What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Revolution That Nearly Failed

by Iran Prism 10 min read

The Newspaper Truck

On the evening of January 7, 1978, a delivery truck carrying copies of the government newspaper Ettela’at arrived in Qom. Within hours, people had attacked the truck and burned copies in the street. Seminary students made photocopies of the offending article with an addendum calling for a meeting the next day. Bazaars closed. Students gathered at the Khan Seminary. Marchers went to the homes of senior ayatollahs — Shariatmadari, Ha’iri, Golpaygani, Najafi-Marashi — pressing them for endorsement.1

The article — “Iran and Red and Black Colonization,” published under the pseudonym Ahmad Rashidi Motlagh, printed in red ink on page seven — called Khomeini a “British agent,” an “Indian Sayyed” questioning his Iranian origins, a “man without faith,” and insinuated he had “unnatural relations with a young associate.” The Information Minister, Dariush Homayoun, later claimed the article arrived sealed from the Imperial Court and he never read its contents. Amir Taheri, editor of the rival Kayhan daily, received the same article and refused to publish it, finding it “insulting.”2

One account recorded that the Shah ordered the original draft rewritten to make the tone “more insulting.”

Before this article, Khomeini was, to most Iranians, “an almost forgotten exiled dissident cleric.” He had been in exile since 1964. His son Mostafa’s death in October 1977 had produced mourning ceremonies that gave him his first mass exposure in years. But the Ettela’at article gave him something the mourning ceremonies alone could not: national name recognition overnight, cast not as an agitator but as a victim. As David Menashri observed, “the religious leaders equated a personal attack on Khomeini with an attack on Islam as such.” The publication date — 17 Dey — was the anniversary of Reza Shah’s forced unveiling law, deepening the insult for religious Iranians.3

Calling a senior ayatollah “faithless” transformed a political dispute into a religious one, mobilizing people with no prior political engagement.

The next morning, security forces in Qom fired live ammunition at protesters. Between five and twenty people were killed — the scholarly range is wide, but the opposition claimed up to three hundred. The inflated number mattered more than the real one. This would become a pattern.4

The Forty-Day Engine

What followed was a mechanism unique to Shia Islam — and it is worth pausing to understand it, because nothing like it exists in any other revolutionary context.

In Shia tradition, the dead are mourned on the fortieth day — the arba’in or chehelom. The practice is rooted in the commemoration of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala in 680 CE. Each crackdown created martyrs. Mourners gathered forty days later. Security forces — lacking crowd control training, equipped only with live ammunition — created new martyrs. A new forty-day cycle began.5

The cascade:

Qom, January 8-9. Five to twenty killed. Ayatollah Shariatmadari called the country to mourn on the fortieth day.

Tabriz, February 18. Police Colonel Haghshenas ordered a mosque closed, calling it “a barn.” A twenty-two-year-old student, Mohammad Tajalli, rushed the Colonel and was shot dead. His body was carried through the streets, triggering twelve hours of fighting. The army deployed tanks for the first time since 1963. “Death to the Shah” was heard publicly for the first time. Verified deaths: nine to thirteen. The opposition claimed five hundred.6

Yazd and multiple cities, approximately March 29-30. Three days of protests across more than three dozen cities. Over a hundred killed across the period.

Nationwide, approximately May 10. Mourning protests in twenty-four towns and cities. Troops broke into the homes of religious leaders and killed theology students taking sanctuary.7

Think of the last funeral you attended. Now imagine that the person you were mourning was killed by your own government — and imagine knowing that forty days from now, you will march again, and they might kill someone else. That is the emotional logic of the chehelom cycle. Every act of repression automatically generates the next protest, on a calendar the government cannot control — and the protest takes the form of a sacred religious obligation that cannot be banned without confirming the charge that the government is anti-Islamic. The mosque network — decentralized, embedded in every neighborhood, impossible to shut down — provided organizational capacity no secular opposition could match.

Charles Kurzman noted this cycle had been “put to protest purposes only once before in Iranian history, in 1963, and that movement had come to naught.” No revolution in a non-Shia context has deployed an equivalent self-reinforcing, calendar-driven mobilization structure.8

The Summer Stall

Then it stopped.

By June 17, 1978, the next forty-day interval arrived — and the cycle came to a halt. Ayatollah Shariatmadari, against Khomeini’s wishes, called for mourning as a one-day stay-at-home strike rather than street demonstrations. It worked. No street casualties meant no new martyrs, no new mourning ceremonies, no next escalation.9

Kurzman documented the result: by summer 1978, protests had “stagnated, remaining at a steady rate for four months, with about 10,000 participants in each major city” — a fraction of Iran’s fifteen million adults. The revolution had plateaued.

