We have not stressed the ‘revolutionary’ aspect of the Islamic Revolution enough
Daily Telegraph 11/01/26
What do these countries have in common? Argentina, Australia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States. The answer is that all have been on the receiving end of Iranian terrorism, either directly or through a Tehran-backed proxy, such as Hezbollah.
Think about that list. What possible interest could the ayatollahs have had in, say, Buenos Aires, which lies 8,500 miles from Tehran? In 1994, a militant drove an explosives-laden van into a Jewish community centre, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300. Argentine prosecutors followed the trail back to Iranian state officials.
Why, for Heaven’s sake? Why Argentina? Maybe just to show that they could. Maybe the mullahs were flaunting their reach, demonstrating that they could strike where they wanted. That charred horror was what “globalise the intifada” looks like.
Such atrocities explain why what is happening in Iran’s cities matters to the rest of us. A dictatorship that refused to recognise territorial jurisdiction, that spilled out violently from behind its borders, that sponsored militias and terror cells from Lebanon and Yemen to the Balkans and Central Asia, is in its death throes.
A regime born in street protests is perishing by the same rough method. Its end, as well as being a liberation for the Persian people, is a boon for everyone else, a flare of light in the gloom.
When we think of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, we tend to emphasise the first word over the second. But the revolutionary nature of Khomeini’s regime – he abolished the monarchy, nationalised businesses, expropriated and exiled a portion of the middle class – is critical to understanding Iran.
Revolutionaries do not acknowledge national sovereignty. The ayatollahs made that abundantly clear with their first action: the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran.
It is difficult, after nearly half a century, to recall quite how shocking it was to make hostages of embassy personnel. The sanctity of diplomatic missions is the cornerstone of the international order. Even during the Second World War, when lethal autocracies fought to annihilate one another, diplomatic staff were peacefully evacuated through neutral countries.
In rejecting that norm, the ayatollahs were sending out the strongest possible signal: “Your rules don’t apply to us. We don’t recognise international law. We answer to a higher power”.
That abuse should have told us everything we needed to know. It is in the nature of revolutionary regimes to pick fights. They buy stability at home with instability abroad. These were not tinpot kleptocrats but millenarian fanatics who believed that their foreign adventurism would hasten the return of the Twelfth Imam and the end of the world.
Sadly, we did not get the message. In 1980, in a mirror-image of the US hostage crisis, the Iranian embassy in London was seized by an anti-regime group. Britain’s response? To storm the building, kill the terrorists, rescue the hostages and hand the legation back to Tehran with a cheque to cover breakages incurred during the rescue.
The ayatollahs concluded that they could have it both ways, being accorded full courtesies as a sovereign state while refusing to recognise anyone else’s jurisdiction.
Just as France’s Directory encouraged Jacobin Clubs across Europe, and just as Russia’s Bolshevists supported Communist parties on every continent, so Iran’s ayatollahs assiduously spread the idea that there was a contradiction between Islamic faith and loyalty to secular institutions.
They did not come up with this notion, but they popularised it. It is hard to stress quite how radically the Iranian Revolution altered perceptions of Islam. Yes, there had been extremists before, but they had been relatively marginal. Terrorism, at least in the Muslim world, had until that point been a largely Leftist and secular phenomenon.
The mullahs taking Tehran was equivalent to the Jacobins taking Paris or the Bolshevists taking Moscow. Overnight, Islamist radicals had the resources of a state behind them, and their confidence and influence grew commensurately. The mullahs did not see themselves simply as Shia leaders. They aimed to radicalise the entire ummah.
In the 1960s, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had made Persian translations of the chief works of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, hanged in 1966 after falling out with Nasser.
The Iranian Revolution gave a new salience and immediacy to Qutb’s illiberal, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic doctrines, introducing many Muslims to the notion that the only legitimate regime was a theocracy.
Toppling the ayatollahs will not completely kill that idea, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall completely killed communism. But it will alter the intellectual landscape, reviving the older idea that there is a duty of loyalty to any state that does not explicitly repress Islam.
It is worth noting that most of Iran’s current leaders, like their equivalents in the late Soviet period, have little time for the stated ideology of their state. Just as the Kremlin nomenklatura was, at least by the 1980s, going through the motions, no longer believing that a global socialist utopia was around the corner, so Iranian officials have lost the apocalyptic fervour that drove their predecessors in the 1980s.
A decade ago, elements in the regime attempted to normalise their relations with the rest of the world, offering to give up their nuclear ambitions in exchange for reintegration into the comity of nations.
In the end, they lost out to the hardliners. But many of them are still in place, and are now hoping to work with opposition figures on an orderly transition.
Will they succeed? Dictatorships usually fall from within, as moderates and pragmatists take over and guide the state toward pluralism. Equally, though, the Islamic Republic might end as it started, with a sweeping away of the previous order. Who looks most likely to take over?
Iran has many disaffected communities: students, feminists, Arabs, Azeris, secularists, Marxists, Sunnis. One name on many protesters’ lips is that of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled pretender, though it is not clear whether those demonstrators want a restoration of the old dynasty or whether they are simply signalling their contempt for the ayatollahs.
The Crown Prince insists that there is no prospect of an executive monarchy. He offers himself, rather, as a unifying transitional figure who would preside over a constitutional convention and then allow Iranians to choose their future through a referendum.
As a matter of fact, Iran is precisely the kind of place where a constitutional king might bring value. George Orwell saw limited monarchy as the best defence against dictatorship, because it meant that the state’s pomp and pageantry were directed at someone with no real power, forestalling personality cults. “In a dictatorship”, he wrote, “the power and the glory belong to the same person”.
The Pahlavis are a very young dynasty by Iranian standards, the Crown Prince’s grandfather having been proclaimed 100 years ago following a military coup. Still, many surviving members of the previous house, the Qajars, seem content to back Reza, and a lifetime in the Anglosphere has evidently taught the Crown Prince that absolute monarchy is not an option.
Whether he plays a role or not, Iran is waking from a nightmare. The people who taught the world to measure the stars are being held in ignorance. Hands that raised the marble columns of Persepolis are hauling smuggled goods through border passes. The humane tolerance of Rumi has been driven out by sectarian bigotry, the poetry of Ferdowsi drowned out by moronic slogans. The nation that built and operated the old Silk Road trade routes is reduced to selling cut-price oil to China and drones to Russia.
The world is a colder, darker and grimmer place than we could have imagined a decade ago. But in these chilly, high plateaus, a flame is being kindled. At the very least, Iranians are discomfiting dictators everywhere. At best, they are taking back their sublime heritage as one of the oldest continuous civilisations on the planet.
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