The Revolution's First Victims

The Prime Minister Who Lasted Two Days

On the morning of November 4, 1979, Mehdi Bazargan was the Prime Minister of Iran. He was a French-educated engineer, a moderate Islamist, and the man Ayatollah Khomeini had appointed to give the revolution a respectable face for the cameras. He believed in the synthesis of Islam and democracy. He believed in diplomatic relations with the West. He believed that Khomeini, once the Shah was gone, would return to Qom and leave governance to technocrats.

That morning, students seized the American embassy in Tehran.

Within forty-eight hours, Bazargan resigned. His government was over. The experiment with liberal democracy in post-revolutionary Iran had lasted nine months — and for most of those months, he had been a figurehead overruled by a shadow Revolutionary Council of clerics and by the Komitehs — local revolutionary committees that answered to no one but Khomeini.

Bazargan was the first victim. He was not the last.

Within four years, every major faction that had helped overthrow the Shah — secular liberals, women’s organizations, the Marxist left, the Islamo-Marxist MEK, and the traditional merchants who had bankrolled the uprising — had been purged, imprisoned, or executed. The president who followed Bazargan, Abolhassan Banisadr, was impeached in June 1981 and forced to flee to France. Writing from Versailles, he used a specific word to describe what Khomeini had done: khod’eh — deliberate tactical deception. Not ambiguity. Not misunderstanding. Calculated lies. Hold onto that word — khod’eh. It explains everything that follows.

But here is the part that rarely gets told. The revolution was not one movement. It was five — five factions who thought they were pulling the same job, only to discover, one by one, that only one faction was ever meant to walk away.

The Negative Coalition

The 1979 revolution was not “the people” rising against “the Shah.” It was a negative coalition — five factions united exclusively by what they opposed, projecting five incompatible utopias onto a single figure who told each faction exactly what it wanted to hear.

The clerics had what no other faction possessed: over 9,000 mosques and countless hussainiyas (religious halls) — a nationwide communication network that could mobilize millions while bypassing the Shah’s censorship apparatus.¹ Khomeini’s radical innovation, Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist), was deliberately downplayed during the revolutionary buildup in favor of populist rhetoric about justice and independence.

The secular nationalists — the National Front and Freedom Movement, heirs to Mossadegh — wanted a return to the 1906 Constitution. Bazargan and Karim Sanjabi traveled to Khomeini’s exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau, outside Paris, to meet with him, legitimizing him as the opposition’s leader in exchange for vague assurances of democratic governance. Their strategic error: assuming Khomeini would return to Qom as a spiritual guide while they ran the government.

The Marxist left — the Tudeh Party and the Fedayeen guerrillas — adhered to a “stages theory” of revolution. Overthrow the Shah’s American-backed regime first; socialism would follow naturally. The Fedayeen provided the paramilitary muscle that finally broke the Shah’s military in February 1979. Their strategic error: believing Islamists were merely a transitional vehicle against imperialism.

The MEK — the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Islamo-Marxist organization that had emerged from prison with hundreds of thousands of supporters — combined revolutionary Shi’ism with Che Guevara-style radicalism. Their strategic error: overestimating their own leverage against the clerical machine’s ability to mobilize masses.

The bazaaris — Iran’s traditional merchant class — were the revolution’s financial backbone. The Shah’s 1975 anti-profiteering campaign had imprisoned thousands of shopkeepers. His modernization program was replacing their bazaar networks with supermarkets and state distributors. Their strategic error: assuming clerical rule would guarantee economic non-interference.

And behind all five, a sixth force: the urban middle class and intelligentsia, emboldened by Jimmy Carter’s 1977 human rights pressure on the Shah, who projected liberal democratic values onto Khomeini’s calls for “freedom” — interpreting them through a Western lens rather than reading the theocratic blueprint that Khomeini had published years earlier in Hokumat-e Islami (Islamic Government).

Each faction heard what it needed to hear. None read what Khomeini had actually written.

