9 - The Khomeinists: Between Sedentarisation and Perpetual Revolution

Summary

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 often stands out – perhaps along with the French and Bolshevik Revolutions – as a paramount example of a fully-fledged revolutionary event in world history, due to both the extent of the mass mobilisation involved and the velocity and gravity of the change it spurred. It pre-cipitated the fall of the Pahlavi monarchy, under which the often secularist and Western-educated elite attempted to steer Iran on to the path of modernisation and nation state-building for more than half a century, shaking off the country's past weaknesses vis-à-vis colonising powers and winning it an equal standing on the regional and world stage. It replaced these attempts with a system which drew on an ostentatiously different imagery of legitimisation and reasoning, at the centre of which was the idea of an eternal and just order prescribed to his believers by God himself.

Gaining power in 1979, the revolutionaries attempted to restructure the Iranian state along this new path by means of the institution of the ‘theocratic’ Islamic Republic, which – with minor adjustments – has existed for more than forty years now. Nevertheless, the revolution not only brought about an internal change for Iran; its repercussions were also broader on a regional and, indeed, international scale.

Some of these might been expected, as with the exchange of the ruling regime, a shift in the foreign policy of the whole state naturally occurred as well. Still other changes, however, were altogether unexpected. Already during the first year after the demise of the Pahlavi monarchy, the new ruling establishment began to engage in policies which can, by all means, be considered radical. Beginning with the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and the detainment of US diplomats, these policies, over the following ten years, included: the direct support of a number of armed groups operating in the territories of Middle Eastern states and often engaging in violent armed struggle against the local governments; a costly and bloody protraction of the war with neighbouring Iraq; an appeal to execute a British novelist and citizen residing in London; and an almost continuous flow of threats and recriminations directed towards near or more distant foreign countries.