R1.11 Revolution, reform and foreign relations in the Middle East (circa 1945–2020)

Between 1945 and 2020 Iran, Egypt and Lebanon went through revolution, reform from above, civil war and foreign intervention. Their histories are closely linked: Nasser’s Arab nationalism shaped politics across the region, Iran’s revolution of 1979 changed the balance of power from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, and Lebanon became a battleground for the rivalries of its neighbours.

Iran, 1941–1953: oil nationalisation and the coup against Mosaddeq

Iran was never formally colonised, but in the first half of the twentieth century Britain and Russia treated it as a sphere of influence. Reza Shah Pahlavi, an army officer who founded the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, built a centralised state, a modern army and secular schools. In August 1941 British and Soviet forces invaded Iran to secure its oil and a supply route to the USSR, and forced Reza Shah to abdicate in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah.

The young Shah was weak in the 1940s. The Majlis, Iran’s parliament, regained power, political parties formed, and the communist Tudeh Party (founded in 1941) built a mass following among workers and intellectuals. When Soviet troops stayed in northern Iran after the war and backed autonomous governments in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, the crisis of 1945–1946 became one of the first confrontations of the Cold War. Under American and UN pressure the Soviet forces withdrew in May 1946, and the Iranian army crushed the autonomous governments in December.

Oil and the National Front

Iran’s oil was produced by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), whose largest shareholder was the British government. Under its concession, Iran received a far smaller share of the profits than the company and the British treasury, and Iranian workers in the refinery town of Abadan lived in poor conditions beside British managers. When the American company Aramco agreed to split profits 50–50 with Saudi Arabia in December 1950, Iranian demands for a better deal hardened.

Mohammad Mosaddeq, an elderly aristocrat, lawyer and veteran member of the Majlis, led the National Front, a coalition of liberal nationalists, bazaar merchants and some clerics formed in 1949. In March 1951 the Majlis voted to nationalise the oil industry; on 28 April Mosaddeq became prime minister, and on 1 May 1951 the nationalisation law came into force. For his supporters, control of oil meant real independence; Mosaddeq’s popularity also rested on his demand that the Shah reign as a constitutional monarch rather than rule.

Britain refused to accept the nationalisation. It withdrew its technicians, organised an international boycott of Iranian oil, blockaded exports and took the case to the UN and the International Court of Justice, which ruled in July 1952 that it had no jurisdiction. Iran’s oil revenue collapsed and the economy suffered. In July 1952 the Shah refused Mosaddeq control of the war ministry and appointed another prime minister; mass demonstrations on 21 July (30 Tir in the Iranian calendar) forced the Shah to reappoint Mosaddeq within days. In October 1952 Iran broke off diplomatic relations with Britain.

The coup of 19 August 1953

By 1953 Mosaddeq’s coalition was breaking apart. Ayatollah Abolqasem Kashani, an influential cleric, turned against him, as did some National Front deputies, while the economic crisis continued. Mosaddeq ruled increasingly by emergency powers and in August 1953 dissolved the Majlis after a referendum whose results were widely criticised as implausible. His opponents accused him of opening the way to the Tudeh Party.

The British government had planned to remove Mosaddeq since 1952. The Truman administration was reluctant, but President Eisenhower, who took office in January 1953, accepted the British argument that Iran might fall to communism. The CIA, led in Iran by Kermit Roosevelt, and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) organised Operation TPAJAX (the British called it Operation Boot). They paid for propaganda, bribed politicians and street crowds, and persuaded a hesitant Shah to sign decrees dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister.

The first attempt failed on 15–16 August, and the Shah fled to Baghdad and then Rome. On 19 August (28 Mordad) crowds, some of them paid, marched on central Tehran, and royalist army units attacked Mosaddeq’s house. Several hundred people were killed. Zahedi took power, the Shah returned on 22 August, and Mosaddeq was tried by a military court and kept under house arrest in his village until his death in 1967.

The consequences shaped Iran for a generation. In 1954 a consortium of Western companies took over the running of Iran’s oil, with British Petroleum (the renamed AIOC) holding 40 per cent and five American companies another 40 per cent; Iran kept formal ownership and received half the profits. The United States replaced Britain as the Shah’s main foreign backer. For many Iranians, liberal and religious alike, the coup showed that the Shah owed his throne to foreigners.

Successive US governments said little about the coup for decades. In 2013 the CIA declassified parts of its internal history, The Battle for Iran, that acknowledged its role. In a speech in Cairo in 2009, President Barack Obama had already referred to it directly.

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.

Barack Obama, President of the United States, speech at Cairo University, 4 June 2009. Obama was addressing the Muslim world and offering Iran talks over its nuclear programme, so he paired the American admission with an Iranian wrong. As evidence, the speech shows how far the coup had become accepted historical fact by 2009, and how both governments still used the history of 1953 and 1979 in their dispute.

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The Shah’s Iran, 1953–1977: dictatorship, alliance and the White Revolution

Royal dictatorship and the American alliance

After 1953 the Shah steadily took power back from the Majlis and the old landed families. Parties were reduced to two official ones, nicknamed the "yes" and the "of course" parties. The secret police, SAVAK, created in 1957 with American and Israeli help, watched universities, the press and the bazaar, and its use of torture against political prisoners became notorious in the 1970s. The Tudeh Party was crushed in 1954–1955 and the National Front marginalised.

Iran became one of the closest allies of the United States in the region. It joined the Baghdad Pact in 1955, received large amounts of American military and economic aid, and in the 1970s, under the Nixon Doctrine, was armed as the West’s policeman of the Gulf. Iran also sold oil to Israel and kept informal relations with it, which offended many Iranians. In October 1964 the Majlis passed a law giving US military personnel and their families immunity from Iranian courts. Opponents called it the "capitulation" law, recalling the privileges forced on Iran by European powers in the nineteenth century.

