Michael Lavalette looks at the history of modern Iran – a country shaped by Imperialism and resistance

Across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Iran suffered repeatedly from Imperialist intervention and interference, producing a deeply embedded hostility to Western imperialist interests. The Iranian revolution of 1979, which established the Islamic Republic, represented a major defeat for US interests, something that the US has been desperate to reverse ever since. 

Israel is looking to destabilise the Middle East further by stoking tensions with Iran. The recent bombing of three Iranian provinces indicates that Israel is keen to confront Iran to marginalise its major regional competitor. In the process, it hopes to ‘debase’ the ‘resistance axis’ operating across much of the Middle East, and supported by Iran. In these moves, Israel has the full backing of the US. Israel may have sent the aircraft, but they were US bombs, they utilised US intel, they bombed sites agreed in advance with the US and have now got US army personnel in place within Israel to operate key parts of the Israeli iron-dome defence network. It is clear that Israel is attacking Iran in both their and the US’s interests: the Israeli watchdog has been let off its leash.

But any conflict with Iran will be far from straight forward for Israel. Western misconceptions about Iran portray it is a backward, impoverished country. It isn’t. Present day Iran is the sixth largest country in Asia geographically. It has a population close to ninety million (Tehran alone houses over nine million people). In terms of GDP, it is the nineteenth-wealthiest country in the world. It holds 10% of the world’s oil reserves and 15% of the world’s gas reserves, making it one of the most important oil and gas producing nations. It has a strong agricultural sector and performs well in mining and manufacturing (particularly automobile manufacture, transportation, construction materials, home appliances, food and agricultural goods, armaments, pharmaceuticals and information technology). It also has a large standing army (almost one million personnel, if reservists are included), and is considered to have the thirteenth-strongest military force in the world. Iran is a serious regional power, one that Israel would struggle to defeat in any conflict without significant US support and backing – and even with US backing, an Israeli victory is not guaranteed.

To understand Iran’s position in the region, and its deep hostility to Western Imperialist interests, we need to look at the ways in which Iran’s development has been skewed by imperialist intervention across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Iran and the ‘Great Game’

Iran is a country with a rich and varied history. It has historic settlements that go back as far as 4000 BCE and contains 27 Unesco world-heritage sites. It has significant traditions in art, architecture, literature and music. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Iran was a significant regional and global power. However, by the nineteenth century, Iran was the site of growing inter-Imperialist rivalries, primarily between the Tsarist Russian Empire and the British Empire.

The Russians defeated the Iranians in two wars at the start of the nineteenth century. The Treaties of Gulestan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828) led to Iran conceding territory to Russia and gave Russia an exclusive right to a naval presence on the Caspian Sea. The treaties gave the Russians control over much of northern Iran.

Iran also provided a land route between the Indian sub-continent and the Mediterranean Sea which was important for British trade. The British had been active in the Persian Gulf since the eighteenth century and were keen to control the Gulf of Oman. The Treaty of Paris (1857) established a British presence and control over much of the south of Iran.

In 1800, Iran had been fairly isolated from the world economy, but the treaties opened up the economy, paving the way for Russian and British interests to play a dominating role in the economy. Foreign trade increased eightfold over the nineteenth century. Imports consisted mainly of guns, tools and textiles from Britain; sugar and kerosene from Russia, and spices, tea and coffee from British interests in Asia. Exports were mainly agricultural products like raw cotton, silk, tobacco, rice, dried fruits and opium for the British drug-running trade to China. In 1888, Lynch Brothers (of London) set up a steamboat company to transport goods and people along Iran’s riverways. To aid ‘their’ companies set up in Iran and exploit ‘opportunities’, the British established the Imperial Bank of Persia in 1899. The Bank had full control over printing Iranian banknotes. The Russians did something similar by setting up the Banque d’Escompte Perse for ‘their’ companies. By the turn of the century, Iran was a central site of the ‘Great Game’ between the Russian and British empires.

The British and Russian states used their influence to exert control over Iran. The Russians obtained a range of ‘concessions’ from the Iranian state. For relatively small outlays, they gained exclusivity to fishing rights in the Caspian Sea and to build roads and telegraph lines linking Tehran with the Russian Caucuses. The British obtained concessions to dredge main river ways, build carpet factories and, most importantly of all, drill for oil in the southwest of the country – a concession that would eventually lead to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC).

