Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution

Abstract As the undisputed leader of the islamic revolution and the founder and charismatic leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) from 1979 to 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set the direction of post-revolutionary developments in the two decades after his death. Iran has remained firmly in the hands of Khomeini’s followers, the children of the Islamic revolution, and his successors who inherited the IRI have continued along one of the several paths he broke or adumbrated. When Khomeini overthrew the monarchy in 1979, he was already an old man. His Islamic revolutionary rhetoric was of course directed against Mohammad Reza Shah and the United States, but his formation predated the advent of both the last Shah and the United States on the Iranian scene, as did the preoccupations that made him a revolutionary when he was already an aging Grand Ayatollah (Sign of God).Shi’ism had by the beginning of the nineteenth century developed an independent hierocracy (religious institution) that constituted one of the two powers in Iran’s authority structure, the other power being the monarchy—the state under the Shah.