Iran, Islamic Republic of

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IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF

Founded in 1979 in the wake of a violent and dramatic revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran walked a delicate tightrope between modernity and theocracy. For millions of Muslims throughout the world, the Islamic Republic inspired hope that Muslim law could be applied to a modern nation state, while for others who were opposed to its agenda, the country stood out as a repressive, fearful regime.

The Islamic Revolution of 1978 and 1979 destroyed the monarchy of the Pahlavis, who had pursued a secularization policy at the expense of the majority public opinion and allowed foreign investment to control large sectors of the national economy. Millions of Iranians of varying political persuasions—leftists, merchants, and ulema—were particularly troubled by the predominant influence of the American government on Iranian foreign policy and economic decisionmaking. Despite some gains for the population during the White Revolution (1967–1963) most Iranians lived in poverty, totally alienated from the luxury of the Pahlavi regime, and repressed by its security forces.

The revolution forced Muhammad Reza Shah (1919–1980) to abandon the country by January 1979, ushering the return of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Although Khomeini had been in exile since 1964, his anti-Western and anti-secularization messages had been distributed widely throughout the country, in both print and cassette form. In the wake of the shah's exile, Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979, becoming the spiritual figurehead of what was now an Islamic Revolution. On 1 April 1979, Iranians voted overwhelmingly to found an Islamic Republic. Their action was inspiring to some, and frightening to others.

From 1979 until 1982, Iran existed in a revolutionary crisis mode. The entire apparatus of government had collapsed, along with the economy. The military and police forces were in disarray, and battles between hard-line clerics and more moderate politicians raged in an effort to determine who would control the new society. The extreme anti-Western, and particularly anti-American, tone of the revolution cut Iran off from the West, compounding its economic problems, yet giving strength to its revolutionary credibility among struggling nations. Although there were many factions against him, Khomeini was able to come to the forefront of the government with the backing of the Revolutionary Guards, formed in 1979 to suppress opponents of the Islamic Republic, and a series of revolutionary tribunals, which meted out harsh justice to collaborators of the Pahlavi regime. For the next few years, those shaping the new Islamic government would completely crush their opposition in a bid to consolidate their power over Iran.

By the end of 1979, Iran had a new constitution, officially declaring the nation an Islamic Republic. The government was structured with an elected president, a prime minister chosen by the president, and an elected parliament, the Majlis, and a twelve-member Council of Guardians, dominated by six religious jurists with veto power over all legislation passed by the elected parliament. Finally, the most powerful position in the government lay in the institution of velayat-e faqih, which established the office of supreme jurist, one who would rule on all workings of government on behalf of the Hidden Imam of Twelver Shi˓ism. This jurist would be Khomeini, effectively making him the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic.

In 1980, the new republic faced serious new crises. In November of 1979, students took control of the United States Embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-seven hostages for 444 days. This inflamed Western hatred of the revolution, fueling its radicals further. Moreover, in September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, hoping to take advantage of its fragility to seize control of its large oil fields, as well as to prevent the spread of the revolution across its borders. While anti-Western sentiment was fueling the purge of the military establishment, Iran was now forced to mount a military defense.

In the midst of these international problems, the Islamic Republic's first president, the secular leftist Abu 'l-Hasan Bani-Sadr (b. 1933), attempted to rein in the power of the ulema at home by consolidating the power of local revolutionary tribunals under the watch of the central government and by promoting secular reforms. However, the ulema resented his attempts to assert secular authority, as well as his botched efforts to resolve the hostage crisis with the Americans and the escalating war with Iraq. By 1981 Bani-Sadr was impeached and forced into exile in France, the same place he had been exiled during the shah's regime. Now the road was paved for Khomeini and his Islamic Republic Party (established in 1979) to take full control of Iran.