The discovery of oil, and the development of Iranian oil fields (the first Iranian oil came on stream in 1908) would significantly change Iran’s importance to the Imperial powers. Winston Churchill described the Iranian oil fields as a ‘prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams’ because of the huge profits it yielded for Britain. By 1912, for example, the British Navy had shifted from coal to oil-powered Dreadnoughts in the pre-war arms race. Oil was on the way to becoming the most important commodity in twentieth-century capitalism, and the Iranian oil field a crucial imperial asset. The APOC would change its name in 1935 to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and would provide Britain with a monopoly of the production and sale of Iranian oil.

The Constitutional Rebellion

Imperialist interference in the country produced a political response from Iranians. There were three key episodes of rebellion across the twentieth century.

The first, sometimes called the Constitutional Rebellion, covered the period from 1905 to 1921. Across the Middle East region, growing nationalist movements demanding independence and democratic rights started to put down roots at the end of the nineteenth century. Such demands grew in Iran amongst university-educated young people. In Iran, the demands for constitutional reform merged in 1905/06 with a growing economic crisis and spiralling inflation. The price of bread rocketed by 90%, that of sugar by 33%. The cause was a mixture of a bad harvest, a cholera outbreak and the disruption of trade due to the Russo-Japanese War. The consequence was widespread poverty.

Across Iran, there were bread riots, women’s marches, protests from students and religious leaders and demands that the Shah intervene to protect people. The response from the powerful was to turn to repression, which only inflamed the situation.

In June 1906, there were large demonstrations and a ‘safe camp’ was set up within the university in Tehran. There, students drafted the outlines of a more democratic constitution that they would place in front of the Shah (which he would sign in early 1907). A Constitutional Assembly was set up to draft an electoral law, and elections were held for a National Assembly. Numerous guilds, unions and political parties formed. The number of newspapers increased overnight from six to over ninety. Iranian society was aflame with debate and political protest and action.

Although the constitutional reforms operated within strict limits (women and the poor were excluded from the vote, for example) they still went too far for the Shah who tried to move against them in 1908. The result was a civil war between the Assembly and the Shah, which the Shah would lose. By 1910, the Shah had abdicated (though replaced by a young relative) and a wider voting base established for the National Assembly.

Iran came out the civil war bankrupt with a weak central state. This allowed the Imperialist powers to further deepen their control over the country. But the global situation was shifting. The pre-First World War alliances were taking shape – the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 saw greater alliance between the two powers in the face of rising German and Ottoman interest in the region.

Though formally neutral during the First World War, Iranian resources were used by both Russia and Britain. The British directly recruited a regiment (the Persian Rifles) to fight for British interests in the Middle East.

Between 1917 and 1921, an estimated two-million Iranians perished as a result of war, famine, disease and, from 1919, the flu pandemic. In all this Britain saw an opportunity: Germany was defeated, Russia was in the throes of revolution, and Iran was impoverished; here was a chance to control the whole country.

The British hoped to incorporate Iran into the British empire, creating a chain of vassal states that would link the Mediterranean to the Indian sub-continent. In 1919, the British proposed an agreement (the Anglo-Persian Agreement) whereby Britain would loan money to Iran, hence saving it from bankruptcy, and in return, get monopoly rights over railway building, arms provision, provision of military advisers, teachers, protection of British oil interests and significant control over Iranian ports. To ensure the Agreement would go through the Assembly, the British paid the Premier (Vossuq al-Dowleh) a stipend of £6000 a month (for an indefinite period).

But as the Iranian people became aware of the terms of the ‘Agreement’, the popular mood shifted dramatically against British interference and British imperial interests. The movement for change exploded again and, between 1919 and 1921, Iran was embroiled in the post-war revolutionary struggles that shook much of the globe.

To its north, Iran was bordered by revolutionary Russia and impacted by the civil war that engulfed the former Russian Empire. To its west, Iran was bordered by the former Ottoman Empire and the rebellions against Western interests taking hold in Iraq, Syria and other Arab lands. The spread of revolutionary and nationalist ideas had an impact within Iran. Further, the revolutionary Soviet Government renounced Tsarist claims over Iranian territory and also revealed a range of treaties that Britain, France and Tsarist Russia had forged to divide the region between them.

In Iran, the new Soviet government lent support to the growing anti-imperialist and anti-British sentiments and actions that raged across the country for almost two years. In Gilan province (in the costal north), the Red Army was in control and by 1920 they were preparing to move on Tehran.

