Life in Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution

Iran is in the grip of a full-scale revolution, according to an Iranian-American campaigner, after the home of the founding father of the Islamic republic was firebombed by protesters.

Thousands have taken to the streets across the country in recent weeks, their outrage sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in custody in September after being detained by Tehran’s morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly.

Initially focused on the treatment of women under Iran’s strict Islamic laws, anger at corruption and economic mismanagement has since spiralled. The country’s leadership now “faces its biggest threat since the revolution of 1979” that brought it to power, reported Newsweek.

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After the ancestral home of Ayatollah Khomeini, the cleric who founded the Islamic republic in 1979, was set on fire last week, Majid Sadeghpour, political director of the Organisation of Iranian American Communities (OIAC), told the Daily Express: “We are witnessing the process of an inferno that will not only burn the ancestral home of the regime’s founder but that of [Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and the entirety of the regime they represent.”

“Something unprecedented is happening,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a recent interview. “The grandchildren of the revolution are carrying out a revolution.”

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 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 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. During his autocratic reign, “Iran’s economy and educational opportunities expanded” as he “pushed the country to adopt Western-oriented secular modernization, allowing some degree of cultural freedom”, reported 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 were subsequently elected into 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 his own rule. He did not allow dissent of any kind in his regime and “his increasingly authoritarian measures and his eventual dismissal of multiparty rule set the stage for the infamous revolution”, said Business Insider.

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 International Policy Digest. “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 in Paris 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 Colonization”.

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.

“But never before have protests centered on women’s issues or been led by women, even spearheaded at times by high school girls without head coverings chanting their hopes for the regime’s overthrow,” said the newspaper.

“Surprised to be facing a largely female vanguard, Iran’s clerical leadership – whose hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on women’s rights and civil society – has been at a loss.”

David Patrikarakos, writing for Unherd, said: “In 1979, Iranians held up images of Khomeini. In 2022, they tear them down.”

But “what the Iranian revolutionaries need now more than anything else is a Khomeini”, he argued. “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. It’s not enough that Khamenei loses. Someone else must win.”