December 3rd 1979: Ayatollah Khomeini comes to power

On this day in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini became Supreme Leader of Iran. Born to a Shi’ite family in the village of Khomein in 1902, his father was murdered when he was five months old, and he lost his mother and aunt to cholera in 1918. Khomeini and his brother were both ardent religious scholars, and the former excelled at religious study, eventually moving to Arak to study with a famed Islamic scholar. Khomeini’s teachers supported the Shah and believed that religion should not be involved in government. Khomeini, however, was alarmed by what he saw as Iran’s secularisation and abandonment of its Islamic roots. In 1962, he began actively protesting the pro-Western rule of Reza Shah, which resulted in his arrest and exile in Iraq in 1964. Khomeini spent fifteen years in exile, during which time he developed a comprehensive theory for a reformed Iranian state, based on Islamic principles and led by the clergy. His ideas were popular in Iran, making Khomeini - now known as an Ayatollah (major religious leader) - the de facto leader of the opposition to the Shah, whose forces violently suppressed dissenters. Tensions came to a head in 1979, when popular protests forced the Shah to flee the country, and Khomeini triumphantly returned from exile. In the following months, plans for an authoritarian theocracy based on Islamic law were put into place. In November, Iran dramatically demonstrated their defiance of Western powers when several Iranians took sixty hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, sparking the Iranian Hostage Crisis. A December referendum created the world’s first Islamic republic in Iran, and named Khomeini as Supreme Leader for life. His regime was fiercely repressive of dissent in all forms, executing political opponents, requiring women to wear a veil, banning symbols of Western culture, and introducing punishments based on Islamic law. In 1980, a surprise invasion of Iran by Iraq began a long war which ultimately claimed roughly one million lives. The Ayatollah’s radical regime greatly concerned Western powers, especially when, soon before his death in 1989, the Ayatollah issued a fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie for criticising Islam. Ruhollah Khomeini forever changed the face of Iranian politics, and helped turn it into the country we know now, which remains in constant tension with Western powers.