The White Revolution, 1963

Under pressure from the Kennedy administration to reform and from rivals at home, the Shah launched his own programme of reform in 1962–1963, which he called the White Revolution: a revolution from above, without bloodshed, to pre-empt a "red" one from below. Its six original points were approved by a referendum on 26 January 1963; further points were added later.

Land reform was the core of the programme. The large landowners lost their estates and with them much of their political power, which helped the Shah. But the reform favoured peasants who already held tenancy rights; landless labourers received nothing, and many holdings were too small to support a family. Agricultural production grew slowly while the population grew fast, and from the late 1960s Iran became a large importer of food. Rural migrants crowded into the shantytowns of southern Tehran, where they found work in construction and religious life in the mosques.

The White Revolution did create a modern Iran. A new middle class of engineers, teachers, civil servants and technicians grew with the state, and enrolment in schools and universities rose sharply. Yet the same people who benefited most from modernisation were often the most frustrated by the lack of political freedom. Ervand Abrahamian has called this "uneven development": rapid social and economic change combined with a political system that allowed no participation.

Khomeini and religious opposition

Ruhollah Khomeini was a senior Shi’a cleric, an ayatollah, who taught in the seminary city of Qom. In 1962–1963 he attacked the Shah’s reforms, including votes for women and land reform, as violations of Islam and as foreign-inspired, and denounced the Shah’s ties with the United States and Israel. After a fiery speech in Qom, he was arrested on 5 June 1963 (15 Khordad). Riots in Tehran and other cities were put down by the army. Estimates of the dead range from a few dozen to several thousand.

Released in 1964, Khomeini condemned the capitulation law in October and was exiled in November 1964, first to Türkiye (then officially "Turkey" in English) and from 1965 to Najaf, the Shi’a shrine city in Iraq. From exile he developed the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. In lectures to his students in 1970, published as Islamic Government, he argued that in the absence of the hidden Twelfth Imam, the most learned jurists had the right and duty to govern, not only to advise rulers. This was a radical break with the long tradition in which most Shi’a clergy kept their distance from politics.

Khomeini was not the only voice of religious opposition. The lay intellectual Ali Shariati, whose lectures at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew thousands of students, presented Shi’ism as a revolutionary creed of the oppressed. Shariati died in England in 1977. The People’s Mojahedin (MEK), founded in 1965, mixed Islam with Marxism and turned to armed struggle; Marxist guerrillas, the Fedayan, did the same. Religious ideas gave the opposition a language that ordinary Iranians understood, and the mosques gave it a network that SAVAK could not close.

Oil boom and economic strain, 1973–1977

After the Arab–Israeli war of October 1973, oil prices quadrupled. Iran’s oil revenue rose from about US$5 billion in 1973 to around US$20 billion by the mid-1970s. The Shah promised that Iran would soon reach the "Great Civilisation" and match the industrial nations of Europe. He doubled the investment budget and spent heavily on arms.

The economy overheated. Ports and roads could not handle the imports, consumer prices rose by about 27 per cent in 1977 according to World Bank figures, rents in Tehran soared, and shortages and power cuts followed. In 1975 the Shah abolished the two official parties and created a single party, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party, declaring that those who would not join it could leave the country. The party launched an anti-profiteering campaign in 1975–1976 that fined and jailed thousands of shopkeepers and bazaar merchants, blaming them for inflation. By 1977 the government cut spending, and unemployment rose among the migrants who had flooded into the cities.

The display of royal wealth fed resentment. In October 1971 the Shah held celebrations at Persepolis for 2,500 years of the Persian monarchy, with world leaders entertained in luxury tents and food flown in from Paris. Khomeini denounced the festival from exile. Corruption at court and the high incomes of foreign advisers became common complaints.

The revolution of 1978–1979

From protest to revolution

In 1977 the Shah, who was secretly being treated for cancer, relaxed repression a little. The new US president, Jimmy Carter, had made human rights part of American foreign policy, and the Shah released some political prisoners, allowed open letters from lawyers and writers and let the International Committee of the Red Cross visit prisons. Liberal and secular critics used the opening first, with poetry evenings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran in October 1977 that drew thousands.

Carter’s policy was never meant to weaken the Shah. On a visit to Tehran on New Year’s Eve 1977, he praised his host warmly.

Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.

Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, toast at a state dinner in Tehran, 31 December 1977. A toast at a state dinner is diplomatic courtesy, and Carter’s words show what Washington wanted to believe more than what it knew. Within days the cycle of protest began, which is why the toast is often quoted as evidence of how badly American leaders understood Iran, and why Iranians who opposed the Shah saw the United States as his protector.

On 7 January 1978 the government newspaper Ettela’at published an article, planted by the Ministry of Information, that insulted Khomeini. Seminary students in Qom protested on 9 January and police killed several of them. Shi’a custom marks the fortieth day after a death with mourning ceremonies, so the deaths in Qom led to protests in Tabriz in February, whose dead were mourned in other cities in March, and so on. The mosque network turned each round of killing into the next round of protest.

Two events in the late summer of 1978 made compromise impossible. On 19 August a fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan killed about 400 people locked inside. The public blamed SAVAK; evidence later pointed to Islamist militants, but at the time the fire turned many neutral Iranians against the regime. On 8 September, the day after martial law was declared, troops opened fire on a crowd in Jaleh Square in Tehran. The opposition claimed thousands of dead; later research suggests the number was much lower, under a hundred, but "Black Friday" ended hopes of reconciliation.

From October 1978 strikes spread to the oil industry, the banks, the civil service and the bazaar, and oil production fell to a fraction of its normal level, cutting off the state’s income. Khomeini, expelled from Iraq, moved to a village outside Paris, where the world’s press could reach him and his speeches were recorded on cassette tapes, copied and distributed across Iran. On 10–11 December 1978, the Shi’a holy days of Tasu’a and Ashura, demonstrations of a million or more people marched through Tehran.

