Iranian Revolution

The Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran, and replaced the monarchy with an Islamic Republic led by the cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. Mass protests and strikes over more than a year brought down one of the best-armed regimes in the Middle East, with lasting effects on the region and on Iran's relations with the West.

Mohammad Reza Shah had ruled since 1941, and his power was strengthened after the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, backed by the United States and Britain. From 1963 his White Revolution brought land reform, women's suffrage and rapid modernisation, funded increasingly by oil. But the regime was authoritarian, its secret police, SAVAK, was feared, and the oil boom of the 1970s brought inflation, inequality and resentment. Many religious Iranians opposed its secular, Western-oriented policies.

Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior Shia cleric, denounced the shah's reforms and his ties with the United States and Israel, and was exiled in 1964, living mostly in Najaf in Iraq. His recorded sermons circulated widely in Iran. In exile he developed the doctrine that a qualified Islamic jurist should rule, an idea that later shaped the new state.

In January 1978 a newspaper article attacking Khomeini set off protests in the religious city of Qom, in which demonstrators were killed. Shia mourning ceremonies held forty days after each death became occasions for new protests, creating a rising cycle. In August a fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan killed several hundred people; the opposition blamed the regime, though responsibility was later attributed to Islamist militants. On 8 September, hours after martial law was declared, troops fired on a crowd in Tehran's Jaleh Square, remembered as Black Friday. Later counts put the dead at fewer than a hundred, though much higher figures were believed at the time. Strikes, especially in the oil industry, paralysed the economy in the autumn, and enormous marches filled Tehran in December.

On 16 January 1979 the shah left Iran, never to return. Khomeini, who had moved to France in October 1978, flew back to Tehran on 1 February to a vast welcome and appointed his own provisional government. On 11 February the army declared itself neutral, and the shah's last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, fell. In a referendum at the end of March, voters approved an Islamic Republic by an officially reported majority of about 98 per cent.

On 4 November 1979 students seized the United States embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage; 52 of them were held for 444 days, until 20 January 1981. A new constitution, approved by referendum the following month, gave supreme authority to a guardian jurist, Khomeini. Revolutionary courts executed former officials, and in the following years liberal, leftist and other groups that had joined the revolution were suppressed. In September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year war.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show Iran before and after the revolution, which changed its government but not its borders.