The Bait

What held the coalition together was not shared ideology. It was one man’s extraordinary ability to tell each audience exactly what it wanted to hear — documented, dated, and on the record.

In May 1978, Khomeini told Le Monde: “I am not a politician.” He positioned himself as a spiritual guide who would return to Qom to resume religious studies after the Shah’s fall. Not a head of state. A sage.

On December 11, 1978, he told reporters: “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, equating it with France.

On December 28, 1978, he promised: “Women can choose any kind of attire they like so long as it covers them properly.” He did not say chador. He said modest covering — and framed Islam as the liberator of women from being “sexual objects” or “dolls” in the Western style.

On March 1, 1979, days after his triumphant return: “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.” He attacked the Pahlavi elite: “The wealth of the former Shah and his siblings is enough to build a country.”

On 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.”

Democracy for the liberals. Freedom for the women. Redistribution for the poor. Autonomy for the minorities. A utopia tailored to every faction. The promises were not ambiguous. They were specific, public, and documented — which is what makes what happened next not a drift but a betrayal.

The Switch

This is where Banisadr’s word — khod’eh — becomes visible. Not as accusation, but as a documented timeline. The promises began unraveling twenty-seven days after the revolution succeeded.

March 7, 1979: Khomeini decreed that women in government ministries must not appear “naked” — his word for unveiled.² Less than one month after victory. Less than seventy days after the dress-freedom promise.

March 8, 1979: On International Women’s Day, massive protests erupted in Tehran. The regime retreated tactically, calling the veil a “recommendation.” It was not a concession. It was a pause. By 1980, hijab was mandatory in government offices. By 1983, it was mandatory for all women in public spaces — punishable by lashings. The Family Protection Law was suspended.³ The legal marriage age for girls was lowered from eighteen to nine.

November 4, 1979: Students seized the American embassy. Khomeini, observing the ecstatic public reaction, declared it a “second revolution” — greater than the first. Bazargan resigned two days later. The hostage crisis trapped the left in a vise: support the seizure and empower the clerics, or oppose it and be branded an American agent. Documents reconstructed from shredded embassy files were used to accuse leftist leaders of espionage. And in the atmosphere of emergency and xenophobia, the constitutional referendum enshrining Velayat-e Faqih was approved by a landslide in December 1979 — the theocratic architecture that governs Iran to this day, passed under cover of anti-American hysteria.

April 1980: Khomeini launched the Cultural Revolution. Universities were shut down for three years.⁴ Faculty were purged. Students were expelled. This was not censorship. This was strategic — the universities were the Left’s recruitment base. You kill a movement not with arrests but by closing the places where ideas spread.

1983: The Tudeh Party — the oldest communist party in the Middle East — was finally targeted.⁵ This was the ultimate irony: the Tudeh had loyally supported the suppression of liberals and other leftists. They had helped Khomeini eliminate every rival faction, believing they were securing their own position. Their leadership was arrested and tortured into televised confessions of spying for the Soviet Union. The party that had provided intellectual legitimacy to the revolution was destroyed by it.

August 1979: When the Kurds demanded the regional autonomy that revolutionary rhetoric had implied, Khomeini declared a “Holy War” against them. The IRGC was deployed. Thousands were killed. Kurdish regions were militarized. The promise of equal rights for “all pieces of the Iranian nation” had lasted five months.

The Baha’i community — deliberately excluded from constitutional protections — faced systematic persecution. Their leadership was executed. They were banned from higher education.

The bazaaris discovered that the Islamic moral economy they had been promised was a state-dominated war economy. Bonyads (foundations) and the IRGC took over major industries and commerce. The bazaar lost its role as primary importer. The corrupt bureaucracy was far more intrusive than the Shah’s.

The elimination timeline:

Secular liberals: purged 1979-1981 (Bazargan resigned, Banisadr impeached and exiled)

Women’s rights: reversed starting March 7, 1979 (27 days after victory)

Kurdish autonomy: crushed August 1979 (5 months after minority rights promise)

Marxist left: destroyed 1980-1983 (Cultural Revolution, then Tudeh destroyed)

MEK: armed conflict 1981, mass executions 1988

Bazaaris: economically marginalized by Bonyads and IRGC through the 1980s

Every faction that had made the revolution possible — except the clerics themselves — was consumed by it.