But in February 1921, a British-backed coup led by General Reza Khan and his Cossack troops took place. They took Tehran, declared martial law and moved to ‘save the country from Bolshevism’. The new government abrogated the Anglo-Persian Agreement (hence quelling anti-British feeling) and made an agreement with the Soviets which saw them withdraw from Gilan and cancel all Tsarist loans, claims and concessions. Yet despite these moves, British interests, and British oil interests in particular, remained closely aligned with the developments initiated by new regime.

Khan’s iron fist

Reza Khan became de facto military dictator of Iran. The parliament was a mere decorative fig-leaf. In 1926, he deposed the existing Shah, took the crown, and named his son as his heir. He rapidly expanded the military and police within the country with the purpose of maintaining social control. Conscription was introduced (with conscripts forced to learn Farsi as part of the ‘nation-building’ project).

The state moved in a corporatist direction. Oil and tax revenues grew and the resources were used to develop key infrastructure: roads, railways, a central bank, post office and radio and telegraph system. The centralised state grew dramatically and soon had a presence across the country, in every town and village.

Khan’s decrees pushed right down into society. He introduced identity cards, demanded people adopt ‘Iranian’ surnames (himself taking the name Pahlavi and demanding other families with this surname change theirs!). He introduced Western dress codes, banning ‘tribal’ wear. He demanded men were clean shaven, or had small well-kept moustaches, and wear what became known as ‘Pahlavi caps’ rather than the fez.

In 1934, Khan decreed that the country should stop being referred to as Persia, but called Iran. His reasoning was that it invoked links to ancient Aryans (at a time when Hitler was proclaiming the Aryan race had links to Iran). As part of this process, a number of towns and places had their name changed to sound less Arabic. Some commentators close to Khan argued that Iran, because of its ‘racial’ composition, was culturally and psychologically closer to Nordic Europe than it was to Arabs and those in the Middle East.

Khan’s was a brutal regime, built with the purpose of enriching local and multinational capital, and, of course, to enhance significantly Khan’s personal wealth. The poor were taxed heavily. The cost of living rose. The peasantry, tribespeople and the emerging working class bore the brunt of repression and exploitation. Corruption was rife amongst state and local government officials. Policing and secret policing expanded as Iran came to resemble a military-police state. Yet, relations with Western interests remained close. Indeed, in 1934, Khan extended an agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The agreement gave AIOC a sixty-year concession on oil production (with only a minimal increase in Iranian royalties), emphasising that Western capital was (and is) happy to sit alongside any brutal dictator, as long as profits keep rolling in.

The 1953 coup

Khan’s rule was brought to an abrupt end in 1941. In the midst of the war, there were concerns (in British and American circles) about how close the regime seemed to be to Germany. Southern Iranian oil supplies were crucial and had to be secured for the British war effort. And Iran provided a land corridor that would allow supplies to get to the USSR (especially via the Trans-Iranian railway).

British and Soviet troops entered Iran and divided the country between north and south once more. Khan was deported to Madagascar and then exiled to South Africa where he died in 1944. A few hundred ‘German sympathisers’ were arrested, but the ‘Pahlavi state’ continued. The Crown Prince Muhammad Reza became Shah. Both Soviet and British authorities guaranteed Iranian territorial integrity and promised to leave within six months of the war’s end. The new Shah agreed to cooperate with the Allies and offered troops for the war effort (which was declined).

The British offered support on condition that some of his father’s questionably acquired wealth and landholdings were returned to the state and that he agreed to act as a constitutional monarch, relinquishing control of some aspects of the state (though not the armed forces). Shah Reza handed over some property and wealth stolen by his father, but as he would do throughout his reign, he also moved $1m into a private bank account in the US.

The second phase of Iranian revolt against imperialism lasted from 1941 through to 1953. This period saw the growth of socialist and nationalist opposition to Western interests. The socialist Tudeh Party (Hezb-e-Tudeh, the Party of the Masses) grew in influence from 1941. Its programme declared: ‘Our primary aim is to mobilize the workers, peasants, progressive intellectuals, traders, and craftsmen of Iran. Our society has two main classes: those who own the main means of production; and those who have no significant amounts of property … our aim is to fight despotism and dictatorship … [and] the class structures that produce despots and dictators.’

