What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Constitution That Was Swapped

by Iran Prism 9 min read

What Iran Almost Got

In the summer of 1979, Ezzatollah Sahabi — a mechanical engineer, a member of the Freedom Movement, and a man who believed that Islam and democracy were not only compatible but inseparable — stood before the Assembly of Experts and argued for the constitution that Iranians had been promised. He lost, 53 to 8. The constitution that Ayatollah Khomeini carried back to Iran on February 1, 1979, was not the one Iranians ended up living under.

Hassan Habibi — a French-educated jurist with a doctorate in law and sociology, and a member of the Freedom Movement — had drafted it at Khomeini’s direction while in Parisian exile. What he produced was, by any measure, a conventional democratic document. A strong directly elected presidency modeled on de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. A unicameral National Consultative Assembly. An independent judiciary. A Guardian Council where Islamic jurists held a minority of seats and were approved by parliament from a list drawn up by senior clerics.1

It contained no Supreme Leader. No velayat-e faqih. No special political role for the clergy. No candidate-vetting mechanism. No constitutionalized Revolutionary Guards. Aside from substituting a president for the monarch and inserting language requiring laws to be compatible with Islam, it “did not differ markedly from Iran’s 1906 constitution” — the document that had established the Middle East’s first parliamentary democracy.2

The most striking fact is not what the draft contained. It is who approved it.

Khomeini endorsed the Habibi draft. He endorsed it “on more than one occasion.” He proposed only two modifications — partly to bar women from the presidency and judgeships. He urged “it must be approved quickly.” The Revolutionary Council endorsed it unanimously. Khomeini even suggested bypassing a constituent assembly entirely and putting the draft directly to a national referendum.3

He had, at that point, already published the blueprint for the system he actually intended to build — nine years earlier, in a book distributed only to trusted followers.

How the Assembly Was Captured

The irony is sharp enough to cut: it was the liberals, not the clerics, who demanded the process that destroyed them.

Khomeini proposed either a direct referendum or a small forty-person advisory council to finalize the constitution. Bazargan’s provisional government, secular nationalists, and Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari all pushed for a popularly elected constituent assembly. They wanted the democratic legitimacy of a full process — representatives chosen by the people, public deliberation.4

They got their wish. The technique is older than constitutions: present a democratic process, then engineer the conditions so only one outcome is possible. The form of consent without its substance.

The clerical members of the Revolutionary Council — without consulting Bazargan — unilaterally decided the assembly would have roughly seventy members rather than the large body the liberals had envisioned. Bazargan immediately recognized the danger: with larger constituencies and fewer candidates, he warned, “it would be easier to rig the elections” and “the likelihood of dissenting voices in the Assembly could be reduced to almost nothing.”5

He was right. The Islamic Republican Party — founded by Beheshti, Bahonar, Rafsanjani, Khamenei, and Mousavi-Ardabili just two weeks after the revolution — exploited its identification with Khomeini and its network of mosques, seminaries, and revolutionary committees. Khomeini helped by characterizing opposition candidates as “Westernized intellectuals, Marxists, and morally corrupt secular groups who did not believe in Islam.”6

The result, on August 3, 1979: seventy-three members elected on 51.7 percent turnout. Fifty-five were mojtaheds — Shia clerics — making up 75 percent of the Assembly. Fifty of seventy-three were IRP candidates or Khomeini loyalists. The National Front, the People’s Fedai Guerrillas, and the People’s Mojahedin were totally absent. Twenty-plus political groups and ethnic minority organizations boycotted entirely. The one Kurdish representative elected — Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan — had his credentials rejected. His seat was left permanently vacant.7

All three leadership positions — Speaker, Deputy Speaker, Secretary — were held by velayat-e faqih supporters.

