Iran has repeatedly found itself in a sense of emergency for close to five decades, contributing to the survival of the establishment that took power post-1979 revolution, with the same Western hegemony and interferences among the contributing factors
In 2025, Iran vowed to reserve all options to defend itself after President Donald Trump said the US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites ‘obliterated’ three facilities hours after escalating tensions by deploying B-2 bombers capable of bombing underground. It called the strikes outrageous, a grave violation of the United Nations charter, international law, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and warned of everlasting consequences.
CBS News reported that Washington contacted Tehran ahead of the US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, saying it did not aim for regime change, which the West has repeatedly tried since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The contact appears to be designed to mitigate the potential consequences. It was perhaps because of a realisation that the revolution has partly endured with confrontation, or its anticipation with the US. Yale University historian Abbas Amanat has argued this has legitimised the ruling Iranian establishment as the core of national resistance against Western hegemony.
The sense of emergency Iran has repeatedly found itself in has contributed to the survival of the establishment, which has also overcome opposition by making the country a regional power. Repeated regime change attempts through overt or covert operations have increased its popularity even as Iran has been in a state of flux for almost 46 years. Iran has, since the 1980s, survived American sanctions, the US-backed Iraqi invasion, and the 20th century’s longest, to create the Middle East’s most extensive industrial base.
Amanat, who has noted that the perpetual crisis has benefited the revolution, has argued that the 1979 revolution was an unusual event as a clergy-dominated movement took control of a state in modern history for the first time. For centuries, the Iranian religious establishment coexisted with the state. The state saw religion as a pillar of stability and protected, patronized, and rewarded the religious establishment. Shiaism also played a key role in preserving Iran’s socio-cultural identity since it was declared the state religion in the 16th century, around 900 years after the rise of Islam, even as it was not fully enforced.
The First Revolution
The Constitutional Revolution (1905 to 1911), which provided Iran with a constitution modelled on the British one and parliament, laid the groundwork for the 1979 revolution. It introduced constitutional governance and fostered anti-imperialist sentiments that were among the reasons for the second revolution. Based on British political ideas, the Constitutional Revolution laid the foundations of the modern Iranian state and polity. It established the principles of parliamentary representation. The Constitutional Revolution fuelled nationalism. Iranian thinkers, scholars, and political activists drew on constitutionalism and the rule of law, drawing inspiration from the Enlightenment.
Iranians engaged with ideas of political organisation as economic stagnation, and the 1905 Russian revolution was among the sparks for Iran’s first revolution. The first majlis or consultative assembly, created in 1906, paved the way for a constitutional monarchy.
Societal Change
A gradual societal change began with Iran’s adoption of selective modernization in the 19th century. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Pahlavi monarchy (1921-1979) secularized institutions such as education and the courts of law, which were previously under the clerical establishment’s control. In the 19th century, the religious establishment resisted the Qajar dynasty’s attempt to enforce a European or Ottoman model for a more state-based judicial system.
The state became more centralized and more secularized in the following decade, seizing control of privileges and institutions from the clerical establishment, and created a justice ministry and secular public education that competed with religious education. The resistance to modernization of religious seminaries with an unchanging curriculum and pedagogy made it easier for the state-backed secular public education to overshadow them.
The British creation and development of Iran’s petroleum industry was another factor in the religious establishment’s isolation. The bulk of the oil revenue went to the British. A smaller percentage of revenue given to the Iranian government proved crucial for a nearly bankrupt state post-Second World War. It was used to fund centralization, reforms, strengthening armed forces, and an autocratic Pahlavi regime that no longer needed the religious establishment’s support.
The Loss And Gain
The religious establishment lost the privileges it once enjoyed, and some of its endowments were taken away, prompting an impoverished and younger generation of clerics to join the bureaucracy. Abbas Amanat notes that this changed the nature and structure of the clerical community, making it more prone to radicalization in the latter part of the 20th century. The community was left out of the state, modern sphere and largely isolated, but preserved ties to the traditional business sector.
The isolation made the clerical community more conservative and prevented it from modernising the religious law. Abbas Amanat argues the clerics clung to the arcane curriculum and teaching system. The religious establishment’s radical political agenda became an alternative to engaging in the modernization of Islamic law. This attracted certain sections of society excluded from the benefits of the Pahlavi state secularization, and led to the emergence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Iranian state under the shah also became more repressive in the 1960s and 1970s. It closed off avenues to political participation, such as free press, political parties, critique of government, and free and fair elections. The state’s repression fed the religious establishment’s support. The forces of popular dissent had few other options except resorting to the relatively untouched environment of the mosques and annual Shia mourning ceremonies. The government failed to close down venues for the clergy to express its veiled, but effective, criticism of the Pahlavi state despite its powerful security apparatus.
The Subservience
The clergy blamed the shah for subservience to the West, especially the US. In the late 1960s, the clerical community, especially Ayatollah Khomeini, notes Abbas Amanat, adopted much of the nativist anti-Westernism of the intellectual Left, such as Jalal al-Ahmad, the romantic revolutionary rhetoric of people such as revolutionary Ali Shari’ati, the ideology of the Marxist-Islamist urban guerrilla organizations, and the remnants of liberal nationalism of Mohammed Mossadegh (1880-1967).
In 1951, Mosaddeq swept to power on the pledge of nationalizing Iran’s oil
and ending the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company’s monopoly on Iranian petroleum. American President Dwight Eisenhower abandoned the non-interventionist policy when Mosaddeq kept his promise. He roped in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Mossadegh, an alumnus of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, who believed in constitutionalism, civic nationalism, and secular nationalism, in 1953.
Anti-Western Sentiment
The religious establishment leveraged anti-Western sentiment to its advantage, partly because of Iran’s bitter experiences of occupation by Western powers during the First and Second World Wars. European and US interventions undermined Iran’s democratic institutions during the Constitutional Revolution and with Mossadegh’s removal from power and the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy.
The religious establishment tapped into the sentiments that Iranians harbored because of their troubled history with the imperialism and superpowers. The religious establishment saw a political advantage in condemning the West and accusing it of destroying Iran’s democracy.
By the 1970s, most Iranians were sick of the Shah’s corrupt and incompetent rule, preparing a fertile ground for the Khomeini-led revolution. The Shah’s policies fuelled record inflation. Militarisation and a loss of national and religious identity united clergy, intellectuals, the merchants, and almost all socio-political organizations, including the communists and the feminists, against the monarchy and bring it down. By seeking to install the Shah’s son as Iran’s ruler and getting dragged into Israel’s forever wars, the West has shown it has learnt no lessons, or it does not care about its repeated blunders that have cost millions of lives in the Middle East.