By 1946, the Tudeh had six MPs, 50,000 full members and 100,000 affiliated members. They were organised in branches in almost eighty towns (that is, all the towns with a population over 10,000). Its main newspaper Rahbar (Leader) had a circulation of over 100,000, making it one of the largest selling papers in the country. It was a well-organised, nation-wide movement for change. It had links with the expanding trade-union movement and the expanding networks of women’s organisations. It started to raise demands for oil nationalisation and for Iran to become a republic free from Imperial interference. In May 1946, it called for (and led via its control of the Central Council of Federated Unions) a general strike in the oil industry which won the eight-hour day, full-pay for Fridays and six days annual holidays a year. This in turn led the government to capitulate to demands for the implementation of comprehensive national labour laws which banned child labour, implemented a minimum wage, provided workers insurance for injury or unemployment, introduced holidays and Friday pay for all.

The Tudeh was growing in popularity and the Iranian working class was flexing their muscles to force improved wages and working conditions on employers. However, the Tudeh was hindered by its close ties to the USSR. This was to prove disastrous when the Soviets demanded oil concessions from Iran’s northern oil fields. The party had been demanding nationalisation. They had denounced oil concessions that had been given to Britain and the US. But now they were left defending Soviet concessions (and were reduced to arguing that the concessions the Soviets wanted were more generous than those of the Western imperialists!).

Further, in 1945, the Soviets suddenly advocated autonomy for both Kurdistan and Azerbaijan – and provided arms and protection for autonomous movements in both regions. The Tudeh were caught off guard again, and again tied themselves in knots trying to justify Soviet interference.

The confusion caused by ‘following the Moscow line’ created a space for the Shah to move against the Tudeh. It was accused of supporting ‘secessionists’ and its leaders were arrested or forced into exile. Martial law was declared in Tehran and Party offices were closed down. In 1949, a botched assassination attempt on the Shah was used effectively to implement a ‘Royalist coup’. The Shah declared martial law across Iran. He shut down newspapers that were critical of the Royal family. He dissolved parliament for six months and formally increased his royal prerogatives. And he demanded that the landed estates he had been forced to give back to the state in 1941 be returned to him and his family.

Opposition to the Shah didn’t dissipate, but by 1950, the main opposition came from the nationalist movement led by Muhammad Mossadeq. Mossadeq led the National Front (Jebe’eh-e Melli) which was a broad network of various parties and organisations including the National Party (an Iranian chauvinist network), the Toilers (which had split from the Tudeh over links with the USSR) and various trade associations representing those in the Bazaars and Guilds. It also gained support from key clerics, especially Ayatollah Kashani whose personal history included involvement in the Iraqi revolt against the British in the early 1920s, imprisonment by the British in 1943 (for holding pro-German views), by the government in 1945 (for opposing the Soviet oil deal) and by the Shah in 1949 (as part of the general arrest of potential opponents after the assassination attempt).

With the support of the Tudeh-led unions, and via mass demonstrations and protests, Mossadeq moved the question of nationalisation of the oil fields onto the political agenda. By the middle of 1951, he became Prime Minister and placed colleagues from the National Front in all the key ministries. He created the National Iranian Oil Company and ordered it to take over the AIOC – its oil wells, its pipelines, its refinery and its offices. The British responded by freezing Iranian assets, blocking Iranian oil exports and reinforcing its naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Mossadeq in turn accused the British of subversion, broke off diplomatic relations and shut down the British Embassy and consulates.

Mossadeq’s government was directly challenging big oil and British imperial power, but he was also challenging the Shah. He introduced electoral reform which would weaken the power of the Shah and the landed elites. He also asserted that the PM, and not the Shah, should have the right to appoint the war minister, hence challenging royal control of the military. When the Shah refused, Mossadeq went onto the radio and called people to strike and take to the streets! He linked the question of oil nationalisation to the question of democracy by claiming that, if the Shah’s power base was left unchallenged, he would move against nationalisation. People came out in their hundreds of thousands.

In the face of the mass movement, the Shah backed down. Mossadeq introduced a series of laws cutting the military budget, purging the military of unreliable elements and investigating irregularities in arms procurement (i.e. court corruption). He transferred Royal land holdings back to the state and started discussions on turning Iran into a republic.

In the context of the Cold War, the developments in Iran caused alarm in American and British ruling circles. But whilst the position of the Shah (and Iran’s position in the Western alliance) was deemed important, it was secondary to concerns over the future of Iranian oil and the protection of the international oil cartel.

For Britain, the concerns were that AIOC held the world’s largest oil refinery. It was the second largest exporter of crude oil and Iran had the world’s third largest oil reserves. Iranian oil provided £24m a year to the British Treasury and provided 85% of the Navy’s fuel needs. Its huge profits went to shareholders mainly based in Britain and were tied in to (‘private’) oil interests in Kuwait and Iraq.