The Shah, ill and uncertain, swung between concessions and repression. He appointed a military government in November, then in January 1979 the National Front politician Shapour Bakhtiar as prime minister, and left Iran on 16 January. Khomeini returned to Tehran on 1 February to a crowd of millions and named Mehdi Bazargan, a liberal Islamic engineer, as head of a provisional government. After air-force technicians rebelled and fighting broke out in Tehran, the army chiefs declared their neutrality on 11 February 1979 and the monarchy collapsed. In a referendum on 30–31 March, 98.2 per cent of voters approved an Islamic Republic.

Later research estimates that about 3,000 people were killed in the revolution, far fewer than the 60,000 the new regime claimed. The figure matters because the Shah’s army was never defeated in battle. A mass movement of strikes and demonstrations made the country ungovernable, and the army would not keep killing.

Why did the revolution happen?

The revolution brought together groups with very different aims: clergy and seminary students, bazaar merchants, the new middle class and students, industrial and oil workers, the urban poor, liberal nationalists and the Marxist and Islamic-Marxist left. What united them was opposition to the Shah, and the causes can be grouped by how long they took to build.

The 1953 coup and dependence on the United States. The coup gave the opposition its central charge: that the Shah was a foreign puppet. American advisers, the capitulation law and arms purchases kept the charge alive. Yet the United States did not cause the revolution directly, and in 1978 it gave the Shah mixed signals rather than abandoning him.

Royal dictatorship. By closing every legal channel for opposition, the Shah made the mosque the only place where opposition could organise and left himself with no moderate partners to negotiate with in 1978.

Modernisation and its costs. The White Revolution and the oil boom created the groups that made the revolution (the urban poor, students, a new middle class) and turned the clergy and the bazaar against the regime. The economic crisis of 1976–1977 came at the worst moment for the Shah.

Religion and Khomeini. Shi’a Islam provided a language of martyrdom and justice, an organisation (the mosques and the network of clerics) and a leader whose refusal to compromise made him the symbol of the whole movement. Khomeini’s statements from Paris were vague about clerical rule, which allowed liberals and leftists to follow him.

The Shah’s own weakness. The Shah was ill, isolated and indecisive in 1978; his army, built to obey him personally, had no plan when he left.

Perspectives on the Iranian Revolution

These views are not simply alternatives. Abrahamian, Keddie and Skocpol explain why the regime was vulnerable; Arjomand explains why the clergy, and not the liberals or the left, took power; Kurzman warns that vulnerability alone does not explain when and how ordinary people chose to act. A convincing judgement uses more than one and weighs them.

Post-revolution Iran: politics and the economy

Building the Islamic Republic, 1979–1983

In 1979 Iran had two centres of power. Bazargan’s provisional government tried to run the state, while revolutionary committees (komitehs) in every neighbourhood, revolutionary courts and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council exercised real power. The courts executed hundreds of the Shah’s generals, officials and SAVAK officers in 1979. In May 1979 Khomeini created the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to protect the revolution, a force loyal to the clergy that balanced the regular army; the Basij, a volunteer militia, followed in November.

Khomeini’s followers used the time to turn a broad revolution into an Islamic one. In a speech in June 1979 marking the anniversary of the 1963 uprising, Khomeini told the liberal and secular groups who had joined the revolution that it belonged to Islam.

Those who imagine that some force other than Islam could shatter the great barrier of tyranny are mistaken. As for those who oppose us because of their opposition to Islam, we must cure them by means of guidance, if it is at all possible; otherwise, we will destroy these agents of foreign powers with the same fist that destroyed the Shah’s regime.

Ruhollah Khomeini, speech on the anniversary of the uprising of 15 Khordad, June 1979 (English translation in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook). Khomeini spoke to supporters while the constitution was being drafted and liberals, leftists and ethnic movements were contesting the revolution’s direction. The speech shows his claim that only Islam made the revolution, and it is a warning that non-Islamic opponents would be treated as foreign agents, which is what happened over the next three years.

An elected Assembly of Experts, dominated by clerics, wrote a constitution based on velayat-e faqih, approved by referendum in December 1979. It made Khomeini Supreme Leader for life, above an elected president and parliament.

The hostage crisis helped the radicals to win. On 4 November 1979, after the Shah was admitted to the United States for medical treatment, students calling themselves followers of the Imam’s line seized the US embassy in Tehran. Bazargan, who had met the US national security adviser days before, resigned. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days, until 20 January 1981. The crisis rallied support behind Khomeini, discredited liberals as pro-American, and ended any chance of normal relations with the United States; a failed American rescue mission in April 1980 added to the humiliation of the Carter administration.

The first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, elected in January 1980, clashed with the clerical Islamic Republican Party and was impeached in June 1981. The People’s Mojahedin then rose against the regime. On 28 June 1981 a bomb at the party’s headquarters killed Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, head of the judiciary, and more than 70 others; in August another killed the new president and prime minister. The regime answered with mass arrests and thousands of executions in 1981–1982. The universities were closed from 1980 to 1983 in a "Cultural Revolution" to purge staff and courses, and by 1983 the Tudeh Party, the last legal party outside the clergy’s camp, had been banned and its leaders forced into televised confessions.

The worst single act of repression came at the end of the war with Iraq. After an MEK force invaded from Iraq in July 1988, special commissions in the prisons ordered the execution of political prisoners who would not recant, most of them from the MEK and left-wing groups. Amnesty International estimates that around 5,000 were killed in the summer of 1988; other estimates are higher. The government has never acknowledged the scale of the killings.

Politics after Khomeini, 1989–2020

Khomeini died on 3 June 1989. The Assembly of Experts chose Ali Khamenei, then president and a cleric of middle rank, as Supreme Leader, and a constitutional revision abolished the post of prime minister and strengthened the presidency. Politics after 1989 swung between factions, all of them inside the system: pragmatic conservatives, hardliners close to the IRGC and reformists.

