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

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 protests transformed his views of Iran’s rapidly changing political landscape. He saw courage, defiance, and repression—and he was lucky to leave one of the rallies unharmed. Meanwhile, the funeral of Kamran Nejatollahi, a 24-year-old professor the government had killed, became one of the most violent episodes in the lead-up to the monarchy’s collapse. Thousands of mourners had turned up at the event on December 27, 1978, and several protesters were shot dead.

The essay includes a rare reference to the death of Joe Alex Morris Jr., a Los Angeles Times correspondent who was in Tehran covering the revolution together with three other American colleagues. While reporting on a mutiny staged by air force cadets on February 10, 1979, Morris was killed when Imperial Guard soldiers opened fire to contain the uprising. The monarchy was overthrown the following day.

Uncertainty was baked into the revolution from the beginning. The movement that defeated the shah had been united by opposition to his rule, but not by a shared vision of what should come next. Opposition was solid enough to bring down an unpopular regime, but it couldn’t define the framework of the succeeding state.

“You just had to fill in the blank,” says Matin-Asgari. “There was this Islamic Republic, nobody knew what it meant, but there was a lot of support for it.”

Matin-Asgari is now a professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. In 2015, he received his university’s Outstanding Professor Award. His latest book, Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–U.S. Relations, was published earlier this year. He has watched from a distance as the revolution’s authoritarian turn paved the way for the current disconnect between the state and its constituents.

Today, much of Iran’s exiled opposition hopes to replicate the revolutionary spirit of the 1979 protesters by siding with President Donald Trump and the ultranationalist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

When protests against the theocracy began in early 2026, exiled former crown prince Reza Pahlavi anointed himself as an opposition leader and frequently called for military intervention on Fox News. His supporters in the diaspora celebrated the U.S.-Israeli attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.

But to Matin-Asgari, diasporic observers ensconced in the safety of their adopted countries are not in a position to urge Iranians at home to accept risks or come to terms with the pains of war for specific political outcomes to be achieved.

“This idea is very dangerous and in some ways irresponsible to expect ordinary people to go out there and get killed so that the regime would change. It’s not going to fall that way,” Matin-Asgari says. “I tell anyone who tells others in Iran to go out there and protest, if they’re really serious, they should get an airline ticket and go back to Iran and join them. It’s very easy to sit here and prescribe something, including getting killed in street protests, for others to do.”

Iranians have engaged in more acts of uprising against their government than any other nation’s people in the region. The monthslong Woman, Life, Freedom protests were famously referred to as the first feminist revolution in the Middle East. In the recent protests in January, at least 3,117 protesters were killed, according to the official Iranian government data. (A D.C.-based human rights group made up of Iranian dissidents has put the figure at 6,488.)

As the country was trying to recover from that crackdown, the U.S.-Israeli alliance launched an unprovoked war on Iran that, in the first phase, continued for 39 days, killing 3,519 more Iranians. More than 115,000 civilian buildings were damaged or destroyed. A new round of airstrikes by the U.S. military, starting on July 7, has killed at least 60 Iranians as of this writing.

The Iranian-American historian also recognizes, based on personal experience, that immigration alters people’s perceptions and that many of those who have been away from Iran for decades cannot plausibly have a full-fledged understanding of the country’s fast-evolving social dynamics.

“I haven’t been back in the past three or four years, but in the past 20 years, when I was going to Iran almost every year, I realized that I didn’t really know this country,” he says. “The imaginary Iran that even I remember doesn’t exist anymore.”

Some characteristics of the 1970s anti-shah movement can be seen among the exiles fighting the Islamic Republic now. The monarchists know that they want the current government in Tehran gone and replaced by Pahlavi, the son of the former shah. But they don’t know how to get there, and they have not reflected enough on some fundamental questions about the transition.

“Khomeini had said that once the shah goes, I’d go back to [the seminary city] Qom, and maybe I’d just play an advisory role,” Matin-Asgari says. “But by the summer of 1979, about six months after that, he gave a major speech and said, ‘I was wrong, I thought that I could avoid playing a direct role, and I had made a mistake.'” The ayatollah centralized power, disavowed former allies, and came up with a stern interpretation of Islamic principles to perpetuate his rule.

Today, despite his supporters’ conviction that he should revive the kingdom, the shah’s son says he wishes only to facilitate a democratic transition as a bridge-builder. At Politico‘s Security Summit in May, Pahlavi told journalist Dasha Burns he was not seeking power for himself, saying that he would be “a transitional leader” who offers “a process whereby it’s for the people of Iran to decide ultimately what they want and who do they want as their leaders.”

But Matin-Asgari notes the unpredictability of political transitions: Promises made before power is acquired do not always determine how power is exercised afterward. “Reza Pahlavi is now claiming on the one hand that he is going to be this unifying figure, that he’s not a shah or leader,” Matin-Asgari says. “It’s a bundle of contradictions. Because in practice we see right now that he is not acting as a unifying figure, [but] acting as a divisive figure.”

Pahlavi has been the most visible Iranian calling for a bombing campaign against his home country, urging Trump and Netanyahu on multiple occasions to “finish the job” and branding the war as a “humanitarian intervention.” Despite Pahlavi’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Trump, the U.S. president has dismissed him as a “nice guy” without popular support. Pahlavi’s characterization of the military campaign as benign hasn’t matched the facts of a war in which Iran’s urban infrastructure, cultural heritage sites, universities, research institutions, hospitals, and natural habitats have been heavily pounded.

A late-March survey of Iranian Americans showed 66.1 percent opposing military action against Iran. Pahlavi has also consistently called for tighter economic sanctions to expedite a possible collapse of the government. Such sanctions against Iran led to an annual per capita income loss of $3,000 from 2012 through 2019, weakening the country’s middle class dramatically. Far from being targeted at the Islamic Republic authorities alone, these sanctions have affected entire sectors of Iran’s economy, harming people’s daily lives. Despite claims that exemptions have been in place to enable humanitarian trade, companies involved in the sales of medical equipment and processing routine transactions to Iran have sometimes been penalized.

Pahlavi’s failure to acknowledge the civilian suffering caused by the war may be an indication of his disconnect from life in Iran, where foreign intervention has often been an unpopular concept. One of the main reasons the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) became widely disdained among Iranians is its founder Massoud Rajavi’s unholy alliance with the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when he decided to invade Iran in 1980. 

Meanwhile, there has been a steep rise in alarming behavior and rhetoric in the ranks of the monarchists. Diaspora activists have alienated potential allies in the countries where they live through an unvarnished anti-Muslim animus. Their factional infighting has devolved into street violence and misogynist slurs—ironically, considering that many Iranians loathe the Islamic Republic for its treatment of women. And Pahlavi’s supporters have taken aim at Iran’s ethnic minorities, including Kurds, as rivals for power.

From royalist vigilantes storming diaspora-owned businesses that don’t display pre-1979 Iranian flags to protesters harassing the fans of the Iranian soccer team during its FIFA World Cup matches in Los Angeles, parts of the exiled opposition do not mind being seen as militant and unreasonable. If 1979 is any guide, then attempting to purge rivals while on the sidelines is a warning about how these factions will behave once they take power.

As a recent example, during an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored in January, the Iranian-Canadian pro-monarchy activist Goldie Ghamari issued a thinly veiled threat to another guest on the show, political commentator Cenk Uygur, who had raised questions about Pahlavi’s ties to Israel. “Shut up, you scoundrel! When this regime is done, then we’re going to come after you guys, don’t worry,” said Ghamari, who has a history of violent rhetoric.

Nostalgia has become a powerful force shaping exile politics. Many exiles remember the monarchy less as a political system than as an imagined period of prosperity. Such memories, Matin-Asgari argues, obscure the authoritarian structures that triggered the revolution in the first place.

“What the shah and his father did was to destroy the foundation of constitutional government. And Reza Pahlavi is totally silent on that,” Matin-Asgari says. “Given that record, why should we assume that Reza Pahlavi, who has not set foot in Iran for the past 50 years, all of a sudden is going to become a democratic king, whereas he has never seriously talked about the dictatorial rule of his father or grandfather?”

Nearly half a century has passed since Afshin Matin-Asgari interrupted his education in Los Angeles to join a revolution that he believed would reshape his country. He has not discarded his conviction that Iran will eventually change for the better. But the spirit that drove him to the streets of Tehran is now tempered by caution about how a revolution can go awry.