially driven by anger at the cost of living and the tanking Iranian economy and currency – was perhaps the biggest challenge to the regime since the revolution.
The son of the former Shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has been in exile in the US since the revolution, said the presence of pre-revolutionary “Lion and Sun” imperial flags at protests across the country showed many in Iran were “demanding a credible new path forward” and “have called for me to lead”.
But, having been caught off guard at first, the regime was quick to crack down brutally on the protesters and reassert its control. This is perhaps the biggest difference between 1979 and today. While the Shah was reluctant to use the army and security apparatus to quell dissent, the current regime has no such compunction and appears willing to fight to the end.
“What the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini,” said David Patrikarakos on UnHerd. He was writing in 2022, in the wake of mass protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in custody after being detained by Tehran’s morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. “They know they want the regime gone but they have no one to hold up in its place. For a revolution to succeed, it’s not enough to be against someone; you have to be for someone else.”
But even with the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli air strikes in February creating a power vacuum at the heart of government, there remains no credible opposition and the likelihood the regime could collapse appears, for now at least, remote.