The presidential election of June 2009 produced the largest protests since 1979. Official results gave Ahmadinejad about 63 per cent; supporters of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi believed the vote had been rigged, and millions joined demonstrations under the slogan "Where is my vote?". The Green Movement, named after Mousavi’s campaign colour, was suppressed by the Basij and the IRGC; dozens were killed and thousands arrested, and Mousavi was placed under house arrest from 2011. In November 2019 a sudden rise in fuel prices set off protests in more than a hundred cities. Amnesty International documented at least 304 deaths; other reports gave much higher figures.

Economic developments

The revolution brought a large state sector. Banks, insurance and large industries were nationalised in 1979, and the property of the Pahlavi family and the old elite passed to revolutionary foundations, the bonyads, such as the Foundation of the Oppressed. The bonyads ran hundreds of companies, paid little or no tax, answered to the Supreme Leader rather than the government, and became major centres of patronage. The IRGC later built its own business empire in construction, oil and telecommunications.

The war with Iraq brought rationing and price controls, and oil revenue fell with the price of oil in the mid-1980s. After 1989 Rafsanjani tried to liberalise the economy, but inflation peaked at about 50 per cent in 1995. The economy remained dependent on oil and exposed to sanctions: a US trade embargo from 1995 and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996; UN Security Council sanctions over the nuclear programme from 2006; an EU oil embargo in 2012. Relief came with the nuclear deal in 2016, but the United States withdrew from it in May 2018 and restored sanctions, and the economy shrank again.

Data: World Bank, World Development Indicators (indicators NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG and FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG), accessed 2026.

Some social goals of the revolution were met. Electricity, roads, clinics and schools reached rural Iran, infant mortality fell sharply and literacy became nearly universal among the young. These gains, with the welfare provided by the bonyads, help to explain why the regime kept a base of support among the rural and religious poor even when urban Iranians turned against it.

Post-revolution Iran: foreign relations, women and marginalised groups

"Neither East nor West": foreign relations

The revolution’s slogan "Neither East nor West, Islamic Republic" rejected both the American alliance of the Shah and Soviet communism. Iran left the Western defence system, cut ties with Israel (the Israeli mission in Tehran was handed to the PLO in February 1979) and called the United States the "Great Satan". Khomeini spoke of the export of the revolution: Iran would inspire and help Muslims, above all Shi’a Muslims, to overthrow governments it regarded as corrupt and pro-Western.

This alarmed Iran’s neighbours. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with a Shi’a majority ruled by a Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime, feared revolution at home, and the Gulf monarchies formed the Gulf Cooperation Council in May 1981. Rivalry with Saudi Arabia, which presented itself as the leader of Sunni Islam, became a lasting feature of regional politics; in July 1987 clashes between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi police in Mecca left more than 400 dead. Iran’s most successful export of the revolution was in Lebanon, where it helped to create Hezbollah.

Relations with the West swung between confrontation and pragmatism. Iran secretly bought American arms through Israel in 1985–1986, in the deal that became the Iran–Contra affair. On 14 February 1989 Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of the British novelist Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses, which broke relations with Britain and showed that ideology could override diplomacy. Khatami’s presidency improved relations with Europe and the Gulf states.

From 2002, when an Iranian opposition group revealed a secret uranium-enrichment site at Natanz, the nuclear programme dominated foreign relations. Iran insisted it had the right to civilian nuclear power under the Non-Proliferation Treaty; the United States, Israel and European governments feared it was seeking the capacity to build a weapon. After years of sanctions, Iran and six powers (the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China) signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on 14 July 2015, limiting enrichment in return for the lifting of sanctions. President Trump withdrew the United States on 8 May 2018.

After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran’s regional influence grew through allied Shi’a parties and militias in Iraq, support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war after 2011, and support for the Houthi movement in Yemen. The commander of the IRGC’s foreign arm, the Quds Force, General Qasem Soleimani, directed much of this policy until a US drone strike killed him in Baghdad on 3 January 2020. Iran fired missiles at US bases in Iraq in retaliation, and on 8 January its air defences shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 near Tehran by mistake, killing all 176 people on board.

Experiences of women

Women of every class took part in the revolution, many of them wearing the chador (a full-length cloak) as a symbol of opposition to the Shah. Their experiences afterwards were contradictory. The new regime suspended the Shah’s Family Protection Law, which had restricted polygamy and given women more rights in divorce and custody, in February 1979. The legal age of marriage for girls was lowered to puberty, set at 9 lunar years (raised to 13 in 2002). Women were barred from serving as judges, and the testimony of a woman in court counted as half that of a man in many cases.

Compulsory hijab was introduced step by step: in government offices in 1980, and for all women in public by a law of 1983, enforced by morality patrols. Many women protested when the policy was announced in March 1979, and the issue never disappeared. In December 2017 Vida Movahed stood on a utility box in Enghelab (Revolution) Street in Tehran and waved her white headscarf on a stick; other women copied her and became known as the "Girls of Revolution Street".

At the same time, the Islamic Republic’s policies drew many religious families into public life. Segregated schools and universities made parents willing to educate daughters, the literacy gap between girls and boys almost closed, and by the late 2000s women were more than half of university entrants in several years. Women voted and sat in the Majlis, though few held senior office. Women’s participation in the paid labour force stayed low, between about 10 and 19 per cent of women in 1990–2020 according to World Bank (ILO) estimates.

The fall in fertility shown in the graph is one of the largest social changes in modern Iran. After encouraging large families in the 1980s, the government launched a family-planning programme in 1989, with free contraception, clinics in rural areas and the support of senior clerics. Combined with women’s rising education and later marriage, it cut births per woman from over 6 in the mid-1980s to about 2 by 2000.