The Honest Ledger

The revolution had genuine popular support. Millions marched. The Shah’s regime was authoritarian — SAVAK’s torture was documented and indefensible. The anti-profiteering campaign alienated the bazaar.⁶ The pace of Westernization disoriented traditional communities. Inequality was extreme: the Gini coefficient stood between 0.50 and 0.56, among the highest in the developing world.⁷

These were real grievances, and the people who marched had real courage.

The point is not that the revolution was unjustified. The point is that Khomeini practiced calculated deception — what his own first president called khod’eh — a deliberate obfuscation of his theocratic blueprint behind a veil of democratic and populist promises. And then he systematically liquidated every coalition partner who had made the revolution possible.

The Buyer’s Remorse

Imagine discovering that a movement you risked your life for — marching against tanks, enduring tear gas, watching friends arrested — was designed from the beginning to betray you. Not gradually. Not through mission creep. By design.

That is the situation of the majority of Iranians alive today.

What the revolution produced:

79% of Iranians would vote No to the Islamic Republic in a free referendum (GAMAAN 2019, 200,000+ respondents, encrypted methodology)⁸

Only 32% identify as Shi’a Muslim — the fastest secularization in the region⁹

Minimum wage collapsed to $73/month

Currency: 70 rials/$ → over 1,410,000 rials/$

Housing: 22 years of savings → over 112 years

The revolution’s goal was to create an Islamic society. Instead, it produced the fastest secularization in the region. Significant numbers of Iranians now identify as atheist, agnostic, or Zoroastrian — often a nationalist protest identity, reclaiming pre-Islamic Persian heritage.

In the protests of 2017, 2019, 2022, and January 2026, the most common chant was not a political slogan. It was a line from a song of nostalgia: “Reza Shah, rohat shad” — “Reza Shah, bless your soul.” The children of revolutionaries, chanting the name of the king their parents overthrew.

The most cited unfulfilled promise — the one that surfaces in every protest wave — is the simplest: oil money on the dinner table. That was the promise. The buyer’s remorse is not anecdotal. It is sociological fact. And the question the simplified revolutionary narrative cannot answer — the one worth sitting with — is this: if the people chose this government, why do 79% of them want it gone?

For the forensic record of every promise broken, see The Paris Deception. For how the hostage crisis was used as a domestic political weapon, see 444 Days. For the most cautionary tale in opposition politics — the MEK’s fifty-year metamorphosis, see The Chameleon. For what Iranians actually think when asked without fear, see What Iranians Actually Want. For the women’s rights that were abolished, see The Minister Who Was Hanged. To test what you know about Iran’s hidden history, take The Iran Test.

Britannica, “Iranian Revolution,” section on revolutionary organization and mosque networks ↩
IranWire, “Khomeini Factcheck: Forty Years of False Promises in Iran,” 2019 ↩
Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, “Gender Inequality and Discrimination: The Case of Iranian Women,” accessed 2026 ↩
Britannica, “Iranian Revolution,” section on the Cultural Revolution of 1980 ↩
Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran Between Two Revolutions,” Princeton University Press, 1982; Maziar Behrooz, “Rebels With a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran,” I.B. Tauris, 1999 ↩
Explaining History Podcast, “The Bazaar and the Clergy: The Socio-Economic and Ideological Foundation of Anti-Pahlavi Opposition,” September 2025 ↩
Brookings Institution, “Iran: Poverty and Inequality Since the Revolution,” 2000 ↩
GAMAAN, “Survey Report on the Islamic Republic: Yes or No,” April 2019 ↩
Skeptic Magazine, “Iranians Are Rejecting Theocracy: The Islamic Republic’s Unintended Legacy,” 2024 ↩