For America, the developments were equally disastrous. Nationalisation would challenge Western authority in the region, it would shift control of the international oil market away from Western oil companies towards the oil-producing countries and these developments could inspire others to follow suit (Indonesia, Venezuela and Iraq, for example).

The British political establishment and their lackeys in the press started to decry Mossadeq as ‘fanatical’, ‘crazy’, ‘eccentric’, ‘volatile and unstable’, ‘dictatorial’ and ‘unbalanced’.  In Washington, he was portrayed as an ‘opium addict’ who threatened the ‘Free World’.

By late 1952, the CIA and MI6 had started to make plans for a military coup. They recruited tribal leaders, army officers (many who had been trained in the US), police officers, gang leaders and thugs. On 19 August 1953, tanks rolled into central Tehran. Armed gangs accompanied the tanks and somewhere in the region of 300 people were killed (in the words of US President Eisenhower) to ‘save the day’ for the Iranian people and support their ‘revulsion at communism’.

The coup destroyed Mossadeq and his nationalist movement and handed power back to the Shah. But he was now deeply unpopular and identified with the AIOC, with British Imperial interests, with the CIA and with MI6. The Pahlavi monarchy was revealed as being intimately tied to the interests of imperialism, corporate capitalism and ‘the West’.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979

After the coup, Reza Shah picked up where his father had left off in 1941. He expanded the military, the secret-police regime, the state bureaucracy and a corrupt system of court patronage. Iran’s oil revenues grew massively, from $34m in 1954/55 to $20bn in 1977. In an average year, 60% of Iran’s revenues came from oil. Huge amounts of this were siphoned off into the Shah’s personal bank accounts. The military budget increased twelve-fold between 1953 and 1977, to the point that Iran had the largest navy in the Gulf, the largest air force in West Asia and the fifth largest army in the world.

With the help of the FBI and Israel’s Mossad, the Shah set up the SAVAK – a hated, brutal secret police force. Torture and summary execution were part of SAVAK’s routine of brutality against political opponents of the regime. They censored the press and media, screened applicants for jobs in universities and the civil service and recruited thousands of spies in towns and villages to act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Shah.

A brutal internal regime sat alongside an economy that was growing on the back of oil revenues. And these two elements were linked: the brutality of the regime (and the attacks on trade unions, for example) helped keep wages down, rates of exploitation high and profits up. In the 1950s, the International Labour Office suggested Iran was one of the most unequal countries in the ‘Third World’, by the 1970s, they argued it was one of the most unequal in the world.

Oil and high rates of exploitation drove economic growth. This, in turn, changed the social structure of Iran significantly. The number of white-collar workers (civil servants, teachers etc) grew to just over 700,000 by the mid-1970s. The urban (blue-collar) working class expanded to around 1,300,000 employees. These workers were not just employed in oil-related work, but in mines, factories, railways, docks and transport. The towns and cities grew rapidly. By 1979, over 46% of the population lived in urban centres. The towns often hosted large numbers of rural migrants living in shanty towns existing on the peripheries in marginal employment. The rural economy had also changed. It was increasingly divided between large wealthy farmers, small holders and agricultural day labourers. The Shah’s regime was creating its very own ‘gravedigger’ in the form of those classes whose objective interests were in replacing the Pahlavi’s state.

From 1977, there was a marginal loosening of state repression and this, combined with economic recession, gave opposition networks the opportunity to protest and mobilise. From late 1977, there were various, and increasing, demonstrations against the regime organised by students, intellectuals and clerics. In August 1978, a fire killed over 400 people in a cinema complex. The popular belief was that this was an act of terror orchestrated by the hated SAVAK. Leading clerics, including the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, called for mass demonstrations against the SAVAK and the Shah.

The Revolution of 1979 was made by a broad coalition of forces. Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian suggests that ‘the traditional middle class’ of the bazaari merchants and the clergy ‘provided the opposition with a nationwide organisation’, the white-collar working and middle class ‘sparked off the revolution, fuelled it, and struck the final blows’, while ‘the urban working class’ was ‘its chief battering ram’. The bazaari played an important role through their financial assistance and networks, the urban ‘shanty-town’ poor provided the masses on the streets, but it was the strike movement in the last months of 1978 that broke the back of the regime.