Women organised for legal change within and against the system. The lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who defended women, children and political prisoners, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to do so. The One Million Signatures Campaign, launched in 2006, collected signatures for an end to discriminatory laws; several of its activists were imprisoned.

Experiences of marginalised groups

The constitution recognised Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians (mainly Armenians and Assyrians) as religious minorities, with five reserved seats in the Majlis, and allowed them their own religious and family law. Many members of these communities, especially Jews, emigrated after 1979, but the communities survived.

Others were not recognised. Followers of the Bahá’í Faith, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, were treated as heretics. More than 200 Bahá’ís were executed or killed in the 1980s and 1990s, their holy places were destroyed, and they were barred from universities and public employment. Political opponents (the MEK, leftists, monarchists) were imprisoned and executed in large numbers, and homosexual acts were punishable by death.

Ethnic minorities, most of them living on Iran’s borders, saw the revolution as a chance for autonomy. Kurdish parties rose in 1979; Khomeini declared a holy war against them in August 1979, and fighting in Kurdistan cost thousands of lives in the early 1980s. Arabs in Khuzestan, Turkmen and Baluch also faced repression. Because most Kurds, Baluch and Turkmen are Sunni Muslims, ethnic and religious discrimination often overlapped in a state built on Shi’a jurisprudence.

The Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988

Why Iraq invaded

Iran and Iraq had long disputed the Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the Tigris and Euphrates that is Iraq’s only outlet to the Gulf. In the Algiers Agreement of March 1975 Iraq accepted a border down the middle of the channel, in return for the Shah ending his support for a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader and president from 1979, regarded the agreement as a humiliation.

The revolution in Iran gave Saddam both a motive and an opportunity. Khomeini called on Iraqi Shi’a to overthrow the secular Ba’athist regime, Iran supported the Shi’a Islamist Dawa Party, and in April 1980 Iraq executed the leading Iraqi Shi’a cleric, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr. At the same time, purges had removed many of the Iranian army’s officers, the United States had cut off spare parts for Iran’s American weapons during the hostage crisis, and Iran was diplomatically isolated. Saddam expected a short war that would win back the whole Shatt al-Arab, perhaps detach the Arab-populated, oil-rich province of Khuzestan, and make Iraq the leading power in the Gulf. On 17 September 1980 he tore up the Algiers Agreement, and on 22 September Iraqi forces invaded.

Invasion, stalemate and ceasefire

The invasion stalled within weeks. Iraq took the port of Khorramshahr after a long street battle but not the oil city of Abadan, and Iranians rallied to defend their country; Iran’s official name for the conflict became the "Imposed War". By May 1982 Iran had driven the Iraqis back and retaken Khorramshahr. Saddam offered to withdraw, and Arab states reportedly offered compensation, but Khomeini decided to carry the war into Iraq and demanded Saddam’s removal. The war became a struggle over the survival of the Iraqi regime and the expansion of the revolution.

From 1982 to 1988 the front barely moved. Iran used massed attacks by IRGC units and Basij volunteers, including teenagers, against Iraqi trenches, minefields and artillery, a pattern that reminded observers of the Western Front in 1914–1918. Each side attacked the other’s cities with aircraft and missiles in the "War of the Cities" and its oil exports in the Tanker War, in which more than 400 ships were attacked in the Gulf. Iran’s capture of the Faw peninsula in February 1986 was its greatest success. In 1988 Iraq, rearmed and using chemical weapons on a large scale, retook Faw and other ground, while the US Navy clashed with Iranian forces in the Gulf.

Technology and chemical weapons

The war combined the trenches of the First World War with late twentieth-century technology. Both sides fired Soviet-designed Scud missiles at cities; Iraq’s extended-range al-Hussein missiles, used from 1988, could reach Tehran. Iraq used French Mirage aircraft and Exocet anti-ship missiles in the Tanker War, and one of its aircraft hit the US frigate Stark by mistake in May 1987, killing 37 sailors.

Iraq made extensive use of chemical weapons, banned in war by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. It used mustard gas against Iranian troops from 1983 and the nerve agent tabun from 1984; UN specialists confirmed the use of chemical weapons in March 1984. Iran said that tens of thousands of its soldiers were exposed, and many survivors suffered lung, skin and eye damage for decades. Western firms, many of them West German, supplied chemicals and equipment for Iraq’s programme. International reaction was muted, because most governments wanted Iraq to win.

Chemical weapons were also used against Iraq’s own Kurds, many of whom supported Iran. During the Anfal campaign of 1986–1989, the regime destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages and killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds according to Human Rights Watch. On 16 March 1988 Iraqi aircraft attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons, killing an estimated 3,200 to 5,000 people, most of them civilians. Halabja became the best-known chemical attack on civilians since the First World War and a central example in the negotiations that produced the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.

Regional and global involvement

Most of the world wanted to stop the revolution spreading more than it wanted to stop Iraq, so most outside support went to Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait lent Iraq tens of billions of dollars and let it use their ports; Egypt sold arms and Jordan sent volunteers. The USSR and France were Iraq’s main arms suppliers. The United States removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, sent Donald Rumsfeld as a special envoy to meet Saddam in December 1983, restored diplomatic relations in 1984, and gave Iraq agricultural credits and battlefield intelligence. It also ran Operation Staunch, a campaign to stop arms sales to Iran.

Iran had few friends. Syria, Iraq’s Ba’athist rival, closed the Iraqi oil pipeline across its territory in 1982; Libya and North Korea sold arms; China sold to both sides. Israel sold arms to Iran in the early 1980s to weaken Iraq, and in 1985–1986 the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran through Israel, hoping to free American hostages held in Lebanon, and used the profits to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. When the affair became public in November 1986 it embarrassed Washington, which then leaned further towards Iraq.

