Sixty-Eight Days
On December 28, 1978, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sat in a rented house in Neauphle-le-Chateau, a village outside Paris, and told reporters that women in an Islamic Iran would be free to choose their own clothing. “Women can choose any kind of attire they like,” he said, “so long as it covers them properly.” He did not say chador. He said modest dress — and he framed Islam as a force that would liberate women from being “sexual objects” or “dolls” in the Western style.
Sixty-eight days later, on March 7, 1979, Khomeini decreed that women working in government ministries must not appear “naked” — his word for unveiled.
Sixty-eight days. From “women can choose” to “women must cover.” The first promise was for the cameras in Paris. The second was for the theocracy in Tehran.
Kate Millett — the American feminist author of Sexual Politics — had traveled to Tehran in March 1979 to march alongside Iranian women. She was arrested and expelled for chanting liberty slogans in the streets. Her memoir, Going to Iran, captures what she witnessed: the “palpable sense of betrayal” felt by Iranian women who had marched against the Shah’s tanks, risked imprisonment and death, and now discovered that the revolution they had helped win considered their freedom a problem to be solved.
Banisadr — the revolution’s first president, writing from exile — had a word for this: khod’eh. Deliberate tactical deception.1 Not ambiguity. Not positions evolving in response to circumstances. The blueprint already existed — Khomeini had written it years earlier in Hokumat-e Islami (Islamic Government), a text available to anyone who looked. Almost no one did.
What follows is a record of that gap — between what was said for the cameras and what the blueprint already contained.
The Democracy Promise
The Promise:
Le Monde, May 1978: “I am not a politician.” Khomeini told reporters he would return to Qom after the Shah’s fall to resume religious studies. He would be a spiritual guide, not a head of state.
December 11, 1978: “Both women and men are free to attend university. Both are free to vote and stand as parliamentary representatives.” When asked about the form of government, he used the word Jomhuri — republic — implying popular sovereignty.
He also promised press freedom: “Freedom of speech, freedom of the pen… freedom has its place.”
The Reality:
Khomeini did not return to Qom. He became Supreme Leader — a position with more power than any Shah had held. The constitution enshrined Velayat-e Faqih, giving the Supreme Leader authority over the judiciary, the military, and the right to override parliament.2 It was approved in a December 1979 referendum held under the cover of the hostage crisis — in an atmosphere of emergency and xenophobia that made opposition tantamount to treason.
Press freedom lasted months. By 1980, the regime had shut down dozens of newspapers. Editors were arrested. Journalists were executed. Iran became — and remains — one of the worst press freedom environments on Earth.
The first Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, resigned in November 1979. The first President, Abolhassan Banisadr, was impeached in June 1981 and fled to France. Writing from exile, Banisadr would use the word that names the pattern: khod’eh.
The Women’s Promise
The Promise:
December 28, 1978: “Women, like men, are free in all these things… Women can choose any kind of attire they like so long as it covers them properly.” He promised full participation in “education, economic and military arenas.”
The Reality:
March 7, 1979 — 27 days after victory: Unveiled women in government ministries declared “naked.”
March 8, 1979: Massive protests on International Women’s Day. The regime retreated tactically, calling the veil a “recommendation.” It was a pause, not a concession.
By 1980: Hijab mandatory in government offices.
By 1983: Mandatory for all women in all public spaces. Punishment: lashings.
The Family Protection Law — which had set the marriage age at 18, required judicial oversight for polygamy, and given women divorce rights — was suspended. In its place:
The legal rollback:
- Marriage age for girls: lowered from 18 to 9 (later raised to 13)
- Women: barred from serving as judges
- Men: granted unilateral divorce rights
- Polygamy restrictions: removed
Simone de Beauvoir recognized the threat when other Western intellectuals were still romanticizing the revolution. She established the International Committee for Women’s Rights and sent a delegation to Tehran to express solidarity with Iranian women — explicitly rejecting the argument that the veil was a “cultural” issue that outsiders had no right to critique.3
The women who had marched against the Shah discovered that in the new Iran, they had fewer legal protections than they had under the old one. The rights that Farrokhroo Parsa — Iran’s first female cabinet minister — had spent her career building were abolished. Parsa herself was executed in 1980.
If you had marched in February 1979 — risked arrest, maybe death — and been told in March that appearing without a headscarf made you “naked,” what word would you use? This was not merely harm inflicted on women. It was the seizure of self-ownership — freedom that existed one week, abolished by decree the next.
The Economic Promise
The Promise:
March 1, 1979: “We will build houses for the needy. We will provide free water and electricity for the poor. We will provide free buses for the poor.” Khomeini attacked the Pahlavi elite: “The wealth of the former Shah and his siblings is enough to build a country.” The implication was unmistakable: oil revenues would flow directly to the people’s tables.
