Iran in World History

parties, the freeing of political prisoners, and the closing of night-
clubs and casinos. These gestures, rather than appeasing the opposi-
tion, emboldened it. Street protests continued, drawing hundreds of 
thousands of protesters, which led the shah to declare martial law 
on September 8, 1978. That same day the army fired into a crowd of 
peaceful protesters, killing sixty-four unarmed civilians—an event that 
came to be remembered as Black Friday.
Ayatollah Khomeini, still in Iraq, capitalized on the public’s growing 
outrage by making ever more incendiary speeches. At the suggestion of 
his advisors, Khomeini relocated to suburban Paris, where he enjoyed 
better access to advanced communications for the dissemination of his 
diatribes against the shah’s regime. His messages found a widening 
audience among leftist and even secular members of the opposition, 
as well as some Western intellectuals such as the French philosopher 
Michel Foucault. Across Iran, a succession of workers’ strikes through-
out the autumn brought the country’s economy to a virtual standstill.
Renewed street demonstrations in November led to anarchy, as the 
shah urged the security forces to exercise restraint. On December 2, an 
estimated two million protesters filled Tehran’s Freedom Square on the 
occasion of 
‘Ashura
commemorating the death of Imam Husayn—the 
young, handsome, virtuous grandson of the Prophet Muhammad 
who was killed in battle in 680 ce. Four days later the shah himself 
went on television and told the nation “I have heard the voice of your 

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revolution.” He apologized for his mistakes and promised to work with 
opposition parties to restore public order.
Nevertheless, protests in the following days brought millions more 
demonstrators into the streets all over the country. The shah responded 
by appointing a member of the opposition, National Front leader 
Shapur Bakhtiar, to the post of prime minister. It was too little too late. 
In the face of continuing unrest, the shah, now seriously ill with cancer, 
left the country on January 16, 1979, never to return.
With most countries unwilling to receive him, the shah wandered 
like the Flying Dutchman from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas 
and Mexico, before finally being admitted to the United States for 
medical treatment. Rather than give in to the demands of Iran’s new 
revolutionary government that the shah be extradited home to face 
trial, the United States sent him on to Panama. After a short stay 
there, he returned to Egypt, where his cancer finally claimed him on 
July 27, 1980. The Pahlavi dynasty—along with Iran’s tradition of 
monarchy stretching back more than twenty-five centuries—was at 
an end.

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C h a p t e r 8
The Islamic Republic
of Iran (1979–present)
O
n February 1, 1979, a specially chartered Air France 747 left 
Paris for Tehran. On board were the Ayatollah Khomeini and 
a group of advisors, accompanied by one hundred twenty jour-
nalists. Asked by American news correspondent Peter Jennings what his 
feelings were on returning home after a fourteen-year exile, Khomeini 
dismissively replied, “Nothing.”
For most of the others on board, the dominant emotion was fear: the 
Iranian military had given no assurances that it would not shoot down 
the plane as soon as it crossed into Iranian airspace. As it happened, 
they did not do so. The flight landed safely at Tehran’s Mehrabad air-
port, where several million supporters welcomed Khomeini and his 
entourage. Newspaper headlines reinforced the popular hysteria with 
the inflammatory headline, “The Imam Has Come,” playing up mes-
sianic expectations latent in the collective psychology of the largely 
Shi‘ite nation.
Iranians from across the political spectrum—Marxist, secular 
democratic, and religious—had worked together to expel the shah. 
Among all the various revolutionary voices, however, only the charis-
matic religious leader Khomeini was able to inspire a mass following. 
Taking advantage of his broad grassroots support, Khomeini wasted 
no time in dismissing the fragile Bakhtiar government appointed by the 
departing shah, replacing it with a provisional administration led by 
the head of the Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI), a politically moder-
ate engineer by the name of Mehdi Bazargan.
Faced with widespread public disorder in the major cities as well 
as separatist rebellions in several provinces, the new government cre-
ated its own military body called the Pasdaran-e enghalab-e eslami, 
or Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), in order to stave off any 
perceived threats to the revolution. Since then Iran has had essentially 

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two armed forces: the traditional military, ostensibly responsible for 
fighting wars abroad, and the Revolutionary Guards, for maintaining 
internal security. Over time, the roles of the two became increasingly 
blurred.
In late March 1979 the provisional government held a national ref-
erendum, asking voters in simple terms whether or not they approved 
the establishment of an as yet undefined “Islamic Republic.” Many 
boycotted the referendum, objecting to this lack of specificity, but 
among those who voted almost all were in favor. A republic was, after 
all, what most Iranians had been hoping for, and since 99 percent of 
Iranians were Muslim, it stood to reason that the new state would be 
“Islamic”—although most voters seem to have had little notion at the 
time of what this would prove to entail.