This fact is almost entirely absent from popular accounts. The standard narrative presents the revolution as an unstoppable wave building from January to February. The reality is that it nearly died in the summer. Shariatmadari’s restraint — his insistence on nonviolent methods that avoided the cycle of martyrdom — had worked precisely because it denied the revolution the fuel it needed.

From exile, Khomeini countered. He declared “the blood of martyrs must water the tree of Islam” and pressured mosques and moderate clergy to reject Shariatmadari’s restraint. The technique here has a name in political science: outbidding — where the more radical faction forces moderates to either escalate or lose credibility. Khomeini was outbidding Shariatmadari for leadership of the opposition.10

But Khomeini’s words alone did not restart the revolution. Two events did.

The Fire

On August 19, 1978 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1953 coup — four men barred the doors of Cinema Rex in Abadan and set the building ablaze. Between 377 and 470 people burned to death watching Masoud Kimiai’s The Deer, a film about political resistance that SAVAK had forced the director to reshoot.

Khomeini declared the fire “undoubtedly the work of the criminal SAVAK and the bloodthirsty regime.” The scholarly consensus, based on the sole surviving arsonist’s confession and the pattern of twenty-nine previous cinema arsons by Islamist militants, is that the perpetrators acted from religious conviction. The regime possessed intelligence identifying the perpetrators and chose to withhold it in hopes of reconciliation with the clergy.11

Cinema Rex did three things. It radicalized neutral Iranians — Roy Mottahedeh wrote that “thousands of Iranians who had felt neutral… felt that the government might put their own lives on the block to save itself.” It galvanized Abadan’s oil workers, who had played no part in revolutionary ferment before the fire. And it created a narrative asymmetry that the regime could never overcome: “The side with the truth could not be believed, and the side with the lie could not be doubted.”12

The fire restarted what Shariatmadari’s restraint had paused.

88 Became 4,000

Three weeks after Cinema Rex, the Shah imposed martial law. The notice was issued at midnight on September 7, read on morning radio on September 8 — a Friday. No morning newspapers were published on the Islamic day of rest. A significant portion of the population never heard the announcement.13

Thousands gathered at Jaleh Square in eastern Tehran. Protesters carried flower branches to present to soldiers as signs of brotherhood. The army ordered dispersal via loudspeakers. When the order was ignored, tear gas came first, then automatic weapons fire.

The real death toll has been established with unusual precision, and it is the single most important number in the revolution’s history.

Emadeddin Baghi — a researcher at the Islamic Republic’s own Martyrs Foundation, the Bonyad Shahid, tasked with identifying martyrs for compensation — documented sixty-four killed at Jaleh Square and twenty-four additional deaths elsewhere in Tehran. Total: eighty-eight. The Shah’s government reported eighty-six dead citywide. The figures converge from opposite directions — one from a government that wanted to minimize, one from a successor regime that had every incentive to inflate.14

The opposition claimed over four thousand dead. Ali Davani, a clerical chronicler, asserted this figure. Michel Foucault, reporting from Iran, amplified it. Clerical leadership announced “thousands have been massacred by Zionist troops” — a fabrication that also claimed Israeli soldiers had carried out the shooting. Letters circulated claiming “three military transport aircraft arrived in Tehran this week with 300 Israeli soldiers.” No documentary or physical evidence of foreign troop deployment has ever been produced.15

Here is where it is important to name the technique, because it has been used before and will be used again: casualty inflation as a revolutionary weapon. The practice of multiplying death tolls was not accidental. It was systematic. At every stage: Qom — five to twenty became three hundred. Tabriz — nine to thirteen became five hundred. Black Friday — eighty-eight became four thousand. The pattern was consistent: multiply the real toll by roughly fifty, distribute the inflated figure through the mosque and cassette tape networks, and let the emotional mathematics do the rest.16

This is not a defense of the Shah’s violence. Eighty-eight people killed by their own government at a peaceful demonstration is a crime. But at eighty-eight dead, reconciliation was conceivable — the Shah could dismiss commanders, apologize, accelerate reforms. At four thousand, reconciliation was psychologically impossible. Abrahamian wrote that Black Friday created “a sea of blood between the Shah and the people.” Gary Sick, on Carter’s National Security Council, called it the moment “it turned into a revolution.”17

The inflated number did more revolutionary work than the actual killing.

