Chapter 144. The Guardianship of the Jurist: Iran from the 1953 Coup to the Islamic Republic

In 1979 a Shi’a jurist took control of a modern state, and a doctrine developed over centuries in the seminaries of Qom and Najaf became the constitution of a nation of some forty million. This chapter follows that change through the library’s sources. Engdahl, Davidson and Taylor describe the 1953 Anglo-American coup. Farah Pahlavi gives the monarchy’s own account. Karen Armstrong supplies the Shi’a background, and Kim Ghattas the narrative of the revolution and its regional consequences. Ioan Petru Culianu, drawing on Martin Riesebrodt, sets Iran beside American fundamentalism. Mehran Keshe, born in Iran, adds his own and sometimes contradictory claims about the Islamic Republic.

The Coup of 1953: Three Western Accounts

William Engdahl treats the coup as an episode in Anglo-American oil strategy. After Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, “prospective buyers of nationalized Iranian oil were warned by the Anglo-American oil companies that they would face legal action on grounds that a compensation agreement had not yet been signed”. Engdahl calls this “a self-fulfilling strategy”, because “the company and the British refused to sign any compensation agreement”. In May 1953 Eisenhower turned down Mossadegh’s request for aid on the advice of the Dulles brothers, and on 10 August Allen Dulles met Ambassador Loy Henderson and the Shah’s sister in Switzerland. Engdahl’s summary: “The CIA cooperated fully with the British SIS, under code name Operation AJAX, in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in August 1953”. He notes that General Schwarzkopf’s contacts in the Iranian army “later proved to be crucial” [Engdahl, A Century of War, #62478, ch. 7].

Pelle Neroth Taylor quotes the intelligence historian Stephen Dorril on how the coup worked: “A key aspect of the plot was to portray the mobs as supporters of the Tudeh Party in order to provide a suitable pretext for the coup and the resumption of power by the shah. [MI6 agents] hired a fake Tudeh crowd, comprising an unusual mixture of pan-Iranians and Tudeh members, paid for with fifty thousand dollars given to them by a CIA officer” [Taylor, Brexit: European Union, American Empire, #62532]. Taylor also cites Dorril that “MI6 had plans to assassinate Nasser” using the Muslim Brotherhood, which links this episode to the Islamist politics of the next chapter.

Christopher Davidson adds detail. He notes that “there was no hard evidence available that could prove Mosaddegh had any sort of affiliation with the Tudeh”, and that Dulles told colleagues that “this is how we get rid of that madman Mosaddegh”. The hired agitators “posed as communist Tudeh members and threatened religious leaders with murder if they didn’t support Mosaddegh”, and in some cases “firebombed the houses of leading clerics”. After the Shah fled, “the same agitators that had posed as Tudeh militants poured back onto the streets, but this time with pro-Shah banners”. Davidson also reports that CIA funding to the cleric Ayatollah Kashani “now seems confirmed”, citing a former station chief [Davidson, Shadow Wars, #66972]. In this account, clergy were both targets of the staged violence and recipients of the money behind it.

The Monarchy’s View: Farah Pahlavi

Farah Pahlavi’s memoir gives the court’s version. She quotes the Shah’s own recollection of his flight in August 1953: “Being quite aware of Mossadeq’s plans and ambitions, I had decided to leave Iran before a takeover by force. I wanted to avoid bloodshed and leave the country free to make its choice”. She describes “three days of rioting, mainly in Tehran”, the first two of them “organized by the Mossadeq and Tudeh” parties [Pahlavi, An Enduring Love, #62779, ch. 3, “The 1953 Coup and King’s Exile”]. Western intervention plays no part in her account. It is a story of rescue from chaos and of the people’s return to their king.

Her account of the White Revolution referendum of 1963 introduces Khomeini as “a cleric we had never heard of, a certain Ruhollah Khomeini”, who “had written to the king to make a protest against women’s suffrage”. She writes that “protests in the holy cities, especially Qom, nevertheless became more and more violent”. In her account the clerics opposed agrarian reform “because it would deprive them of the income from their large properties”, made common cause with the great landowners, and also feared the Literacy Corps. “The agitation led to the arrest of Khomeini”, and Prime Minister Alam, “sensing the danger facing the country”, took provisional authority over the army and authorised officers “to shoot when in extreme danger” [Pahlavi, #62779, ch. 8, “The 1963 Clerical Uprisings and Arrest of Khomeini”].