In 1987 the United States agreed to reflag Kuwaiti tankers and escort them through the Gulf. American warships clashed with Iranian forces, and in April 1988 the US Navy destroyed Iranian oil platforms and much of Iran’s navy in Operation Praying Mantis. On 3 July 1988 the cruiser USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner, killing all 290 people on board; the United States said the crew had mistaken it for an attacking fighter. Iran’s leaders took the attack as a sign that the superpowers would not let them win. The UN Security Council had demanded a ceasefire in Resolution 598 in July 1987, and on 18 July 1988 Iran accepted it. Khomeini said that agreeing to the ceasefire was, for him, worse than drinking poison. The fighting ended on 20 August 1988 on the pre-war border.

Economic and social impact

Most estimates put total deaths at around half a million, with a range from about 300,000 to more than a million; Iran’s official figure for its own war dead is about 200,000. Hundreds of thousands were wounded, tens of thousands were held as prisoners of war (the last were exchanged long after the ceasefire), and more than a million Iranians were displaced from the border provinces.

The economic damage was enormous. Iran’s Abadan refinery, then one of the largest in the world, was destroyed early in the war; Iraqi aircraft bombed the Kharg Island oil terminal repeatedly; cities such as Khorramshahr were left in ruins. Estimates of the total cost to the two economies run to hundreds of billions of dollars each. Iraq ended the war with a large army and debts of tens of billions of dollars, much of it owed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. When Kuwait refused to cancel its loans and pumped oil that kept prices low, Saddam invaded it on 2 August 1990, which led to the Gulf War of 1991.

In Iran the war strengthened the revolutionary state. It justified repression of opponents as traitors, built a culture of martyrdom around the war dead (the huge Behesht-e Zahra cemetery south of Tehran became its centre), and made the IRGC a powerful military, political and later economic force. It also left a generation of veterans and their families with a claim on the state, and a lasting suspicion of the outside powers that had armed Iraq, which shaped Iran’s later pursuit of missiles and nuclear capability.

Egypt under Nasser, 1954–1970: domestic politics and the economy

Gamal Abdel Nasser led the Free Officers, the secret group of army officers who overthrew King Farouk on 23 July 1952, and by November 1954 had defeated General Mohammed Naguib to become Egypt’s sole leader. He was elected president, unopposed, in June 1956 and ruled until his death on 28 September 1970.

Domestic politics: a military-led authoritarian state

Nasser’s state rested on the army, the security services and a single official political organisation, renamed three times: the Liberation Rally (1953), the National Union (1957) and the Arab Socialist Union (ASU, 1962). The ASU was meant to mobilise workers and peasants, half of its seats reserved for them, but it never became an independent party; decisions were made by Nasser and a small group of officers. The National Charter of 1962 defined the regime’s ideology as "Arab socialism": state ownership of the main means of production, social justice and national independence, without Marxist class war or atheism.

Opposition was not tolerated. The Muslim Brotherhood was crushed in 1954, after a Brotherhood member fired at Nasser during a speech in Alexandria on 26 October (the Manshiyya incident), and again in 1965–1966, when the regime claimed to have uncovered a new conspiracy; its leading thinker, Sayyid Qutb, was hanged on 29 August 1966. Qutb’s prison writings, especially Milestones (1964), argued that rulers who did not govern by God’s law were not truly Muslim and could be resisted. They became founding texts for later radical Islamist groups, including the one that killed Sadat. Communists were imprisoned in camps from 1959 to 1964. The press was nationalised in 1960.

The army became a state within the state. Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, Nasser’s closest friend, controlled it as a personal fiefdom, and officers moved into the bureaucracy, nationalised companies and provincial government. After the defeat of 1967 Amer was arrested and died in custody. When light sentences for air-force commanders blamed for the defeat were announced in February 1968, students and workers in Helwan and Cairo held the largest protests of Nasser’s rule. Nasser responded with the "30 March Programme", promising elections inside the ASU and the rule of law, but the system did not change.

Economic transformation and modernisation

Nasser’s economic policies moved in stages from reform to state control. Land reform began in September 1952, with a ceiling of 200 feddans (a feddan is about 0.42 hectares), lowered to 100 in 1961 and 50 in 1969. The Anglo-Egyptian agreement of October 1954 ended the British military presence in the Canal Zone by June 1956. After Suez, British and French banks, companies and property were seized in 1957 under a policy of "Egyptianisation". The July Laws of 1961 nationalised banks, insurance companies and most large industrial and commercial firms, and by the mid-1960s the state controlled most of the economy outside agriculture and small trade.

The Aswan High Dam was the symbol of the new Egypt. When the United States, Britain and the World Bank withdrew their offer to finance it in July 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company to pay for it; the USSR then lent the money and supplied engineers. Built between 1960 and 1970 and inaugurated in January 1971, the dam ended the Nile’s floods, allowed year-round irrigation and more than one crop a year, added several hundred thousand hectares of cultivable land and, by the early 1970s, produced about half of Egypt’s electricity. It also had costs: the Nile no longer brought fertile silt, so farmers came to depend on chemical fertiliser; the Delta coast began to erode; and Lake Nasser flooded the homeland of the Nubians.

The first Five-Year Plan (1960–1965) set out to industrialise Egypt through import-substitution industrialisation: building factories to make at home what had been imported. The Helwan iron and steel works south of Cairo, textile mills, fertiliser and cement plants and the aluminium smelter planned at Nag Hammadi were the results. Growth was strong in the early 1960s, at about 5–6 per cent a year by most estimates. But many state firms were inefficient, private investment dried up, and the plan was paid for with foreign loans. By 1965–1966 Egypt faced a balance-of-payments crisis, food shortages and inflation; the United States, angry at Nasser’s foreign policy, let its food aid lapse, and the second plan was abandoned.

