As I’ve been researching and writing about war and Iran’s modern history, one question keeps coming up that I think deserves more attention. When people look back at the 1979 Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, they often tell the story as though Islamic rule was always Iran’s inevitable destination—as though the long struggle against colonialism, foreign interference and the monarchy could only have ended this way. But this interpretation misses something important: the distinction between Jomhuriyat (republicanism) and religious rule. It also overlooks the political struggles that followed the revolution, when the Islamists fought for power and eventually prevailed. Their victory was not the inevitable outcome of Iranian history.
For those who fought for popular sovereignty in Iran, Jomhuriyat was never simply about removing the Shah or replacing the monarchy with something called a republic. It was about who had the right to govern and where that authority came from. The principle was that political power should rest with the people, not with a king or those who claimed the right to rule in the name of religion. After decades of monarchy and foreign intervention, Jomhuriyat offered a radical answer to the question of how Iran should be governed. There was nothing inevitable about what followed in 1979. Iran did not have to end up under religious rule.
Jomhuriyat and Iranian Independence
From the Constitutional Revolution to the nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, the struggle against foreign intervention was closely connected to the question of who held power within the country. The 1953 coup and the continuation of Pahlavi rule made that connection even harder to ignore. In the decades that followed, it became one of the central questions of Iranian politics. By the time the monarchy fell in 1979, the struggle for national independence had become inseparable from the demand for political freedom and the right of people to determine their own future.
In an earlier interview about the Constitutional Revolution, I discussed some of these questions with Touraj Atabaki, an Iranian historian and professor emeritus at Leiden University who has made important contributions to our understanding of Iran’s modern social history. His books include Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran and Toiling for Oil: A Social History of Petroleum in Iran. He also edited Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture. One of Atabaki’s main points was that the Constitutional Revolution was about much more than limiting the Shah’s power or modernising the state. It also marked a shift in how people understood themselves and their place in society. Individuals were increasingly recognised as people with rights, capable of making independent choices and questioning both political and religious authority.
Atabaki also drew an important distinction between modernisation and modernity. The two had initially developed alongside each other, but over time they took different paths. Modernisation was largely about building a stronger, more centralised state, creating new institutions and expanding its capacity to govern. Modernity raised a different set of questions. What did it mean for people to think and act independently? How could they participate in political life, question those in power and hold their government accountable? As Atabaki explained, Iran succeeded in building many of the institutions associated with a modern state, but the struggle for political and social freedom remained unresolved.
By bringing the monarchy to an end, the 1979 Revolution opened the possibility of taking that struggle further. Yet the people and political forces who had come together against the Shah did not share a common vision of what should replace him. They disagreed over the future form of government, economic relations, social freedoms and the role religion should play in politics. These disagreements became central to the struggle for power after the monarchy collapsed. The Islamic Republic emerged because the Islamist political project prevailed in that struggle, not because everyone who had fought against the Shah had been fighting for religious rule.
The Islamisation of Jomhuriyat
From the first days after the revolution, Khomeini made it clear that he would not accept alternative interpretations of Jomhuriyat. In a speech in Qom on 1 March 1979, he declared: “What our nation wants is an Islamic republic, not merely a republic, not a democratic republic, and not a democratic Islamic republic.” He went on to dismiss the word “democratic” as a “Western form”, insisting that the new government had to be Islamic.
These statements were made before the new political system had taken shape. Khomeini was setting out his position before the constitution had even been written, while different political groups were still debating what kind of government should replace the monarchy. Years earlier, during his exile in Najaf, he had developed his theory of velayat-e faqih, or guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Yet the first draft of the Islamic Republic’s constitution made no mention of it. The principle was added during the Assembly of Experts’ debates over the constitution in 1979. Clerical rule, then, became part of the new political system through the struggle for power that unfolded after the revolution.
In another speech later that year, Khomeini declared: “Our nation rose up for Islam, followed this path for Islam, and shed its blood for Islam.” He also attacked those who called for a republic without Islam or for a democratic republic, rejecting the idea of freedom outside the boundaries of Islam.
But the effort to make Islam the foundation of the new political order went far beyond the constitution. Compulsory hijab, the repression of independent political organisations, restrictions on the councils and the Cultural Revolution were all part of the same process. Institutions that might have developed independently were increasingly brought under the control of the state and its official ideology. This marked a sharp departure from the political and social diversity that had characterised the revolution. It also narrowed the possibility of building the kind of republic that the overthrow of the monarchy had made possible.
Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi would later express this understanding of government even more explicitly. For him, the people’s vote was not the source of a government’s legitimacy. He regarded Jomhuriyat as a means through which Islamic government could be established. In this view, removing the monarchy did not mean that the people had become sovereign. The republic could exist, but only within the limits imposed by religious authority.
Another question that has recently emerged in my research concerns remarks by Mostafa Mirsalim about the ownership of Iran’s oil. In comments reported on 9 October 2026, Mirsalim, a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, was asked whether oil belonged to the people. His answer was: “Who says oil belongs to the people? Oil is anfal and belongs to God and the Prophet.” He also explained that the people elect the government, which then assumes responsibility for managing these resources. His remarks were reported by Iranian media and other Persian-language outlets.
At first glance, this might seem like another instance of religious ideas being used to explain economic matters. But considered in the context of Iran’s oil nationalisation movement, these remarks raise a much deeper question. The struggle to nationalise oil was, at its heart, a struggle over who had the right to decide what happened to the country’s most important economic resource. It was about ending the power of a foreign state to make those decisions for Iran.
More than seventy years later, however, a prominent figure in the Islamic Republic is questioning whether that resource belongs to the Iranian people in the first place. Instead, Mirsalim invokes the Islamic concept of anfal, under which certain resources are understood to belong to God and the Prophet, to explain who has the authority to manage the country’s oil.
This brings us back to the question of Jomhuriyat. The struggle that led to the revolution had a long history of challenging political and religious authority and demanding greater freedom. Yet the Islamisation of Jomhuriyat took that struggle in another direction. The monarchy was overthrown, but velayat-e faqih placed a new, unelected authority at the centre of the political system. This transformation cannot be separated from what happened to the political forces that had fought for freedom and social change during the revolution. Many were subsequently repressed and denied the right to organise and participate independently in political life. The revolution had ended the monarchy, but it had not settled the question of who should hold power or where that power should come from.
Religious Rule and the Representation of Iranian History
In some academic studies and political accounts of Iran, the Islamists’ victory is explained largely through the country’s religious culture and traditions. The underlying assumption seems to be that Islamic government was somehow a natural outcome of Iranian history, with Shiism understood as an essential feature of Iranian identity. But when history is told this way, other questions receive far less attention. What happened during the political struggles after the revolution? How did the Islamists gain control of the state? And what role did the repression of their opponents play in establishing the Islamic Republic?
These questions were already being raised within Iran’s Marxist tradition long before the 1979 Revolution. Bijan Jazani, one of Iran’s leading Marxist revolutionaries and theorists, who was killed under the Shah, examined the relationship between Islam, class and revolutionary politics in his essay Islamic Marxism or Marxist Islam. Jazani did not regard religion as a political force that remained unchanged throughout history. He sought to understand its role by examining the social conditions and historical circumstances in which religious movements developed. His analysis was shaped by the debates and concerns of revolutionary Marxism at the time. But it also demonstrates something important: the political role of Islam was already being questioned and debated within Iran’s revolutionary movements, long before the Islamists took control of the state.
There is also a broader problem with explaining Iran’s political history through supposedly unchanging religious and cultural characteristics. This approach has much in common with Orientalist interpretations of non-Western societies, in which religion and culture are treated as explanations for almost everything. When such interpretations converge with the Islamic Republic’s own account of its history, the victory of a particular political movement begins to appear as the expression of an entire nation’s identity. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), for example, is sometimes portrayed as a continuation of Iran’s historical resistance to colonialism. What disappears from this portrayal is the character of the IRGC itself: an unaccountable and opaque military and security institution whose history is marked by extreme violence and repression.
Yet this interpretation becomes difficult to sustain when we examine the history of resistance within Iranian society. The Islamic Republic has faced widespread opposition to its attempts to impose its official interpretation of Islam. Political movements have been suppressed, women have fought for their rights, compulsory hijab has been challenged, and successive waves of protest have confronted the state. These struggles are as much a part of Iran’s history since 1979 as the institutions and ideology of the Islamic Republic. To leave them out is to overlook those who rejected the political and social order the Islamists sought to establish. It also makes religious rule appear to have emerged naturally from Iranian society, rather than as the outcome of a political struggle in which some forces gained power while others were silenced.