The Reality:
The promise was “oil money on the dinner table.” It became the most cited unfulfilled commitment of the revolution — the one that fuels every protest wave from 2009 to January 2026.
The economic collapse:
- Currency: from 70 rials/$ to over 1,410,000 rials/$
- Minimum wage: from $242/month to $73/month
- Housing affordability: from 22 years of savings to 112-177 years
- Brain drain: 4,000+ doctors emigrating per year
The revolution promised to take wealth from the Shah’s court and give it to the poor. Instead, the Bonyads — ostensibly charitable foundations — absorbed confiscated Pahlavi assets and became economic empires answerable only to the Supreme Leader. The IRGC expanded into construction, telecommunications, oil, and banking. The bazaaris who had bankrolled the revolution found themselves competing with a military-industrial complex more powerful than anything the Shah had built.
The poor got rationing, inflation, and an eight-year war.
The Minorities Promise
The Promise:
March 29, 1979: “All pieces of the Iranian nation have the same rights. Religious minorities are respected in Islam and their rights will be granted. They will be free to practice their religion and to select their own representatives.”
The Reality:
August 1979 — five months after the promise: Khomeini declared a “Holy War” against the Kurds when they asked for the regional autonomy the revolutionary rhetoric had implied. The IRGC was deployed. Thousands were killed. Kurdish regions were militarized.
The Baha’i community was excluded from constitutional protections entirely. Their leadership was executed. Members were banned from higher education. Systematic persecution became state policy.
Religious minorities that were recognized in the constitution — Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians — received token parliamentary seats but faced severe restrictions on worship, property, and civil rights.
The Pattern
Name the technique at work: calculated ambiguity turned deliberate betrayal. In Paris, Khomeini spoke the language of each faction. In Tehran, he implemented the program he had written years earlier in Hokumat-e Islami — a text that explicitly outlined a theocratic state, that was available for anyone to read, and that almost no one in the Western media bothered to examine before amplifying his democratic-sounding Paris promises to a global audience.
The BBC Persian Service broadcast Khomeini’s statements to millions of Iranians without critically examining his earlier writings.4 Andrew Young, Carter’s UN Ambassador, declared Khomeini would “eventually be hailed as a saint.”5 Michel Foucault called the revolution a “political spirituality” — and even as executions began, hesitated to condemn it.6
These Western voices were not conspirators. They were symptoms of a broader failure: the assumption that anyone who opposed a Western-backed autocrat must be a democrat. The revolution’s cheerleaders heard what they wanted to hear — the same Paris promises that Khomeini had designed for them.
And the deception worked because the grievances were real. The Shah’s regime was genuinely brutal — SAVAK tortured political prisoners, income inequality was staggering, the pace of Westernization disoriented millions. People who wanted the Shah gone had every rational reason to embrace anyone who promised something better. This is not a verdict on the Iranians who believed. It is a verdict on the man who knew he was lying.
The strongest counter-argument is that Khomeini’s positions evolved — that the Paris promises were genuine, and the turn to theocratic absolutism was forced by the hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, the chaos of a revolution under siege. This deserves honest consideration. But Hokumat-e Islami was written in 1970 — nine years before the revolution — and it already contained every element of the system that was built: the Supreme Leader, clerical authority over legislation, the subordination of popular sovereignty to divine law. The Paris promises contradicted a text Khomeini had spent a decade teaching. The evolution theory requires us to believe he forgot his own book.
The question is not whether Khomeini was sincere in Paris. The record makes clear he was not. The question is whether the world would recognize the pattern if it happened again — a charismatic figure telling each audience what it wants to hear, while the actual blueprint sits on a shelf, unread.
This article is a companion to The Revolution’s First Victims. For how the hostage crisis was used to seal the theocratic constitution, see 444 Days. For the women’s rights that were destroyed, see The Minister Who Was Hanged. For the economic devastation measured against what could have been, see Two Koreas, Two Irans.
Footnotes
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Democracy Digest, “How Khomeini Betrayed the Democratic Promise of the Iranian Revolution,” accessed 2026 ↩
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Britannica, “Iranian Revolution,” section on the 1979 constitutional referendum ↩
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Iran International, “Veils and Freedom: An Iranian Perspective on Women’s Day,” March 2025 ↩
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Collections Canada, “The BBC and the Iranian Revolution 1978-1979,” MA thesis, Communication Studies ↩
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Commentary Magazine, Sohrab Ahmari, “How Iran Plays the U.S.,” accessed 2026 ↩
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SciELO South Africa, “Hamartia: Foucault and Iran 1978-1979,” 2009 ↩