The economic record is therefore mixed. Supporters stress that Nasser broke the power of the landowning pashas and foreign capital, built a modern industrial base and gave millions of Egyptians land, jobs and services for the first time. Critics stress the inefficiency of the public sector, the bloated bureaucracy created by guaranteed jobs, and the way military spending, the war in Yemen and the defeat of 1967 swallowed resources. Both sides agree that by 1970 the model could no longer pay for itself, which is why Sadat changed course.

Social and cultural change

The regime presented itself as the champion of the fellahin (peasants) and the poor. Free education was extended through university in 1962, and school and university enrolment multiplied; graduates were guaranteed a state job, which made the civil service the main employer of the new middle class. Rural health units, social insurance and subsidised bread, sugar and cooking oil reached people who had had nothing from the monarchy. These were real gains in social mobility, although population growth (from about 21 million in 1950 to about 35 million by 1970) strained schools, housing and jobs.

Women gained the vote under the 1956 constitution. Rawya Attia became the first woman elected to parliament in 1957, and Hikmat Abu Zeid the first woman minister in 1962. Women entered universities, the professions and state employment in growing numbers, but personal status law on marriage, divorce and inheritance was left unchanged, and independent feminist organisations were closed. In 1961 a law brought Al-Azhar, the ancient centre of Sunni learning in Cairo, under state control and added modern faculties such as medicine and engineering, so that religious authority supported the regime’s policies.

Culture became an instrument of the state and a source of Egypt’s influence. The cinema industry, the largest in the Arab world, was nationalised in the 1960s; the radio station Voice of the Arabs carried Nasser’s speeches across the region; and the singer Umm Kulthum, whose monthly concerts were broadcast to millions, sang songs praising the revolution. Censorship also reached literature: Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Children of Gebelawi, serialised in 1959, was banned from publication as a book in Egypt.

Some communities lost out. Most of Egypt’s foreign communities, Greeks, Italians, British and French residents, left after 1956 as their businesses were nationalised. The Jewish community, about 75,000 people around 1948, was largely driven out: after Suez many Jews were expelled or pressured to leave and their property seized, and only a few thousand remained by the late 1960s. About 100,000 Nubians were resettled when Lake Nasser flooded their villages in the 1960s.

Nasser’s regional politics: pan-Arabism, Suez and Israel

Non-alignment and the Czech arms deal, 1955

Nasser’s first aim was to end British power in Egypt; his second was to stop the West from building a new alliance system in the Arab world. In February 1955 Iraq and Türkiye signed the Baghdad Pact, which Britain, Pakistan and Iran soon joined. Nasser saw it as Western imperialism in a new form and as a bid by Iraq’s pro-British monarchy to lead the Arabs, and Voice of the Arabs attacked it so fiercely that no other Arab state joined. In April 1955 Nasser attended the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states, where he met Nehru, Zhou Enlai and Sukarno and adopted the policy of non-alignment in the Cold War.

An Israeli raid on Egyptian forces in Gaza in February 1955, which killed nearly 40 Egyptian soldiers, convinced Nasser that his army needed modern weapons. When the West would supply them only on conditions, he announced in September 1955 a large arms deal with Czechoslovakia, acting for the USSR. The deal broke the Western monopoly on arms to the Arab world, brought the Soviet Union into Middle Eastern politics and alarmed Israel, Britain and France.

Suez, 1956: military defeat and political victory

In July 1956 the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to fund the Aswan High Dam, partly in response to the arms deal and Egypt’s recognition of Communist China. On 26 July Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, whose revenues would pay for the dam. Britain and France, the company’s main owners, prepared to retake the canal, and in October they secretly agreed with Israel at Sèvres that Israel would invade Sinai, giving them a pretext to intervene. The fighting itself belongs to the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict; what mattered for Egypt was the result. Under heavy American and Soviet pressure, Britain, France and then Israel withdrew, and a UN Emergency Force took up positions on the Egypt–Israel border.

By stating that by succeeding, Abdel Nasser would weaken Britain’s stand against Arab nationalism, Eden is in fact admitting his real objective is not Abdel Nasser as such but rather to defeat Arab nationalism and crush its cause. … Those who attack Egypt will never leave Egypt alive. We shall fight a regular war, a total war, a guerrilla war.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, speech of 15 September 1956 denouncing the proposed Suez Canal Users’ Association (translation published by the US Department of State, 1956). Nasser spoke six weeks before the invasion, to Egyptians and the wider Arab audience reached by radio, as Britain and France planned to take the canal back. The speech shows how he turned a dispute over a company into a contest between Arab nationalism and imperialism, a framing that made him the hero of the Arab world when the invaders withdrew.

Egypt lost militarily in Sinai, but Nasser gained more than any other participant. He kept the canal, took over British and French assets, and became the leader of Arab nationalism from Morocco to Iraq. Britain’s position in the region never recovered, and the United States and the USSR replaced Britain and France as the outside powers that counted.

The United Arab Republic and the "Arab Cold War"

In February 1958 Syrian leaders, fearing a communist takeover at home, asked Nasser for union, and Egypt and Syria merged as the United Arab Republic (UAR). Nasser insisted on dissolving Syria’s political parties, including the Ba’ath Party that had pressed for union. The same year, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in July 1958, and a civil crisis in Lebanon brought US Marines to Beirut. For a moment it seemed that Nasserism might sweep the Arab world.

The union did not last. Egyptian officers and officials ran Syria as a province, the July Laws of 1961 nationalised Syrian businesses, and in September 1961 Syrian army officers seized power in Damascus and took Syria out of the union. Egypt kept the name UAR until 1971. The collapse was a serious blow to Nasser’s prestige, and Iraq’s new leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, also refused to follow Cairo.