Armstrong describes the same reforms from the clergy’s side. She suggests that Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi opposed land reform because it “contravened Shariah laws of ownership” and he “may have feared that to deprive the people of rights guaranteed by Islamic Law in one sphere could lead to worse abuses”. After his death in 1961, “the post of Marja was not filled” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064].

The Shi’a Background

Armstrong insists on the long view: “In order to understand this Shii faith, without which such events as the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 are incomprehensible, we must briefly consider the development of the Shiah”. After the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, “any government had to be viewed as illegitimate, because it usurped the prerogatives of the Hidden Imam, the true Lord of the Age”, and Shi’is learned political quietism. The 18th-century triumph of the Usuli school, which held that “in the absence of the Hidden Imam… no jurist could have the last word” and so required living mujtahids, gave the clergy independent authority: “Bihbehani’s victory was a political victory for the Iranian ulema” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. She traces Khomeini from his arrival in Qom in 1920 with Shaykh Hairi Yazdi to his 1972 article, which suggested that a faqih who followed Mulla Sadra’s mystical path “could acquire the same ‘infallibility’ (ismah) as the Imams” [#53064].

Velayat-e Faqih: From Najaf to the Constitution

Exiled after 1964, Khomeini settled in Najaf. Ghattas writes that it “was the oldest and most prestigious hawza (Shia seminary)… Over time, Khomeini trained hundreds of clerics and preached to thousands of students who then returned to Iran, Bahrain, or Pakistan”. She uses the Arabic form wilayat al-faqih. She also reports that the economist Abolhassan Banisadr “warned Khomeini not to speak about his wilayat al-faqih because it showed him to be unrealistic: How could clerics who could barely manage the daily affairs of Najaf” run a state? [Ghattas, Black Wave, #72495, Part I]. The doctrine was set out in lectures given at Najaf in 1970 and published as Hokumat-e Islami (Islamic Government). It argued that in the Imam’s absence the qualified jurist inherits the Prophet’s governing authority, not merely authority over orphans and endowments [Wikipedia: Islamic Government; Wikipedia: Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist]. The constitution approved by referendum in December 1979 built the doctrine into the office of the Supreme Leader, who is chosen by an Assembly of Experts [Wikipedia: Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist].

Ghattas also identifies the intellectual groundwork. Khomeini and Khamenei knew of Jalal Al-e Ahmad because “in 1962… Al-e Ahmad had written what would become the seminal, foundational text of the Iranian Revolution: Gharbzadeghi, commonly translated as Westoxication or Occidentosis”, a critique of “a society that was being flattened by rapid modernization and desperation to emulate the West”. She calls Al-e Ahmad, in the 1960s, “the most important thinker in the secular opposition to the shah” [Ghattas, #72495, Part I].

1978-1979: Revolution, Hostages and War

Ghattas follows the escalation. She writes that “the turning point in the heat of a summer of unrest had been an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in the city of Abadan, killing 420 people on August 19”, the 25th anniversary of the coup of 19 August 1953. This was followed by Black Friday, 8 September 1978, when thousands at Jaleh Square chanted “Marg bar shah, Death to the shah” [Ghattas, #72495, Part I]. The Encyclopedia of World History records the outcome: “On January 16, the shah leaves Iran for exile. One week later, the Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile and forms an Islamic revolutionary government”. It then records that militants, “angered by the arrival of the shah in the United States for medical treatment”, seized the US embassy in Tehran and held embassy employees hostage “for 444 days” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “1979”]. Ghattas dates Khomeini’s return to 1 February, and on 22 September 1980 “Saddam declared war on Iran”, with “two hundred Soviet-made Iraqi jets” striking Iranian targets. “The Saudis always denied they had given Saddam a green light”, she notes [#72495]. The war lasted until 1988 [Wikipedia: Iran–Iraq War].

