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October 18, 1979

Note regarding the Meeting between Minister of State Wischnewski with the Deputy Iranian Minister and Government Spokesman Dr. Sadegh Tabatabai on 19 October 1979 from 12:50 to 14:20 Hours in the Federal Chancellery

Tabatabai conveyed his government's regret over the assassination attempt on the German Merck administrative director Leib in Tehran that was organized an anti-government, anti-foreigner terrorist gang. The new revolutionary group and it's new laws and demands are described. Tabatabai continues to say that all negative rumors about the new regime, such as persecution against women and minority religions, is Zionist propaganda. The revolution has greatly damaged business. The fate of the Kurds are discussed.

February 1, 1979

Imam Khomeini, 'Declaration Upon Arrival at Tehran'

February 1, 1979, is a key date in the history of modern Iran in general and of the Iranian revolution in particular. On that day, two weeks after Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980) left Iran, Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900-1989) returned after 14 years in exile—part of a life told in Vanessa Martin’s Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (2014).

On that day, the Shi‘i Ayatollah whom many called Imam assumed Iran’s leadership, as shown in the below speech he gave upon deplaning in Tehran. But that day was not a cut; it was not simply the end of the shah and of the revolution and the start of Khomeini’s rule. Rather, it was a day suspended in mid-air. It was a day where the just-past overthrow of the shah touched the uncertain future of the revolution: a liminality and vulnerability that shines through Khomeini’s speech.

It is for that reason that I have chosen this text, not simply because Khomeini here as in virtually all his pronouncements stressed the need to rid Iran of foreign agents led by the United States. Yes: the revolution had an ultimately clear end, the Islamic Republic, which became official following a referendum in December 1979. And yes: Khomeini was an influential maker of this hybrid theocratic-republican governmental system that came out of the revolution. First emerging in 1963 in the clerical city of Qom as an outspoken critic of the shah surrounding a raft of social reforms, he doubled down on his critique over the US-Iranian status of force agreement of late 1964. As a result, the shah had him expelled to Turkey, from where he in 1965 was able to move to a transnational Shi’i clerical center: the Iraqi city of Najaf. There, he by the early 1970s expanded his critique of the shah’s person to a critique of the very institution of the Iranian monarchy, and began to talk of a clerically led government.

This was a far-reaching change in Shi‘i religious thought, as Hamid Dabashi showed in Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1993). However, those ideas took their final form not before but during and in interaction with the revolution, when Khomeini resided in Najaf until October 1978, then in Neauphle-le-Château, near Paris, and from February 1979 in Tehran. Moreover, Dabashi’s work showed how other intellectuals shaped the revolution, too. And Khomeini adapted certain Third-World leftist populist ideas and terms—a process analyzed in Ervand Abrahamian’s Khomeinism, which exemplified secular scholars’ emphasis on how non-clerical ideas and groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq or Fada’iyin-e Khalq helped bring about and shape the revolution.

Finally, recent works that open a new generational-historiographic chapter, like Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi’s edited volume Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021) and Naghmeh Sohrabi’s “The ‘problem space’ of the historiography of the 1979 Iranian Revolution” (2018), are moving beyond a scholarly focus on revolutionary causes and outcomes and on distinctive actors and their failure and success. Instead, they probe the fundamental imprevisibility and contingency of an unfolding revolution; they stress overlaps and contacts between actors and ideas; and they tease out transnational relationships and global contexts without creating a clear a priori distinction between the domestic and the global, perhaps especially regarding the question of the place and role of Iran’s 1970s in the longer arch of decolonization.

March 27, 1989

National Intelligence Daily for Monday, 27 March 1989

The CIA's National Intelligence Daily for 27 March 1989 covers developments in Haiti, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Ecuador, Lebanon, and East Germany. Certain portions of the document are redacted due to b(1) and b(3) exemptions.

November 8, 1979

Information about a Conversation of Comrade Hermann Axen, Member of the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee, with Comrade Nureddin Kianouri, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Tudeh Party of Iran

East German Politburo member Hermann Axen and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Tudeh Party of Iran Noureddin Kianouri discuss the Iranian revolution and the place of the Tudeh Party within Khomeini's Iran.

April 25, 1983

Information of the Security Agencies of the VRB about Activities of the Iranian Government against the Iranian People’s Party (Tudeh)

Report attempts to analyze the internal and external factors influencing the arrest and trial of members of the People's Party of Iran (Tudeh).

1980

About the Role of Islam in Iran

Stasi report outlines the history of Islam in Iran as well as Ayatollah Khomeini's personal history and foreign policy statements in an attempt to better understand the Iranian government and its likely foreign policy.

September 16, 1980

Saddam Hussein and His Advisers Discussing Iraq's Decision to Go to War with Iran

Transcript of a meeting between Saddam Hussein, the National Command and the Revolutionary Command Council discussing the military situation during the Iran-Iraq War, mainly regarding the disputed territory along the Shatt Al-'Arab river.

February 20, 1979

Saddam and High-Ranking Officials Discussing Khomeini, the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, the Potential for Kurdish Unrest, and the Iranian Economy

Transcript of a meeting between Saddam and some Iraqi diplomatic personnel dated 20 February 1979. The meeting's main issue was Iran and Khomeini. One of the attendants asked Saddam if there is any possibility of turbulence in Iranian Kurdistan due to the internal chaos of the Iranian government. And if so, how would it affect Iraqi Kurdistan. They talked about the Iranian economy and the Iranian army. They said that the Iranian air force contains mostly American jets and it was built on American experience. Secondly they had a discussion about Eritrea and the diplomatic relationship between Iraq and Eritrea.