Lessons from the Last Iranian Revolution

F orty-seven years ago this month, more than 98 percent of Iranian voters opted for a government based on a strict interpretation of Shiite Islam. Not every Westerner regarded this as negatively in real time as they do in retrospect.

Carter administration officials, communists, Mother Jones, and Michel Foucault all deluded themselves into believing that Ayatollah Khomeini led the transformation of Iran into a freer, democratic, and more pluralistic society. This “Class of ’79” stands as a cautionary tale for anyone in 2026 hubristic enough to project a political delusion upon the Iranians looking to overthrow the government today.

In an issue of The Nation dated March 31, 1979 — the second and final day on which Iranians voted to choose their new government — Kai Bird assured readers that “there is every reason to believe that the still unpublished Constitution will include all the elements of a liberal democratic system.”

Bird, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize and co-write the book that served as the basis for the film Oppenheimer, grew up in the Middle East. He demonstrated an understanding in his article that the Islamic Revolution owed far more to Islam than to revolution. He nevertheless allowed the elan of revolution to cloud his view of the religious substance behind it. He wrote:

Perhaps the most reassuring evidence on the future course of the Iranian revolution comes from the streets of Teheran [sic]. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the exuberance displayed soon after the Portuguese revolution in the summer of 1975. The newspapers are full of debate and the sidewalks of downtown Teheran [sic] are crowded with makeshift bookstalls selling the previously forbidden — Karl Marx, Lenin, Oriana Fallaci’s Letter to an Unborn Child, and the progressive Moslem writings of the late Dr. Ali Shariati and other formerly imprisoned authors.

This came a week after The Nation editorially aired some concerns and misgivings regarding the revolution. Still, the magazine cautioned against drawing an adverse conclusion.

“Before rushing in with a negative verdict on the Iranian revolution, let us remember the bloody tyranny that preceded Khomeini and the repressiveness of regimes elsewhere in the region,” The Nation editorialized on March 24, 1979. “What are we to make of those liberal journalists now decrying Iran’s alleged relapse into the Dark Ages, who managed such an exquisite silence during the Shah’s thirty-eight years of brutal rule?”

Princeton University Professor Richard Falk insisted in the February 16, 1979, issue of the New York Times that the depiction of Ayatollah Khomeini “as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” Falk arrived at the opinion that Khomeini’s “entourage of close advisors is composed of moderate, progressive individuals” after visiting the cleric in France. The article depicted him almost as Parson Weems did George Washington, and the “Trusting Khomeini” headline reflected this “I-cannot-tell-a-lie” portrayal. “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics,” he wrote, “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”

Even accounts skeptical of the leftist line on the Islamic Revolution fall, here and there, for ideologically inspired fantasies. MacLean’s, for instance, foresaw “the enshrinement of a progressive (socially) but conservative (religiously) Moslem state” in its February 5, 1979, issue.

It all recalled the dispatches of Lincoln Steffens, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other ideological tourists upon their visits to the Soviet Union. And as Khomeini demanded the resignation of secular government leaders, banned music on the radio, shut down the nation’s leading newspaper, and supported the kidnapping of U.S. embassy workers, the various love-letters to the ayatollah in American publications appeared increasingly puzzling to readers.

Whether the pundits influenced the politicians or the politicians influenced the pundits, powerful voices in both groups fell under a spell seemingly cast by the ostensible wizard-impersonator who already had cast a spell on Iranians.

William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Iran during the Islamic Revolution, judged the ayatollah in late 1978 as potentially occupying a “Gandhi-like position” on the political periphery in a post-shah Iran. Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini “a saint.”

Khomeini proved neither Gandhi nor saint. But within the journalistic profession that otherwise embarrassed itself, a few prophets, or at least prophetic voices, emerged.

“There is every sign that religious emotions are going to play an increasing role in the history of the coming decades,” an unsigned item in the front of the January 5, 1979, issue of National Review explained, “and U.S. policymakers appear to have vastly underestimated their importance in Iran.”

A month later, another unsigned piece in the magazine noted: “What appears to be in store is an Islamic ‘republic’ organized along the xenophobic and reactionary lines laid down by the redoubtable Ayatollah Khomeini — bad news for the U.S., for Europe, for Israel, and for Egypt, among others.”

A month after that, the U.N. ambassador’s speculation on the ayatollah’s pending canonization provoked amusement. “In the world according to Andrew Young (who, surprising as it seems, is a Baptist minister), the Ayatollah Khomeini is a ‘saint,’” an item in the front of the magazine noted. “In the Christian world, however, the Ayatollah will need three miracles to prove such status, the first of which we will grant him if he gets Mr. Young to close his mouth.”

In that same March 2 issue, William F. Buckley Jr. scoffed at the characterization of Khomeini as a liberator. “Political liberty is not the apparent objective of this representative of Islam,” National Review’s editor in chief observed.

Buckley accurately called him “the world’s leading theocrat,” which, in hindsight, seems a quotidian observation. But in early 1979, when others in the word profession deployed ones such as “progressive,” “democratic,” “humane,” and “Gandhi-like” to describe Khomeini and his project, the ability to describe what one saw with one’s eyes rather than what one saw in one’s daydreams seemed an especially laudable feat.