Sahabi’s Warning and the 53-8 Vote

Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti — described as “the second person in the political hierarchy after the Revolution” — was formally the Deputy Speaker. In practice, he was the Assembly’s architect. He chaired the Goals of the Constitution Committee, packed it with IRP colleagues, and personally drafted Article 5: the rule of a single faqih.8

The committee generated the velayat-e faqih articles and passed them in less than two weeks. The opposition was outnumbered roughly five to one.

Ezzatollah Sahabi, a mechanical engineer and Freedom Movement member, mounted the most articulate resistance. His religious argument drew on Mirza Na’ini’s theology from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution: “Absolute rule belongs only to God and the infallible Imams; human beings cannot be under the absolute rule and subjection of anyone except them.”9

His practical argument was blunter: “The faqih has certain qualities which are needed, but not enough for a political leader in today’s society.”

Even a cleric opposed it. Mohammad-Javad Hojjati Kermani warned: “In today’s complex world, a religious leader does not possess the requisite knowledge to lead the people.” He added, with a prescience that looks prophetic: “The concerns of Iran are insignificant compared to those of the international community.”10

But Khomeini intervened. His proclamation ended the debate: “Velayat-e Faqih is not something created by the Assembly of Experts. It is something that God has ordained.”11

An honest reckoning demands acknowledging that Khomeini had genuine mass support and that many Iranians sincerely wanted Islamic governance. The problem was not the public’s desire to see Islam reflected in their government — it was that a democratic-Islamic hybrid was swapped out for absolute clerical rule through a captured process, and the people who voted for it were never told what they were getting.

The full Assembly floor vote: 53 in favor, 8 against, 5 abstentions. The death of Ayatollah Taleghani — a popular, opposition-leaning senior cleric — on September 10, 1979, had further weakened resistance. In sixty-seven sessions, spread over roughly ninety days, the Assembly transformed a democratic draft into the legal architecture of theocracy.

The December 2-3 referendum — held during the hostage crisis, with color-coded ballots and no voting booths — rubber-stamped the result. But there was one voice that had been heard before the Assembly even met.

Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari — the same man who had saved Khomeini’s life in 1963 by elevating him to marja status — issued a fatwa against the constitution. He called velayat-e faqih incompatible with popular sovereignty, warned that the direct merging of religion and government “would be corrupting to both,” and declared: “No system of government can be coerced upon a people, no matter how morally correct it may be.”12

For this, he was destroyed.

The 1989 Rewrite

The 1979 constitution contained a self-defeating flaw: the Supreme Leader had to be a marja-e taqlid — the highest rank in Shia clerical hierarchy. But of the dozen Grand Ayatollahs alive at the revolution’s peak, only one besides Khomeini — Hossein-Ali Montazeri — supported velayat-e faqih. All others rejected it as theological innovation without foundation.13

When Khomeini dismissed Montazeri as his designated successor in March 1989 — “Since it has become clear that after me you are going to hand over this country to the liberals” — the system faced an impossible problem. No qualified candidate existed.

The fix was elegant, circular, and entirely self-serving. On April 24, 1989, Khomeini appointed a twenty-five-member Council for Revision of the Constitution. Twenty of the twenty-five were his own appointees. The deputy chairman was Ali Khamenei — the man the revision was designed to install.14

Khamenei was a Hojjatoleslam, a mid-ranking cleric, nowhere near marja status. He objected to his own selection, stating on the record: “I do not truly deserve to occupy such a position… my leadership would be formal, not a real one. Based on the Constitution, I am not qualified for the job.”15

The revision council’s solution: remove the marja requirement. Replace it with the far lower standard of “scholarship necessary for performing the functions of mufti.” Eliminate the Leadership Council fallback option from the original text. Add the word “absolute” — motlaqeh — to the Supreme Leader’s authority. Abolish the office of Prime Minister. Constitutionalize the Expediency Discernment Council, with members appointed by the Supreme Leader.16

