Modern Iran

On 5 August 1906, after months of merchant strikes, ulama protests, and a mass bast (sanctuary-taking) of 14,000 people in the British legation gardens, the Qajar shah Mozaffar al-Din signed a decree convening Iran's first national assembly, the Majles. The constitution that followed — drafted on the Belgian model — was the first popular constitution adopted anywhere in Asia, predating those of the Ottoman, Russian and Chinese revolutions.

The movement was crushed by the bombardment of the Majles in 1908 (with British and Russian acquiescence), restored by armed volunteers from Tabriz and the Bakhtiari tribes in 1909, and effectively buried by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 dividing Iran into spheres of influence. Yet it left behind the institutional vocabulary — Majles, constitution, separation of powers — that every later Iranian political movement would invoke.

A Cossack officer and minister of war, Reza Khan deposed the last Qajar in 1925 and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. In sixteen years he built the Trans-Iranian Railway (Persian Gulf to Caspian, opened 1938), founded the University of Tehran (1934), the National Bank of Iran (1927), the Civil Code (1928), and a secular court system; banned the veil in 1936; and renamed the country Iran in international correspondence in 1935.

During the Second World War, Britain and the Soviet Union — alarmed by Reza Shah's German leanings and needing the railway as a supply route to the USSR — invaded Iran in August 1941 and forced his abdication in favor of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza.

On 28 April 1951 the Majles, led by the patrician constitutionalist Mohammad Mosaddegh, voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — the largest single foreign investment in the developing world. Time made him Man of the Year for 1951. Britain imposed a global embargo on Iranian oil and, after Truman refused to back a coup, persuaded the new Eisenhower administration to act.

On 19 August 1953 (28 Mordad 1332) — operation TPAJAX, planned by the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt with British MI6 — Mosaddegh was overthrown. The episode shaped a generation of Iranian and Middle Eastern political consciousness; declassified CIA documents acknowledging the agency's role were finally released in 2013.

"The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development, and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America."

The shah's White Revolution of 1963 — land reform, female suffrage, profit-sharing for industrial workers, and a massive literacy corps — modernized the country at speed, but at the price of dispossessing the bazaari merchants and the senior Shi'i clergy. The exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as the leading critical voice. The 1973 oil-price quadrupling produced a building boom and runaway inflation; political repression by SAVAK alienated the secular intelligentsia.

The revolution that began with strikes in late 1977 and ended with the shah's departure on 16 January 1979 was the largest revolutionary mobilization of the twentieth century in proportion to population — perhaps 11% of Iranians took part in street demonstrations. On 1 February Khomeini returned from Paris to a crowd estimated at three million in Tehran. The Islamic Republic was proclaimed by referendum on 1 April 1979.

On 22 September 1980 Saddam Hussein, encouraged by the apparent disarray of post-revolutionary Iran, invaded Khuzestan. The war that followed lasted eight years and cost perhaps a million lives. Iraq used chemical weapons — including against its own Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988 — with the knowledge of Western intelligence services. Iran was effectively isolated; even the United Nations Security Council waited seven years before passing Resolution 598 calling for a ceasefire (accepted by both sides in August 1988, in Khomeini's words "more deadly than drinking poison").

The war shaped the modern Iranian state more deeply than any event since 1979 itself: the Revolutionary Guard expanded into a parallel military and economic empire; Khuzestan, Kermanshah and Ilam still bear the physical scars; an entire generation of "war veterans" became a permanent political constituency.

Iran in 2026 is a paradox. It is a regional power with ballistic-missile capability and a civilian nuclear program, but a country whose currency has lost over 99% of its value since the imposition of "maximum pressure" U.S. sanctions in 2018. It is one of the world's largest producers of natural gas and the holder of the second-largest proven gas reserves on earth. It has 89 million people, a median age of 32, an urbanization rate of 76%, and adult literacy of 91%. More than 60% of university students are women, and Iran ranks in the global top twenty for scientific publication output.

The political system — constitutional in form, theocratic in apex, with elected president, parliament and Assembly of Experts alongside the appointed Supreme Leader and Guardian Council — has proven both more durable and more contested than most outside observers in 1979 expected. The Green Movement of 2009, the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022, and recurring waves of economic protest have repeatedly tested it; how the next generation of Iranians choose to renegotiate the inheritance of 1979 will be among the defining stories of the coming decades.