The policies of the new leadership and the identity of the next supreme leader are unknown. The appointment of a hardliner like Vahidi does not necessarily mean that the regime will choose the path of expanding or prolonging the current war, or even continuing in its practices of brutality or sponsorship of terrorism. Even if the Revolutionary Guard and the regime try to continue Ayatollah Khamenei’s rigid and failed policies, the population is unlikely to be satisfied with their continuation, politically, socially and, especially now, economically.
Abbas MILANI
To help understand how the Iranian people will react after the end of the American and Israeli attacks, it is important to understand that the Iranian revolution of 1979 was not a revolution at all. It was a cunning game of bait and switch played cleverly by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who placed himself at the head of the movement.
The people of Iran wanted a revolution based on the idea of modern citizenship and a social contract, to bring democracy, freedom, independence, and a republic, even an Islamic one, but without clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini promised these ideas, giving Iranians and Western powers what they had been waiting to hear. In the end, what he orchestrated was a counterrevolution. In a suburb of Paris, in the months before the Shah was overthrown, the ayatollah gave dozens of interviews. He hid his political ambition and suggested that he would eventually retire from government, although in his earlier writings he had often supported clerical rule. He even wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter, asking him to disarm the Iranian military and promising to keep Iran free from Soviet domination. But all the while, he was fond of clerical despotism and, as it soon became clear, harbored deep resentments against the United States.
In another indication of his counter-revolutionary ways, many in predominantly Shiite Iran believed that a reformed conception of Shiism was needed to make it suitable for modernity. But Ayatollah Khomeini, from his first major book in the 1940s and later as the supreme Shiite religious authority, insisted on preserving traditional rituals and dogmas, thus suppressing the idea of modernizing Shiite Islam.
IRANIAN REVOLUTION AS BAIT
The romance of the revolution, ignorance of Ayatollah Khomeini’s earlier writings, and his stance as a defender of a liberal democratic political system in the months before the Shah’s overthrow made the bait work, if only for a short time. Iranians from all walks of life, Western leaders, and many prominent intellectuals saw him as the standard-bearer of Iran’s democratic aspirations.
Soon after he came to power, a new constitution came into effect, modeled on Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1970 magnum opus, “Islamic Government: The Guardianship of the Jurist,” about the nature of an Islamic state. It held that people are ontologically like sheep in a herd, incapable of managing their own affairs and in need of a guardian, an idea reminiscent of Plato’s theory of a philosopher-king needed to manage the affairs of the common people. But Ayatollah Khomeini was not a necessary philosopher, but an expert in Sharia. As he took power, Islamic revolutionary courts led by a notorious judge hanged members of the old regime and then opponents of the regime in summary trials. The ayatollah imposed strict social restrictions, such as mandatory hijab for women. It is no wonder that women, secular democrats, leftists, and ethnic minorities felt betrayed and began to fight back.
The history of Iran over the past 47 years has been, in part, the history of people trying to reclaim the rights they lost in that trap. A recent scholarly study by the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford shows, in meticulous detail, that from 2009 to 2024, there was an average of one credible, localized demonstration every three days, in Tehran alone.
In other words, we have seen the real Iranian revolution, battle after battle, over the past five decades. The Green Movement of 2009-10; the Women, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022-23; and the defiance of over a million people who took to the streets less than two months ago, in which thousands were killed by the regime, are all fronts in this gradual revolution. Iranian politicians and intellectuals – from Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1925 to 1941, to Ahmad Kasravi, an erudite intellectual who wrote, more than 80 years ago, a radical critique of Shiism – would never have made Iranian society as secular, as contemptuous of dogma, as distrustful of the Shiite clergy as it is today.
This paradigmatic shift in public opinion is not only the result of more than a century of gradual efforts at democracy, but also (paradoxically) the consequence of 47 years of despotic, dogmatic, and misogynistic clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, came to embody the seemingly unwavering authority of divine dogma, especially when fueled by petrodollars and backed by brute force. The most reliable poll on public opinion in Iran, by the Netherlands-based Group for the Analysis and Measurement of Attitudes in Iran, shows that less than 12 percent of Iranians support the status quo of the Islamic republic. The data was collected even before the government’s mass killings of citizens in January.
THE IRANIAN PEOPLE AND THE CHANGE THAT IS COMING
Now, with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei and about 40 other senior political or military figures, change is imminent, and the overriding question is who will govern Iran next. Given the history of the past few decades, that is the wrong question.
Despite the charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini and because of Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutality, most people in Iran are now convinced that what they bought in 1979 as a cure for a corrupt and oppressive monarchy was no better than snake oil. The relevant question today is: What are the ideas for democratic governance, for regulating the economy, for keeping centrifugal forces at bay, and for preserving sovereignty and good relations with the outside world that Iranians (at home and abroad) can embrace, and how can they do so in a way that will pull Iran out of political paralysis and economic quagmire?
As the regime now struggles to rebuild its badly shaken structure, some had hoped that it would use this opportunity to create a democratic opening, acknowledging the political and human rights of the people, and to normalize relations with the world, especially the United States. The first major appointment, that of Ahmad Vahidi as commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is not promising. It is not clear whether the appointment was ordered by Ayatollah Khamenei or imposed by the corps. Vahidi has served in many positions, including ministerial portfolios, and is directly involved in the mass killings of demonstrators in 2022.
It is not clear what role, if any, the new interim trio of officials responsible for Iran played in the appointment. The trio consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian; Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of the judiciary; and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a member of the powerful 12-member Guardian Council. Ayatollah Arafi is among those often mentioned as a possible successor to Ayatollah Khamenei, who had carefully selected him to lead a global university network to promote Ayatollah Khamenei’s vision of Shiism.
THE ECONOMY
The policies of the new leadership and the identity of the next supreme leader are unknown. The appointment of a hardliner like Vahidi does not necessarily mean that the regime will choose the path of expanding or prolonging the current war, or even continuing in its practices of brutality or sponsorship of terrorism. Even if the Revolutionary Guard and the regime try to continue the rigid and failed policies of Ayatollah Khamenei, the population is unlikely to be satisfied with their continuation, politically, socially and, especially now, economically.
Ayatollah Khomeini rejected the idea that there were economic roots to the 1979 revolution; economics is for “donkeys,” he said.
The goal of the revolution, he thought, was to create an Islamic Iran and devout Muslim men and women. Ayatollah Khamenei doubled down on the idea, making culture wars a key component of his strategy of control and repression. But the economy is a clear source of ongoing threat to the regime, and Iran’s young secular men and women are unwilling to accept anything less than what they were initially promised, before they were duped nearly half a century ago. The regime’s machinery may survive today. But the counterrevolution of the past is giving birth to the revolution of tomorrow. (The New York Times)
(Abbas Milani is director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and a fellow at the Hoover Institution)