by Tim Black, spiked
In 1979, left-wing revolutionaries sided with Islamists – and ended up digging their own graves.
In autumn 1978, Iran’s deeply unpopular monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, was coming under increasing political pressure. The main source of this was not the religious right, as troublesome for him as the clerics had become. It wasn’t even the exiled Islamist firebrand, Ruhollah Khomeini, as ideologically influential as he was in the mosques where his tapes and letters were circulated among an eager congregation. The pressure came, rather, from the Iranian left – from Tehran’s burgeoning student population, from the Stalinist Tudeh Party and, above all, from a restive, unionised working class.
Indeed, it was the widespread oil-workers’ strike, particularly in Khuzestan in September 1978, that brought tensions to a head. The shah attempted to crush the strikes and accompanying protest movement, sending in his security forces to put down a demonstration in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. They succeeded in killing between 60 and 100 people in what became known as the Black Friday massacre. This merely supercharged the rebellion. A wider range of Iranian workers joined what was to become a general strike, bringing Iran to a near standstill. The cry of ‘Death to the shah’ went up around the country. By the start of 1979, even the insular shah knew his time was up.
In January 1979, Mohammad Reza fled the nation he and his father, figureheads of the Pahlavi dynasty, had ruled for over half a century with Western backing. He took with him a small box of Iranian soil. A fortnight later, Khomeini returned to Iran, and on 11 February 1979, the Iranian monarchy was officially no more.