Khomeini died on June 4, 1989. The Assembly of Experts convened the same day. Rafsanjani reportedly revealed Khomeini’s private endorsement. Over 80 percent of Assembly members voted for Khamenei’s “interim leadership” — interim because the constitutional amendments enabling his succession hadn’t been ratified yet. The referendum on July 28, 1989, produced 97.6 percent approval on 55 percent turnout. Khamenei’s position was retroactively legitimized.17

Montazeri called it “the trivialization of Shia clergy.”18

The man who sat as deputy chairman of the revision council wrote the rules that enabled his own appointment. The theory required a philosopher-king. The institution produced a functionary. And the document that began as a democratic charter modeled on the French Fifth Republic became the legal framework for the most complete merger of religious and political authority in modern history.

Today, the Guardian Council — an unelected body whose clerical members are appointed by the Supreme Leader — vets all candidates for public office. Imagine an unelected panel in Washington deciding which candidates Americans were permitted to vote for — and the panel’s members being appointed by the very person the panel is supposed to oversee. That is how Iran’s elections work. No woman has ever been permitted to run for president. In the 2021 presidential election, the Council approved 7 of 592 applicants — an approval rate of 1.2 percent. President Rouhani himself captured it: “This isn’t an election. Rather, it is the appointment of Parliament members.”19

The closed circuit of power has no constitutional exit. The Assembly of Experts can theoretically remove the Supreme Leader. But the Assembly’s candidates are vetted by the Guardian Council, whose members are appointed by the Leader. The constitution contains the forms of democracy — elections, branches, enumerated rights — while subordinating all of them to a single unelected office whose occupant was installed through a process designed by himself, for himself, in the final weeks of the founder’s life.

This article is part of The Greatest Bait-and-Switch in Modern History. For the cassette tape network that amplified Khomeini’s message, see The Tape Network. For the three men who saved Khomeini’s life and were destroyed by him, see The Men Who Saved Khomeini.

Footnotes

  1. Hassan Habibi’s background and the draft’s provisions documented in NYU Globalex analysis of Iran’s constitutional history; Encyclopaedia Iranica. ↩

  2. NYU Globalex; comparison with the 1906 Supplementary Fundamental Laws of Iran. ↩

  3. Said Saffari’s scholarly assessment; Encyclopaedia Iranica; Khomeini’s endorsements documented in Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (Thomas Dunne Books, 2000). ↩

  4. Bazargan, Shariatmadari, and secular nationalist positions documented in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs (Basic Books, 1984). ↩

  5. Bazargan’s warning quoted in Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs. ↩

  6. IRP founding and mosque network exploitation documented in Asghar Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran (I.B. Tauris, 1997). ↩

  7. Assembly composition and turnout from Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs; Kurdish representative (Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou) credentials rejection documented in constitutional scholarship. ↩

  8. Beheshti’s role and Article 5 drafting documented in Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran. ↩

  9. Sahabi’s arguments preserved in Assembly proceedings; Mirza Na’ini’s theology from the Constitutional Revolution period. ↩

  10. Hojjati Kermani’s arguments documented in Assembly transcripts. ↩

  11. Khomeini’s statement to the Assembly of Experts. ↩

  12. Shariatmadari’s constitutional objections from Hossein Bashiriyeh, The State and Revolution in Iran (Routledge, 1984); Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs. ↩

  13. Grand Ayatollahs’ rejection of velayat-e faqih documented in multiple sources including Moin’s biography. ↩

  14. Khomeini’s dismissal letter to Montazeri and revision council composition from Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. ↩

  15. Khamenei’s objection to his own selection documented in Assembly proceedings and multiple scholarly analyses. ↩

  16. The four key constitutional changes documented in Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran; Khomeini’s January 6, 1988 letter to Khamenei. ↩

  17. Succession choreography from Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs; referendum results from official Iranian records. ↩

  18. Montazeri quoted in his published memoirs. ↩

  19. Guardian Council disqualification statistics from official Iranian electoral data; Rouhani’s statement widely reported in Iranian and international press. ↩