The Failure of Islamisation and the Question of Iranian Independence
After nearly half a century in power, and despite decades of brutal, often merciless repression, the Islamic Republic has failed to transform Iranian society into the homogeneous “Islamic Iran” its rulers imagined. The gap between the society the state seeks to create and the society that has actually emerged is visible even in research conducted by the government’s own institutions. According to the fourth wave of the National Survey of Iranian Values and Attitudes, conducted in 2023, 72.9 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that religion and politics should be separated. In the 2015 survey, that figure was just 30.7 per cent.
These figures reveal something important about how Iranian society has changed. Opposition to Islamic government is no longer confined to political activists or those who remember the revolution and the repression that followed. It has become part of everyday life for large sections of the population. This change is visible on the streets of Iranian cities, where the state’s religious authority over how people live is increasingly being challenged. Police commanders, military officials and the Revolutionary Guards repeatedly warn people to obey the law and respect what they call “social norms”. These warnings are revealing. A government that has spent decades trying to impose its religious values now finds itself relying on threats and coercion to maintain control over a society that has increasingly moved beyond the model it seeks to enforce.
The current US and Israeli war against Iran has once again brought the question of national independence to the centre of political debate. Throughout its history, the Islamic Republic has tried to make the defence of Iran’s independence inseparable from the defence of its own religious rule. It has repeatedly portrayed political opponents and those demanding social change as threats to national security or as collaborators with foreign enemies. Yet many of the movements it has repressed have fought precisely for the right of Iranians to govern themselves, live without religious coercion and discrimination, and enjoy political and social freedoms. Rejecting religious rule has never, in itself, meant rejecting Iran’s independence.
The Pahlavi political project and the network of forces supporting it must also be examined critically from the standpoint of national independence. Its political ties to Israel, a colonial and occupying state, its support for foreign military attacks, and its attempts to gain power through war and the destruction of infrastructure on which ordinary Iranians depend all point to the dependent and colonial character of this project. The same applies to proposals to bring foreign troops into certain Iranian cities to restore order. A political movement that looks to foreign military power as a means of taking control of the country raises serious questions about the kind of independence it claims to represent.
The experience of 1979 offers an important lesson here. Overthrowing the monarchy did not, by itself, guarantee that political power would pass to the people. The Shah was removed, but another form of authoritarian rule took his place. Through the Islamisation of Jomhuriyat and the establishment of velayat-e faqih, the possibility of building a republic founded on popular sovereignty was severely restricted. Seen in this historical context, the struggle to end religious rule, remove the political authority of Sharia and change the constitution forms part of the longer struggle for Jomhuriyat and Iranian independence.
Jomhuriyat in Iran emerged from the struggle against monarchy and the principle of inherited political power. Its transformation into an Islamic republic resulted from the Islamists’ victory in the struggle for power after 1979. There was nothing inevitable about that outcome. The question of independence remains unresolved today. Iran cannot secure its independence by preserving religious rule, nor can it achieve it by relying on foreign powers to overthrow that rule. The demand to end religious authority and give people the right to choose, challenge and change their government belongs to a much longer history of political struggle, stretching from the Constitutional Revolution through 1979 and continuing today.
In our earlier conversation, Atabaki also warned of another danger. Demands for security and reconstruction can easily be used to postpone political freedom. When that happens, power may remain concentrated in the hands of a few, even if the political system changes its name or appearance. This warning is particularly relevant to debates about Iran’s future. The question is how to transform the relationship between society and political power so that people can genuinely participate in governing their own lives.
Iran has its own history of popular councils and associations, and that history matters. These institutions grew out of people’s efforts to participate directly in public affairs, and even the Islamic Republic was unable to eliminate them entirely. Instead, it brought many of them under state control, reshaped them according to its religious ideology and left them with little real independence or power.
There is something worth recovering from this experience. The tradition of councils and popular associations demonstrates that direct participation in political and social life is not foreign to Iranian history. It has roots in the country’s own struggles. Developing that tradition further, protecting social institutions from government control and ensuring that political and economic power is shared more broadly could offer one path towards making popular sovereignty a reality