What Iranian Dissidents Can Learn About Regime Change From the Mistakes of 1979
Reason · RC · trust 26/100
Francesca Maria Lorenzini and Kourosh Ziabari | 8.3.2026 11:20 AM
(Wikimedia Commons) Iran's Islamic revolution was not just an Islamic revolution. A diverse set of factions, from Marxist-Leninists to religious nationalists, participated in overthrowing the monarchy. But their hopes for shaping the postrevolutionary order were soon dashed as the first theocracy in Iranian history was established.
Afshin Matin-Asgari, an Iranian-American historian and former student activist who put his life and studies in the 1970s on the line on the streets of Tehran, has felt the disillusionment acutely. Today, he is worried that the exiled Iranian opposition is repeating the errors of the 1979 generation. It is now the supporters of restoring the monarchy, he argues, who threaten the democratic aspirations of Iranians.
During the 1979 revolution, not everyone was on board with the exiled theologian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose rhetoric and views grew more intransigent over time. But he had convinced Iranians that he presented a spiritual antidote to the worldly corruption and foreign-backed repression that the Shah of Iran personified. Under an Islamic Republic, he drove home, Iran won't be a vassal state—hence the revolutionary motto "neither East nor West."
Student activists were captivated by those ideas, as their frustrations with foreign meddling in Iran had grown. The 1953 coup , orchestrated by Britain and the United States, had stifled the prospects of democracy in the country and handed power to an autocratic leader who didn't have a popular base but did have several powerful international patrons.
When students at the University of Tehran protested an upcoming visit by then–Vice President Richard Nixon in December 1953, the shah's security forces resorted to brute force and killed three students: Mostafa Bozorgnia, Mehdi Shariatrazavi, and Ahmad Ghandchi. Their families were not allowed to follow the Shiite tradition of hosting memorials on the third and seventh days after their death, and the ritual culmination of the 40-day mourning period was held under tight security measures.
University students, who were not monolithically religious-minded, acted as one of the major driving forces behind the historic turn of events in 1979, a factor Matin-Asgari documented in his 2002 book Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah . But the theocracy that emerged from a movement for Iranian liberty turned its back on many of the people who had helped overthrow the monarchy. Purges eviscerated universities of critical thinkers, the government outlawed left-leaning parties that had participated in the uprising, and newspapers faced a wave of restrictions. The revolution began to disappoint those who had pinned their hopes on it.
Matin-Asgari came to America in 1974 to study for an undergraduate degree in history at California State University, Los Angeles. But "by December 1978, it was clear that what was happening in Iran was a mass popular revolution," he says. "I decided to go back and join. And as soon as I arrived, I joined the street protests."
"For years and years, we've been waiting for a revolution in Iran, and I was a leftist student obsessed with revolution," he adds. "When it was happening, there was no point in just taking classes and studying revolution."
In "Tehran Memoirs and Diaries: Winter 1979 and Summer 1997," an essay published in 2000, Matin-Asgari detailed how the protests transformed his views of Iran's rapidly changing political landscape. He saw courage, defiance, and repression—and he was lucky to leave one of the rallies unharmed. Meanwhile, the funeral of Kamran Nejatollahi, a 24-year-old professor the government had killed, became one of the most violent episodes in the lead-up to the monarchy's collapse. Thousands of mourners had turned up at the event on December 27, 1978, and several protesters were shot dead.
The essay includes a rare reference to the death of Joe Alex Morris Jr. , a Los Angeles Times correspondent who was in Tehran covering the revolution together with three other American colleagues. While reporting on a mutiny staged by air force cadets on February 10, 1979, Morris was killed when Imperial Guard soldiers opened fire to contain the uprising. The monarchy was overthrown the following day.
Uncertainty was baked into the revolution from the beginning. The movement that defeated the shah had been united by opposition to his rule, but not by a shared vision of what should come next. Opposition was solid enough to bring down an unpopular regime, but it couldn't define the framework of the succeeding state.
"You just had to fill in the blank," says Matin-Asgari. "There was this Islamic Republic, nobody knew what it meant, but there was a lot of support for it."
Matin-Asgari is now a professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. In 2015, he received his university's Outstanding Professor Award. His latest book, Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–U.S. Relations , was published earlier this year. He has watched from a distance as the revolution's authoritarian turn paved the way for the current disconnect between the state and its constituents.
Today, much of Iran's exiled opposition hopes to replicate the revolutionary spirit of the 1979 protesters by siding with President Donald Trump and the ultranationalist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
When protests against the theocracy began in early 2026, exiled former crown prince Reza Pahlavi anointed himself as an opposition leader and frequently called for military intervention on Fox News. His supporters in the diaspora celebrated the U.S.-Israeli attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.
But to Matin-Asgari, diasporic observers ensconced in the safety of their adopted countries are not in a position to urge Iranians at home to accept risks or come to terms with the pains of war for specific political outcomes to be achieved.
"This idea is very…
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