Ghattas’s thesis frames everything that followed: “Three major events took place in that same year, almost independent of one another: the Iranian Revolution; the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots; and the Soviet invasion” of Afghanistan. Together, she argues, they started a forty-year Saudi-Iranian competition for leadership of the Muslim world [Ghattas, #72495].

A Comparative Reading: Culianu and Riesebrodt

Culianu, writing in Romanian, reviews Martin Riesebrodt’s Fundamentalism as a Patriarchal Protest Movement (Tübingen, 1990): “Riesebrodt constată că fenomenul care a dus la revoluţia iraniană din 1979 prezintă trăsături foarte apropiate în raport cu fundamentalismul protestant american, atât de apropiate încât ne îngăduie construcţia conceptului însuşi de ‘fundamentalism'” (“Riesebrodt finds that the phenomenon which led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 shows features so close to American Protestant fundamentalism that they allow us to construct the very concept of ‘fundamentalism'”). He adds that Iran “was once a Shi’a theocracy, but of a special type: like Greek Orthodoxy until the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453”. In both cases Riesebrodt finds acute urbanisation and capitalist industrialisation producing ideological responses, of which fundamentalism is one, alongside Marxism and Fabian socialism [Culianu, Păcatul împotriva spiritului, #15190, “Ku Klux Klan ortodox”].

Keshe and the Islamic Republic

Keshe’s statements on Iran are strong and sometimes contradictory. In KSW 488 (1 June 2023) he says: “Keshe Foundation with me as its head and its management stays loyal to the Iranian nation. But we serve the other nations equally. We will never betray Iran”. He addresses “Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and his messengers” (so in the transcript) and speaks elsewhere in the session of “his Eminency Ayatollah Khamenei” [Keshe, KSW 488, #378200]. In KSW 634 (19 March 2026) he claims that the “US Government purposely bombed Iran Space Research Center – destroyed historical Plasma Technology Center killing plasma scientists”. He also claims that Khamenei “is one of the richest Man, 90 trillion… American debt is 37 trillion”, and that by the end of 2027 over a hundred nations will be able to produce enriched plutonium “for scientific Space development” [Keshe, KSW 634, #378346]. In KSW 631 he says Iran “does not need nuclear weapons”, that the knowledge “which supersedes nuclear is already in the hand of the Iranian scientists”, and that “half of our negotiating are not Iranians, most of our leadership are not Iranians” [Keshe, KSW 631, #378343]. In KSW 311 (16 January 2020) he forecast that “after the completion of the peace talks between Iran and the US, the peace movement will take a new rapid phase”, expecting the change “between middle of this year, to the end of the year” [Keshe, KSW 311, #378023]. The forecast is his; no Iran-US peace agreement is recorded for 2020 in the sources used here.

Alongside this loyalty, KSW 461 (1 December 2022) condemns the state’s treatment of protesters: “They get people as demonstrating, they rape them, and then they shoot them, and in whose, in God’s name” [Keshe, KSW 461, #378173]. Keshe thus declares loyalty to the Iranian nation and its leadership while condemning the violence of its religious state.

Key points

• Engdahl, Taylor (quoting Dorril) and Davidson agree that the CIA and MI6 overthrew Mossadegh in August 1953, using an oil boycott, paid fake Tudeh crowds and money to clerics.
• Farah Pahlavi presents 1953 as rescue from chaos and 1963 as a clerical revolt against women’s suffrage, land reform and the Literacy Corps, which ended in Khomeini’s arrest.
• Armstrong holds that the revolution is “incomprehensible” without Shi’a history, especially the Usuli victory that empowered the ulema.
• Ghattas describes Khomeini’s Najaf network, wilayat al-faqih and Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi as the foundations of the revolution, and 1979 as the start of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.
• The 1979 sequence: the Shah leaves on 16 January, Khomeini returns, the US embassy is seized (444 days of captivity), and Iraq invades on 22 September 1980.
• Culianu, via Riesebrodt, classes the revolution with American Protestant fundamentalism as a response to rapid urbanisation.
• Keshe declares loyalty to Iran and makes claims of his own (Khamenei’s “90 trillion”, a US strike on a plasma centre, a forecast of completed Iran-US peace talks in 2020), while condemning the regime’s violence against protesters [#378200, #378346, #378023, #378173].