Any time there is a crisis in Iran, the 1953 British-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is dusted off as Exhibit A in the case against Western perfidy. It is rolled out to show how Washington and London strangled Iranian democracy in its crib, proving that foreign powers cannot be trusted and that the Islamic Republic is, at worst, a necessary evil. What is rarely recounted is the key role played in that coup by two leading ayatollahs—Abol-Qasem Kashani and Mohammad Behbahani—who were heroes and mentors to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic. The ideological grandfathers of today’s rulers did not merely suffer the coup; they helped midwife it.

It is important to remember what the clergy did then, because it may tell us what they will do next. The Islamic Republic is once again in extremis: its Supreme Leader has been killed, the succession is contested, and the streets are restless. Experts are gaming out scenarios in which civilian protests reach a critical mass and one or more branches of the security apparatus—the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij militia, the regular army—break away from the regime. History, however, suggests that we should be watching not the men in uniform, but the men in robes.Iran’s clergy has almost never been ideologically unified or consistently committed to any one side. From the Constitutional Revolution through the Mossadegh era and the 1979 upheaval, senior clerics have displayed a deeper commitment to being on the winning side than to any fixed political principle. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death gives elements within the establishment their best opportunity in decades to peel away from the system he built if—and it is a very big if—they sense that the tide is turning decisively against it. They have done this over and over in Iran’s modern history. They are the country’s political barometer, its weathervane.

The coup the mullahs prefer to forget

The standard 1953 story features the CIA, MI6, and a weak Shah of Iran. It is a tale of cash‑stuffed suitcases, street thugs, and a young monarch who fled Iran in panic, only to return in triumph. All true, as far as it goes. But Kashani and Behbahani tend to be written out of the script.

Kashani began the decade as Mossadegh’s most important clerical ally. A fiery preacher with a base in Tehran's bazaars and among conservative urban poor, he mobilized mosque networks and religious guilds in support of oil nationalization, denounced the British from the pulpit,........

© Time