Nearly half a century after Iran’s 1979 revolution, its outcome is still widely miscast as an almost natural slide from monarchy to theocracy, yet Hossam el-Hamalawy’s analysis in The New Arab shows it was the product of fierce social and political struggle, not cultural destiny. In his piece for the London-based outlet, the Egyptian scholar-activist argues that the Islamic Republic emerged from contingent battles among competing forces within a broad revolutionary coalition, rather than from an allegedly “innately religious” society.
Far from a mere religious eruption, the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi capped decades of uneven, top-down capitalist modernisation driven by oil revenues, rapid industrialisation and urban growth, alongside tightly controlled political participation. Rural displacement and widening inequality pushed millions into precarious urban life, fuelling mass unrest that, by 1978, had spilled beyond elite circles into nationwide demonstrations and crippling strikes. The strike movement, above all among oil workers, paralysed production, slashed state income and fractured the monarchy’s coercive apparatus, creating a power vacuum on the ground. In factories and workplaces, workers formed shoras (councils) that challenged management and in some cases asserted direct control over production, briefly opening space for alternative centres of authority.
El-Hamalawy stresses that this revolutionary opening did not automatically translate into clerical rule, but into a contested arena in which Islamists held key organisational advantages. While decades of repression had shattered secular parties, socialist groups and independent unions, mosque-based networks, religious charities and clerical structures survived as nationwide infrastructures embedded in daily life. Religious discourse offered a shared moral language through which varied grievances — from economic injustice to political repression and national humiliation — could be reframed as symptoms of corruption and oppression. This allowed bazaar merchants, professionals, students and the recently urbanised poor to imagine themselves as part of a single revolutionary community, even as deep class and gender contradictions persisted beneath the surface.
According to the article, much of the Iranian left misread this balance of forces, treating Ayatollah-led currents as essentially progressive partners because of their anti-imperialist rhetoric and opposition to US influence. Rather than preserving organisational independence while coordinating against the Shah, major left currents endorsed referendums that legitimised clerical authority, muted criticism of repression and accepted restrictions in the name of revolutionary unity. In practice, alliance slid into political subordination just as power was being consolidated. At the same time, the workers’ movement, despite its disruptive strength, remained fragmented and locally rooted; no national structure emerged to knit shoras into a coherent counter-power capable of translating workplace militancy into political authority.
El-Hamalawy describes how clerical leaders moved quickly to neutralise this potential threat, denouncing strikes as harmful to national recovery and recasting labour demands as selfish disruptions of Islamic unity. Professional and managerial layers uneasy with workplace democracy aligned with efforts to restore discipline, while Islamic activists reshaped councils and revolutionary committees into instruments loyal to the emerging state. By the early 1980s, independent organisations were first isolated and then crushed, with repression following political marginalisation rather than initiating it. The result, he argues, was a “counterrevolution from within” the victorious coalition, not a restoration of the Shah but the gradual narrowing of the revolutionary opening until clerical monopoly was entrenched.
These historical lessons, El-Hamalawy contends, are urgent amid today’s military threats and attacks against Iran, as Western and regional powers confront the Islamic Republic. He insists that defending Iran against imperial aggression cannot be equated with endorsing its authoritarian rulers, who have repressed workers, jailed dissidents and crushed democratic movements. From Iraq to Libya, he notes, external intervention has devastated societies while empowering reactionary forces, undermining precisely those social actors capable of driving internal democratic change. Foreign bombardment and sanctions, he warns, strengthen authoritarian states by allowing them to pose as defenders of sovereignty, marginalising dissent and militarising politics.
For El-Hamalawy, the enduring significance of Iran’s revolution lies in remembering that it contained real democratic and egalitarian possibilities that were defeated in struggle, not foreclosed by culture. Recurring labour strikes, women-led uprisings and youth protests in Iran today echo the unfinished demands of 1979: dignity, economic justice and political freedom. The key strategic lesson, he concludes, is that while alliances in revolutionary moments are unavoidable, they must never come at the cost of political independence and the capacity to challenge one’s own allies once the terrain shifts. Genuine emancipation in Iran — as elsewhere — cannot be delivered by clerics or foreign powers, but only by those struggling within society itself.
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