After Black Friday

Once the cycle restarted, it could not be stopped.

October 31: 67,000 oil workers walked out. Production collapsed seventy-five percent. The regime was losing $60 million per day.

December 10-11: The Tasu’a and Ashura marches — commemorating Imam Husayn’s martyrdom — brought an estimated six to nine million Iranians into the streets. Over ten percent of the entire population marched. The Shah revoked the ban on street demonstrations, sensing that violence on Ashura “would be an incident of sacrilege that he would be unable to survive.”18

January 16, 1979: The Shah left Iran. He piloted his own Boeing 707 to Egypt, carrying a box of Iranian soil. He told Bakhtiar: “I give Iran into your care, yours and God’s.” He said: “I am very tired.” The Ettela’at headline — “Shah Raft” (“The Shah Is Gone”) — sold over one million copies within hours. Bakers gave away free cakes. Iranians sprinkled each other with rosewater.19

February 1: Khomeini returned on a chartered Air France 747. Three to six million people lined the thirty-three-kilometer route from Mehrabad Airport.

February 11: The military declared neutrality. 413,000 troops evaporated.

The entire sequence — from the Ettela’at article to the military’s collapse — took thirteen months. But the revolution nearly died in the middle. It was restarted by a cinema fire the regime could have used to expose the perpetrators, and by inflated death tolls that transformed a crime into an apocalypse.

The honest conclusion is uncomfortable from every direction. The Shah’s violence was real and criminal. The opposition’s inflation of that violence was deliberate and effective. And the truth — eighty-eight dead — served neither side’s narrative. Baghi published his findings in 2000. The book was banned. What does it tell you about a government that suppresses evidence which would reduce the crime committed against its own founding story?

This article is part of 48 Hours. For the cinema fire that restarted the revolution, see Cinema Rex. For the American policy failure, see Tell Brzezinski.

Footnotes

  1. Qom response to Ettela’at article from multiple scholarly accounts; seminary student response documented in revolutionary chronicles. ↩

  2. Article content and authorship chain from Information Minister Homayoun’s testimony and scholar Bahman Baktiari’s research; Taheri’s refusal documented in Kayhan records. ↩

  3. “Almost forgotten” description from Radio Farda; Menashri quote from scholarly analysis; publication date significance documented in multiple sources. ↩

  4. Qom death toll from Center for Documents on the Islamic Revolution (5 dead) and U.S. diplomatic cables (14-20); opposition claim of 300 from revolutionary propaganda. ↩

  5. Forty-day mourning cycle from Shia theological tradition; revolutionary application documented in Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2004). ↩

  6. Tabriz events and Tajalli from multiple sources; Colonel Haghshenas’s “barn” remark from eyewitness accounts; death toll from SAVAK records (9) and post-revolutionary count (13). ↩

  7. March-May protest wave from multiple scholarly sources; troops entering clerical homes documented in diplomatic cables. ↩

  8. Kurzman on the uniqueness of the mourning cycle mechanism; comparative analysis from Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. ↩

  9. Shariatmadari’s intervention and the June 17 stall from multiple scholarly sources; Kurzman’s stagnation data. ↩

  10. Khomeini’s “blood of martyrs” declaration from his recorded sermons; outbidding dynamic analyzed in multiple revolutionary theory frameworks. ↩

  11. Cinema Rex details from forensic analysis and trial records; Abbas Amanat, Michael Axworthy, and Abbas Milani all identify Islamist perpetrators. ↩

  12. Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Pantheon Books, 1985); “narrative asymmetry” formulation from analytical review. ↩

  13. Martial law announcement timing from Gary Sick, All Fall Down (Random House, 1985); communication failure documented in multiple sources. ↩

  14. Baghi’s research from the Bonyad Shahid records; Shah’s government figure documented in official records; convergence analysis from Abrahamian. ↩

  15. Foucault’s amplification documented in his Iran dispatches; “Zionist troops” fabrication from clerical communications documented in multiple sources. ↩

  16. Death toll inflation pattern documented across multiple scholarly analyses of the revolution’s mobilization mechanics. ↩

  17. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982); Sick, All Fall Down. ↩

  18. Oil strike from industry records; Ashura march estimates from Washington Post (Jonathan Randal: 750,000 “conservative”) and opposition sources (2 million+); national estimates from multiple scholarly sources. ↩

  19. Shah’s departure from multiple eyewitness accounts and diplomatic cables; “Shah Raft” headline from press history; Abbas Milani, The Shah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ↩