Iranians Rebelled In 1979: What About In 2026?
(ANALYSIS) America and Israel launched ferocious attacks upon Iran with hopes not only to counter the Islamic Republic’s terrorism, missiles and impending nuclear weapons, but to force “regime change.”
The situation is volatile, but so far the government has not collapsed despite numerous assassinations, nor has a revolution erupted. Some think the current bombardment may be undergirding nationalistic support for the Islamists in a culture that reveres religious martyrs.
And yet, before the war broke out, knowledgeable observers agreed that a vast majority of long-suffering Iranians despised the ruling theocracy’s incompetence and oppression. So a revolution now might seem as likely as in 1979, when such widespread revulsion brought down the dictatorial Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, only to be replaced by the dictatorial Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
READ: Why The Sunni-Shi’a Divide Matters In The Iran War
Does 1979 equal 2026? To assess that, it’s necessary to understand how the grim, medieval-minded Ayatollah with his eccentric political theology could sweep in from long exile, rally a grassroots following, outmaneuver rival factions, oust the Shah and establish himself as Supreme Leader both politically and religiously. By far the best evidence on this is a definitive book by journalist Scott Anderson issued last August: “King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.”
The author tracked down living insiders during the 1979 convulsion for interviews and collected every available document, including the private diary of the Shah’s closest aide Asadollah Alam, who repeatedly sought in vain to protect the monarch “from his worst impulses.”
Anderson’s page-turner is non-fiction that reads like fiction. Indeed, the Shah’s downfall seemed fictional to most observers until close to the time it actually happened. Anderson’s narrative makes the insurrection both improbable and inevitable.
The Shah, a longtime American ally who won a 1953 power struggle with CIA help, carried forward his exiled father’s 16-year dictatorship for another 38 years. In time, he built the world’s fifth-largest military. Thanks to booming oil proceeds, during his reign, per capita income increased twentyfold, the literacy rate fivefold, the average lifespan doubled and universities became the region’s finest.
Meanwhile, “women enjoyed greater freedoms than almost anywhere else in the Islamic world” and Jews and other minority groups were granted protection. All alongside autocracy.
The Shah inflicted brutality and injustice and controlled all aspects of the Iranian government and culture while bureaucrats engaged in “outright thievery.” The fearsome SAVAK secret police imposed arbitrary punishments, occasional deaths and ubiquitous spying on resentful citizens who suppressed even mild criticisms. Khomeini thereby won respect as the Shah’s virulent, uncompromising enemy who was sent into exile in Iraq after a 1963 clergy revolt.
As usual with tyranny, the Shah’s satraps were oblivious to the people’s fury or realized this but could not tell the King of Kings the truth until it was too late. With the monarch increasingly cut off from his people, the only means of expression was increasing demonstrations with violent potential. The Shah repeatedly mused about creating a legitimate, representative government but never acted. Ostentatious government spending increased the gap between the rich and the oppressed poor, including job-seeking youths flocking to Tehran.
One blatant royal vanity project was the 1971 Persepolis celebration of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. The “Guinness Book of World Records” named it “the most extravagant party in world history.” Foreign guests (few Iranians were invited) feasted on imported French chefs’ peacock stuffed with foie gras, silvered caviar and 25,000 bottles of fine wines (Islam forbids alcohol). While per capita annual income was less than $500 in today’s currency, the official party budget was $140 million and critics claimed it was many times that. To Khomeini, it was “the devil’s festival.”
One powerful aspect of Iran’s culture was pointedly ignored at the celebration and suppressed by the Shah’s Western-style modernization. He harbored barely concealed contempt for his nation’s religious tradition, which undermined popular support. Iran is defined by a unique devotion to Islam’s Shi’a branch, as distinct from the rival Sunni branch that dominates global Islam. Shi’a observances center on a round of passionate, open-air marches that can turn political.
Ranking clerics receive mystical awe from believers, which Khomeini exaggerated, exercising supreme power as God’s representative on earth. He built a following among Muslim charities and hardscrabble mosques that catered to the poor and absorbed the exiled Ayatollah’s anti-Shah sermons on smuggled cassette tapes.
During the revolution, Iran had three ayatollahs of generally equal stature. Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari upheld Shi’ism’s teaching of clergy “quietism” that refrains from politics and could not command moderate forces when the crunch came. The highly politicized Mahmoud Taleghani was the guru of Iran’s leftists. He spent a decade as a political prisoner, was later forced into hiding, and, though a fervent foe of the Shah’s dictatorship, eventually supported dictator-to-be Khomeini.
That left Khomeini as religiously supreme and beloved because he never compromised with the Shah. He and his disciples have had 47 years to enforce an ideology that makes the now-shaken regime difficult to uproot despite manifest failings. Meanwhile, Khomeini-ism means multitudes worldwide associate Islam with retrograde governance and terrorism, as disillusioned Iranians turn from the faith.
During the five years before the revolution, the Shah was fighting lymphocytic leukemia, a tightly-held secret he even kept from his third wife. Did that sap his vitality and resolve? Or was it that, as he told the American ambassador, “I do not intend to murder the youth of my nation in order to rule it.”
Whatever, he and his vacillating generals could not bring themselves to impose the full military takeover and mass slaughter that might conceivably have beaten the Islamists. Lacking such moral hesitations, over just two days in January, the current regime killed an estimated 30,000 or more demonstrators and crushed a mass uprising.
Anderson details how the Carter Administration and American “deep state” mishandled Iran through ignorance and neglect, and calls the Tehran embassy a “citadel of fatuousness.” Wishful thinking led officials and journalists to suppose Khomeini might be somewhat moderate or a mere figurehead. Few researched his sermons and writings with their blatant hatred toward the Jews, the West and modern life. All that makes this book required 2026 reading for the media and tacticians within Donald Trump’s National Security Council and War and State Departments.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.