In the first years of the Republic, a radical program of Islamization purged all secularists and leftists from education, civil service, the military, and other aspects of public life. Universities were particularly altered, with new curricula and libraries privileging Islamic values over all others, and all students with leftist backgrounds barred from attendance. Strict sex-segregation in public was enforced, and women were required to wear the traditional hijab while in public. The Islamic Republic's strict moral codes were enforced by the Revolutionary Guards, who maintained a vigilant watch over society on behalf of the clerical ruling class. All secular law was replaced by Islamic interpretations, and those who rebelled against Islamization were subject to imprisonment.

Meanwhile, the war between Iran and Iraq continued. For eight years these neighboring nations battled in a brutal war of attrition, ultimately resulting in 262,000 Iranian casualties and 105,000 Iraqi deaths. Iran stunned the world by repelling the Iraqis and maintaining its borders, but it was not without cost. Iraqi bombing left 1.6 million Iranians homeless, and the nation was forced to dip deep into its already unstable financial reserves to accommodate widowed families and rebuild its damaged infrastructure. However, the Islamic Republic was not toppled by Iraq; indeed, its ability to maintain its sovereignty boosted public morale, despite the terrible human and economic costs.

In 1988 the war with Iraq ended, and Iranians now faced a hard question: Should they continue to reject all Western overtures or was it possible to engage economically with Western nations and still remain Islamic in government? In the next decade, Iran restored diplomatic relations with many European countries. However, it did not restore ties with the United States, which continued to be its primary adversary on the world stage. Even as late as 2002, the United States considered Iran part of an "axis of evil" in the world, while Iran continued regular anti-American protests in response.

With the death of Khomeini in 1989, grief struck the Islamic Republic, and the ruling establishment had to find a replacement for the society's preeminent religious guide. The new supreme jurist, Sayyed ˓Ali Khamane˒i (b. 1939), had been president since 1981 and had assumed the position, knowing full well that Iran faced tremendous difficulties. Normalizing the nation after years of revolution and war, and stabilizing an economy facing a shocking demographic shift would be difficult. In the early 1980s, the new regime had banned birth control and abortion, and the government promoted the notion that all families should have as many children as they could provide for. This gave Iran a birthrate of 3.9 percent by 1983, and the population nearly doubled to over sixty million people by 1990. That year the government, overloaded with trying to provide for such a massive increase, changed its policy, allowing contraception once again. In 1992 it went a step further and revoked government assistance from any family with more than three children; and it made abortion legal up to 120 days after conception.

Such reforms made Khamane˒i and Iran's third president, ˓Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (b. 1934), popular with moderates in the country, but the republic continued throughout the 1990s and beyond to vacillate between periods of liberalization and moments of hard-line crackdown. Under Rafsanjani, Iran's markets became more open to Western goods, but the clerical ruling class continued to exercise dramatic influence over all aspects of public life, particularly in the realm of gender segregation and speaking out against Islam. Meanwhile, sales from Iran's vast oil reserves could not stabilize its economy, and people struggled to maintain their families in the wake of increased prices.

At the end of Rafsanjani's second term, in 1997, spiraling inflation and public dissatisfaction with censorship ushered in the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (b. 1943), a man many saw as a reformer interested in opening up debate in Iranian political life and building social and political bridges with the Western nations. Although he was reelected in 2001, Khatami's liberal positions were balanced by the clerical elite, who continue to exert their influence over a conservative legislature. Opening up Iran's public culture to the influences of Western consumerism, secular government and non-Islamic culture is still a sensitive issue in the Islamic Republic, more than two decades after the beginning of its dramatic revolution. Despite landslide victories in two presidential elections (1997 and 2001), in the elections for municipal and village councils in 1999, and in the parliamentary elections in 2000, Khatami and the reformists have made little progress in the power struggle against the clerical ruling elite.

The creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran was one of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century. For millions of Muslims throughout the world, its foundation was a symbol of the continued validity of their religion for the modern world. For those weary of theocracy, however, it stood as a symbol to be feared. For many Iranians and others, the Islamic Republic continues to represent, in the words of its founder Khomeini, a "third way, neither East nor West."