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Crowning Ayatollah Khomeini its man of the year for 1979, Time magazine warned that “the revolution that he led to triumph threatens to upset the world balance of power more than any political event since Hitler’s conquest of Europe.” Thirty years on, the Iranian revolution may not have had the devastating impact that Time predicted, but it remains one of the central events of the last half-century. The fall of the Shah signified more than the rebirth of Islam as a political force. It was also a lasting reminder of the limits of western power and of the resilience and pride of Persian civilisation.
Does the Iranian revolution deserve to rank alongside the revolutions of 1789, 1917 and 1989 in modern history? To paraphrase the famous words of Zhou Enlai, it is probably too early to tell. Yet like the great revolutions in France and Russia, it was born in economic crisis, was sealed in bloodshed, and unleashed a long ideological struggle, both at home and abroad. It, too, was often misunderstood by outsiders. As late as August 1978, with mobs in the streets and the Shah’s corrupt regime tottering, the CIA reported that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation.”
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