A 1971 festival of tents at Persepolis marking 2,500 years of monarchy, attacked as extravagance (1971)
The Shah's 2,500th anniversary celebration, widely cited as a symbol of the regime's distance from Iranians.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Iranian Revolution
1978–1979
The overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy and the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Mass protests through 1978 against Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi drew together clerics, bazaar merchants, secular liberals and the left, and were sustained by strikes that shut the oil industry. The Shah left Iran on 16 January 1979; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in exile since 1964 and latterly outside Paris, flew home on 1 February to vast crowds, and the monarchy collapsed on 11 February when the armed forces declared neutrality. A referendum at the end of March approved an Islamic republic, and a new constitution installed Khomeini as Supreme Leader under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist. In November 1979 students seized the United States embassy in Tehran and held its staff for 444 days, an episode that helped the revolution's clerical wing consolidate power and broke relations between the two countries.
How to spot them
- ▸A monarch calling himself Shahanshah and Aryamehr, crowned in 1967 and gone by January 1979
- ▸An exiled ayatollah giving interviews under an apple tree at Neauphle-le-Château before flying home on an Air France jet
- ▸A day of shooting in Jaleh Square, September 1978, remembered as Black Friday
- ▸444 days, 52 hostages and a failed rescue in the desert
- ▸A doctrine of the guardianship of the jurist written into a new constitution
What happened
The shooting of demonstrators in Jaleh Square, Tehran, on 8 September 1978 (1978)
Black Friday, after which compromise with the Shah became very difficult.
A cinema fire in Abadan in August 1978 that killed hundreds and was blamed on the regime (1978)
The Cinema Rex fire, one of the events that turned protest into mass revolt.
The monarch's tearful departure by air on 16 January 1979, officially a holiday abroad (1979)
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi never returned; he died in Cairo in July 1980.
The return from Paris on 1 February 1979, greeted by crowds estimated in the millions (1979)
Khomeini's flight home after fourteen years in exile in Turkey, Iraq and France.
The armed forces' declaration of neutrality on 11 February 1979, still a national holiday (1979)
The fall of the monarchy and the collapse of Shapour Bakhtiar's government.
The seizure of an embassy compound in Tehran on 4 November 1979 and a captivity of 444 days (1979)
The Iran hostage crisis; the 52 hostages were released on 20 January 1981.
Operation Eagle Claw, a rescue abandoned after a helicopter and a transport aircraft collided at Desert One (1980)
The failed American rescue mission of April 1980, in which eight servicemen died.
Key ideas
- Velayat-e faqih — Khomeini's doctrine that a senior jurist should hold political authority in the absence of the hidden Imam
- 'Neither East nor West, but the Islamic Republic' — the revolution's foreign-policy slogan
- The White Revolution of the 1960s, the Shah's land reform and modernisation programme, as the grievance that first made Khomeini a political figure
Quick-fire facts
- •Khomeini was exiled in 1964 after denouncing legal immunity for American personnel, and lived in Turkey, then Najaf in Iraq, then Neauphle-le-Château near Paris from October 1978
- •Shapour Bakhtiar was the Shah's last prime minister; Mehdi Bazargan headed Khomeini's provisional government
- •The referendum of 30–31 March 1979 approved an Islamic republic; the official result was about 98 per cent in favour
- •The Islamic Republic was proclaimed on 1 April 1979
- •SAVAK, the Shah's security service founded in 1957, was dissolved after the revolution
- •Khomeini's sermons circulated inside Iran on smuggled audio cassettes
- •Abolhassan Banisadr was elected the republic's first president in January 1980 and was impeached and fled in 1981
- •Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, beginning an eight-year war
- •Khomeini died on 3 June 1989 and was succeeded as Supreme Leader by Ali Khamenei
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Sources
- Office of the Historian, US Department of State — The Iranian Hostage Crisis — Short History
- Nikki R. Keddie — Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution