This Iranian uprising could be as pivotal as the French Revolution

Iran’s Islamic regime looks to be tottering. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to express their anger at worsening economic conditions, sparked by international sanctions that have seen their currency collapse and the cost of basic goods shoot up.

At least 38 protesters demanding regime change have been killed so far in violent clashes with police, and 2,200 arrested. Faced with what is fast becoming one of the biggest challenges ever to Iran and its clerical leadership, the ayatollahs – in a rare moment of weakness – pulled the plug on the internet, as government buildings in Tehran were set on fire.

Of course, the Islamic Republic has survived protest waves in the past. In 2009, allegations of election fraud sparked massive street protests and a hugely brutal response by Ayatollah Khamenei’s security forces. In 2022, more than 500 people were reportedly killed in protests after the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for refusing to wear the obligatory headscarf.

But this time, it feels different.

Not least since the war with Israel and the United States in June last year, a cultural revolution among people born after 1979 has seen the abandonment of the obligatory headscarf by many women, not all of them young, in the big cities. It’s a visible sign of the Islamic regime’s weakening control.

As well as the violent street protests across most of the country, now in their 13th day, the dramatic fall in attendance at ordinary mosques across Iran can also be seen as a symptom of the widespread rejection of “official” Islam – a kind of silent strike.

In the past, the high price of oil gave the Islamic regime resources to keep its security forces, and core parts of the population, loyal. Sanctions mean that cash is draining away. Support, too. In the city of Abadan, the regime’s police units laid down their arms and joined the protesters.

Khamenei spoke defiantly at Friday prayers, but, addressing an indoor prayer hall of carefully selected loyalists, he was hardly likely to face a Ceausescu moment. (In December 1989, Romania’s communist leader summoned a vast mass meeting to show regime stability. Six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, things turned sour...)

Looking back to how the Shah fell in 1979, an event that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic, it is important to remember that, in addition to the mass street protests, it was strikes by oil workers and shopkeepers in the bazaars in Tehran that paralysed economic life.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which triggered huge political and economic change across a divided Europe, and the largely bloodless revolutions in Soviet bloc states that it precipitated, are less of a precedent for how an Iranian revolution might unfold. A better comparison might be the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

Like the French Revolution, to be truly epochal, any successful revolt will take place against a domestically generated ideological regime, rather than the kind imposed externally, such as a communist regime dependent on the Kremlin. This Iranian revolution already has all those hallmarks.

Whereas Marianne, the personification of the French Republic – she who embodies Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite – sports a red headscarf in the famous Delacroix painting commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, the brave women of Iran, in a stunning show of religious defiance, have been busy throwing off theirs.

For any regime bigwigs who now flee Iran, Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon is more likely than Moscow to be their preferred hideout. But the scores of thousands of hated regime-enforcers at street level will have nowhere to run if the unrest continues. That’s why they are cracking down now – but they could well face street justice if the regime cracks.

A brutal purge – echoing the Bastille executions, and the shootings and lynchings in early 1979, albeit of the heirs of Iran’s mob justice – is likely. The disintegration of the regime could precipitate regional breakdown, especially in ethnic minority areas like the Kurdish regions in the west, or Balochistan in the southeast.

Such instability might be countered if the United States and its allies rush to lift sanctions on a new Iran and offer quick economic benefits. But America and Israel will also want an end to any nuclear programme.

For now, we must hope for a peaceful and democratic Iran – however it ends up in the history books.

Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford