The Iranian Revolution: Year Zero

Iran’s presidential election of January 25, 1980, which took place almost a year after the fall of the Shah in February 1979, and the insurrection in Tabriz that preceded the election by a few weeks may well come to be regarded as landmarks in the history of Iran’s incipient revolution. These two events seem to indicate a transition from a primitive rebellion spread across an entire society to a political revolution. If so, the chronologically more convenient event, the election of Bani- Sadr, may be taken to mark the close of the Year Zero of the Iranian revolution.

Whether or not Bani-Sadr is justified in interpreting his election as the death of the clerical Islamic Republican party, there can be no doubt that his landslide victory in the face of a viciously slanderous campaign orchestrated by the turbaned ruling elite has reversed the trend toward clerical hegemony since August ’79, whose course I covered in my previous article. The popular vote dealt a...