Iran

What Iranian Dissidents Can Learn About Regime Change From the Mistakes of 1979

A regretful rebel talks about what he learned from his participation in Iran’s Islamic revolution.

Francesca Maria Lorenzini and Kourosh Ziabari | 8.3.2026 11:20 AM

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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........

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