On This Day: Ayatollah Khomeini Returns From Exile

Khomeini was forced out of Iran in 1964 after repeatedly lambasting the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, for his Westernization measures and ties to the United States and Israel.

While in exile in France, the Ayatollah fomented opposition against the Shah, calling for general strikes, and turning public opinion in his favor.

As a result, the Shah of Iran left the country on Jan. 16, 1979, amid an increasingly restive Iranian population. He appointed Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar to take control of the provisional government.

When Khomeini arrived in Iran in 1979, a power struggle ensued between the religious leader and Bakhtiar. Khomeini appointed his own prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and public revolts spread throughout the country.

A Feb. 12, 1979, article from Time magazine describes the moment Khomeini stepped off the plane as "conceivably, the start of a new era for a country that has seemed dangerously out of control.” But the article goes on to incorrectly surmise that because the Ayatollah had indicated that he was in favor of a parliamentary democracy, “it seems improbable that he [Khomeini] would try to become a kind of Archbishop Makarios of Iran, directly holding the reins of power.”

Weakened by the uprisings, Bazargan’s government was dealt its final blow when the military declared itself neutral, allowing the revolutionaries to take control.

“This government represents a regime, whose leader and his father were illegally in power. This government is therefore illegal,” Khomeini said during his first speech upon returning to Tehran, according to the BBC.

The government published the new Iranian constitution on Nov. 15, 1979, concentrating power in the hands of the unelected Supreme Religious Leader. Khomeini’s power grab drew much protest, which the Ayatollah answered by subduing his opposition.

“By early summer 1980 all political groups opposing the government had to go underground,” according to Persian cultural scholar Mohammad Mehdi Korrami in a PBS article.

However, the hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq war helped divert attention from Khomeini’s political suppression.

In November 1979, the Iranians took 52 Americans hostage in retaliation for the Shah taking medical refuge in the United States.

That same year saw skirmishes between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq escalate into the Iran-Iraq war. The war lasted eight years and resulted in massive Iranian casualties and financial burdens.

Ayatollah Khomeini died in June 1989, but relations between Tehran and the Washington remain strained today.

Persian literary expert Mohammad Mehdi Korrami examines Iranian politics from after World War II to June 1981. Korrami focuses on the suppression of opposition forces that culminated with the explosion of two bombs at the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party on June 28, 1981.

Korrami claims that “the increasing violence exercised by these [pro-government] entities expedited the disillusionment process of the opposition,” according to PBS.

Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89) was raised with the teachings of Islamic religious tradition, and went on to become the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. The Iran Chamber Society’s biography of Ayatollah Khomeini states that “he did not fulfill his pre-revolution promises to the people of Iran but instead he started to marginalize ... the opposition groups and those who opposed the clerical rules.”

U.S.-Iranian relations since the Islamic Revolution have “been sporadic and marred by mutual distrust and debacles,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The hostage crisis of 1979-80, in which the Iranians held 52 Americans, was one of the first events to indicate that the U.S. relationship with the new Khomeini regime would be an unpleasant one. The Council traces the relations between the two countries since 1979.