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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is the author of ‘Patriot of Persia’ and ‘In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs’
On January 16 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran with his wife, some jewels and a clod of earth. It was the climax of a revolution that united Iranian dissidents of all hues around their shared hatred of a despotic monarch and his foreign patron, America. The following month, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had emerged as the figurehead of these disparate groups, returned from exile, presenting himself as a saintly cleric who would preside over a free Iran; he soon established a Shia theocracy and eliminated his opponents.
Forty-seven years on, reports of thousands of corpses of civilians slaughtered by Iran’s security forces have disturbed the world’s sleep. US President Donald Trump seems to have put off — for now — “hitting [Iran] very hard, where it hurts”. The former Shah’s exiled son, 65-year-old Reza Pahlavi, has declared himself ready to supplant Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as supreme leader upon the latter’s death in 1989 and is the author of the current carnage.
Once fanciful, a Pahlavi restoration now seems possible — with or without the help of Trump, who on Friday expressed doubts over whether Pahlavi’s compatriots would accept his leadership, adding that, were they to do so, “that would be fine with me”.
Regardless of Trump’s scepticism, on the streets of Tehran, many of the revolutionaries, as we may now call them — mere “protesters” do not torch government buildings and slay elite guardsmen — have been shouting for the son of the man their parents deposed, and urging Khomeini’s “Great Satan” to make good on Trump’s promise to help them.
It is tempting — but wrong — to concur with Iranian monarchists that the events of the 1979 revolution were an aberration and the Islamic republic was doomed from the start. The story of how the Islamic republic destroyed itself is one of missed opportunities.
Revolutions typically go through a period of militancy before they either shock themselves into reversing course or returning in less extreme form, as happened in France after 1789; perpetuate their excesses blindly, Soviet-style, until it is too late; or reform themselves as China managed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Iran’s post-revolutionary shock was an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and his western backers in the 1980s. Following the ceasefire of 1988 and Khomeini’s death the following year, Iran entered a phase of reconstruction and a partial thawing of relations with the west. But Khamenei turned out to be more Leonid Brezhnev than Deng Xiaoping.
Despotic regimes hinge on personalities. The Shah was a dilatory playboy who could not bring himself to massacre his compatriots; over the year it took for the 1979 revolution to come to fruition, his goons killed fewer people than Khamenei’s have over the past few weeks, estimates by rights groups and western officials suggest. The 86-year-old supreme leader simply lacks the imagination and ideological suppleness required by a revolutionary state if it is not to become brittle and ultimately — as may still happen now — break.
A different supreme leader — perhaps Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, who had been Khomeini’s heir apparent but was sidelined for his independent thinking — would have thrown his weight behind the vigorous indigenous reform movement that flourished in the late 1990s and 2000s. The Islamic republic could have been steered into serene middle age, abandoning youthful thuggishness, accepting Israel’s right to exist and relaxing the Islamic dress code.
The pivotal moment came on June 19 2009, when Khamenei definitively declared his hand. His sermon that Friday took place one week into the biggest protests in decades, as millions of Iranians filled the streets of Tehran and other cities in support of the reformist candidate in the recent presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had been defrauded of victory in favour of the hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
I was present that day, fervently hoping, like my Iranian friends, that Khamenei would live up to his claims to fairness and objectivity and side with the masses in the street.
Instead, his left hand gripping his notes like a vice, his right hand picking at the hem of his gown, the supreme leader denounced the marchers as patsies of the west and warned of “bloodshed and chaos” if they marched again. That bloodshed, along with torture and show trials, followed — extinguishing a non-violent movement with limited aims and demonstrating that reform was dead.
Over the next 17 years, Khamenei pushed ahead with the country’s suicidal nuclear programme, also seasoning those who are now killing protesters by sending them to fight small wars alongside Iran’s once-vaunted — and now largely dismantled — “axis of resistance”. Back home, increasingly frequent protests targeted Khamenei himself, growing more violent and requiring more violence from the state to ensure their suppression. The result is a state at war with its people whose sole objective is its own survival.
The annihilation of the reform movement has benefited Pahlavi as much as Khamenei. The disaffected have nowhere else to turn. That the people are chanting his name doesn’t mean they have become monarchists. That they might welcome a US attack doesn’t mean they want to be subservient to the US.
They are reaching for the most convenient figurehead and the most logical means to achieve the end of the Islamic republic. Should that happen, the cacophony that was briefly in evidence in the spring of 1979 will be heard again.