It was February 11th, 1979, after a few moments of silence on Radio Tehran’s broadcast, the voice of Jamshid Adili goes “In sedaaye enghelaab-e mardom-e Iran ast” — “This is the voice of the Revolution of the Iranian people.” He went on to repeat the announcement as if he was trying to reassure the audience that the revolution had brought an end to monarchy in Iran.
The streets became flooded with euphoric people celebrating the triumph of the revolution and the end of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule and the Pahlavi Dynasty. The victory was the culmination of 18 months of demonstrations, bloody clashes, massive industrial actions, a general strike and three days of armed confrontation between the revolutionaries and the most loyal forces of the Shah.
But why did Iran of the 1970s, with its well-off middle class, massive military might and powerful international allies, experience a revolution? And what were the origins of the revolution?
The 1979 revolution has come to be known as the “Islamic Revolution” because it ushered in a regime with an Islamist project, but How Islamic was the revolution? Can a phenomenon as complex as a revolution be described by the simple adjective of Islamic?
As the first part of our series on the 1979 Iranian revolution and its aftermath, we posed these questions to Professor Ervand Abrahamian, a prominent Iranian historian and emeritus distinguished professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He is the author of Iran Between Two Revolutions, among many other titles. He spoke with Shahram Aghamir.