On 16 January 1979, the hated Shah fled the country leaving Iran in the throes of revolution. The last act of the Shah was to appoint Shahpour Bakhtiar, a leading player of the National Front, to become Prime Minister. The deal was that Bakhtiar would set up civilian rule and the Shah would abdicate and leave for exile.

The revolution caused panic in Western circles. The Shah had been armed and supported by the Americans. Iranian oil remained a key element within global petrochemical markets and destabilisation could cause wider economic problems. Within the context of the Cold War, any potential shift of Iranian allegiances away from the West and towards the Soviet block was potentially disastrous.

The Americans considered sponsoring a coup. They made contact with Khomeini to see if he would be malleable to Western interests. They supported the Government of Bakhtiar. But it was clear things were running away from them.

On 1 February 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France. A crowd of almost two million marched to greet him. On 5 February, he declared a provisional revolutionary government. Over the next week, confrontations took place between the ‘two governments’ before Bakhtiar’s government’s eventual collapse on 11 February and the declaration of Iran as an Islamic Republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The Revolution was greeted as a moment of liberation. It was more than just a movement against Imperialism, it was about liberty, social justice and equality, summed up in the slogan ‘freedom, independence and Islamic republic’.

In the weeks after the Revolution, Iranian society exploded into life with meetings, debates and discussions taking place over the shape of the future society, politics, religion, culture and all manner of issues. Oppressed groups formed organisations to demand equal rights. Trade unions sprouted and expanded their membership. Peasants seized the land. New political parties were formed and in factories and workplaces, strike committees developed into ‘shoras’ – workers councils, with the potential to become the democratic organs of the new state.

Islam and the 1979 Revolution

During the 1979 Revolution, there were many, competing perspectives over the direction Iranian society should take. Despite the myth of a monolithic Islam, there were various shades of Islamic-inspired ideologies: Khomeini’s clerical Islamism, the Islamic socialism of the Mujahedeen, and the traditionalist Islam of the clergy. There were also various secular forces with a mass following: communists, socialists, liberals and nationalists. 

Over the previous three decades, a number of Shia scholars had developed a form of political Islam – a new interpretation of the Shia doctrine of velayat–e faqih. This stressed the responsibility of clerics to fight oppression, injustice and inequality – tied to the idea that salvation from the horrors of the present world could come through a strict implementation of Sharia under the guidance and interpretation of an Islamic Supreme Leader. These ideas pushed clerics into direct forms of political engagement. The ideas had grown in influence in the religious schools and they were also strong amongst the ‘shanty poor’ and the bazaari.

Within the left, the strongest voices remained with the Communists and the Tudeh. Whilst very strong in the unions and the Shoras, both parties remained committed to a form of ‘stageist’ politics. They essentially argued that the Khomeini revolution would get rid of the Shah, but would still be compromised by its relationship with Imperialism and its own ‘internal contradictions’ (between the different economic interests of the Khomeini block). It meant they offered unconditional support to Khomeini with the belief that social contradictions unleashed by the Revolution would eventually bring people towards the left. It was a muddled and debilitating approach.

Despite promises that clerics would only offer spiritual guidance and leave politics to laypeople, Khomeini started to concentrate power in the hands of clerics. He set up the Revolutionary Council as a political power centre and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, whose members were mainly recruited from the urban and rural poor, as an enforcer agency.

He moved against the left in the Universities and on the streets and moved to suppress the shoras, which were replaced by Islamic Associations. Next, they moved against the women’s organisations and those of the minorities, especially Kurdish networks. Gradually all grassroots networks were brought under the control of the Islamic Republic.

Two events, in particular, helped solidify the regime. First, the seizure of the American Embassy in November 1979 by student followers of Khomeini. The students took control of the Embassy and hostages for 444 days. This was a (another) massive humiliation for the US at the hands of Iran. Within Iran, it further strengthened Khomeini’s reputation as an anti-imperialist, someone willing to confront the American beast. It also allowed him to further marginalise the left, whilst it provided a ‘distraction’ as many, more conservative policies were implemented into the constitution. Second, the Western-backed Iraqi invasion of September 1980. The war would last eight years, at a huge cost. During the conflict, Iraq was supported by the Western powers, for Iranians another example of Western interference in their lives. Within Iran, it led to a full-blown mobilisation for war and allowed Khomeini to consolidate the power of the Revolutionary Council and further marginalise opposition groups.

The Islamic Republic came out of the conflict with Iraq as a growing, significant regional military power. A society where, as a result of over a hundred years of history, anti-Western Imperialism is embedded as a key ideological linchpin of society.