The political scientist Malcolm Kerr called the rivalries of 1958–1970 the "Arab Cold War": a struggle between "progressive" republics led by Egypt and conservative monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, and among the radical regimes themselves. Its sharpest form was the war in Yemen. When army officers overthrew the Yemeni imam in September 1962, Egypt sent troops to support the new republic, while Saudi Arabia backed the royalists. At its peak about 70,000 Egyptian troops were in Yemen; they used chemical weapons against royalist villages, and thousands were killed in a war often described as Egypt’s Vietnam. The troops were still there in June 1967.

Israel and the road to 1967

Nasser’s prestige depended on standing up to Israel, which most Arabs regarded as a colonial state built on the dispossession of the Palestinians. Yet for ten years after Suez he avoided war. The UN force on the border kept the peace, and at Arab summits from 1964 Nasser backed the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization partly to keep Palestinian activism under Arab state control.

In May 1967, after false Soviet reports of Israeli troops massing against Syria and taunts from Jordan and Saudi Arabia that he was hiding behind the UN, Nasser moved troops into Sinai, asked the UN force to leave and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel attacked on 5 June 1967, destroyed most of Egypt’s air force on the ground and occupied Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in six days. Egypt lost more than 10,000 soldiers, the canal closed until 1975, and on 9 June Nasser offered to resign; mass demonstrations kept him in office.

After 1967 Nasser’s regional policy changed. At the Khartoum summit in August 1967 he accepted Saudi financial aid and withdrew from Yemen, ending the Arab Cold War on Saudi terms. The Arab states agreed on no peace with Israel, no recognition and no negotiations, but Egypt also accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, which implied recognition of Israel in return for withdrawal. Egypt fought a "War of Attrition" along the canal in 1969–1970, with Soviet air-defence crews in Egypt, until a US-brokered ceasefire in August 1970. Nasser’s last act was to negotiate an end to the fighting between Jordan and the PLO in "Black September" 1970; he died of a heart attack the day after the Cairo summit ended.

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Assessing the impact of Nasser

Historians judge this record very differently. P. J. Vatikiotis, in Nasser and His Generation (1978), presents Nasser as a conspirator-officer whose ambitions abroad exceeded Egypt’s means and whose authoritarian state stifled politics. Said Aburish, in Nasser: The Last Arab (2004), is more sympathetic, stressing his popularity, his social achievements and Western hostility to any independent Arab leader. Joel Gordon, in Nasser’s Blessed Movement (1992), shows how the officers built their regime step by step after 1952 rather than following a plan, and Laura James, in Nasser at War (2006), explains the road to 1967 through his need to keep his standing in Arab politics. The shared ground is that Nasser changed Egypt and the region more than any other Arab leader of his century, and that the defeat of 1967 marked the limits of what his methods could achieve.

Sadat, 1970–1981: war, peace and the open door

Anwar Sadat, one of the original Free Officers and Nasser’s vice-president, was underestimated when he succeeded him in October 1970. In May 1971 he arrested his main rivals, the Nasserist group around Ali Sabri, in what he called the "Corrective Revolution", and released many political prisoners, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom he encouraged as a counterweight to the Nasserist and Marxist left in the universities. A new constitution in 1971 made the principles of Islamic law "a principal source" of legislation; an amendment in 1980 made them "the principal source".

From war to peace with Israel

In July 1972 Sadat expelled most of the Soviet military advisers in Egypt, signalling to Washington that he wanted American help to recover Sinai. On 6 October 1973 Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel. Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal was a military and psychological success, even though Israeli forces had crossed to the west bank of the canal by the ceasefire. For Egyptians the war restored the pride lost in 1967 and gave Sadat the standing to negotiate.

Sadat then turned to the United States. Disengagement agreements in 1974 and 1975 returned part of Sinai and reopened the canal. In November 1977 he flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset, the first Arab head of state to visit Israel; the Camp David Accords of September 1978, negotiated with President Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, led to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 26 March 1979. Egypt recovered all of Sinai by 1982. The Arab League suspended Egypt and moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, and most Arab states cut relations. Egypt became, after Israel, the largest recipient of US aid, with military aid of about US$1.3 billion a year from the late 1980s, which tied the Egyptian army closely to Washington.

Infitah and its consequences

Sadat’s economic policy, the Infitah ("opening"), set out in the October Paper of April 1974 and Law 43 of 1974, invited foreign and Arab investment, allowed private banks and import businesses, and shifted Egypt away from Nasser’s state socialism. Remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf, oil from Sinai, Suez Canal fees and tourism brought rapid growth in the late 1970s. But the gains went mostly to importers, contractors and people with political connections, while the public sector stagnated and inflation squeezed wage earners.

When the government, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, cut subsidies on bread, rice and cooking oil in January 1977, riots broke out across Egypt on 18–19 January. About 79 people were killed before the army restored order and the subsidies were restored. The "bread intifada" showed every later government the political danger of touching food subsidies, which became a permanent drain on the budget.

Opposition and assassination

Sadat allowed limited political pluralism. In 1976 the Arab Socialist Union was divided into three "platforms" (manabir) of right, centre and left, which became parties; in 1978 Sadat founded the National Democratic Party (NDP), which dominated every parliament until 2011. Criticism of the peace treaty and of the economy grew from Nasserists, the left and above all Islamists, whose student groups now controlled many campuses. In September 1981 Sadat ordered the arrest of more than 1,500 opponents of every political colour and banished the Coptic Pope Shenouda III to a desert monastery.

On 6 October 1981, during a parade marking the 1973 war, soldiers led by Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambouli, a member of the Islamic Jihad group, shot Sadat dead. The assassins accused him of betraying Islam and the Palestinians by making peace with Israel. Western leaders mourned Sadat as a peacemaker; few Arab leaders attended his funeral, and there was little public mourning in Egypt.

Mubarak, 1981–2011, and the reasons for the revolution

Mubarak’s presidency and domestic policies

Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander and Sadat’s vice-president, governed for almost thirty years. A state of emergency declared after Sadat’s death was renewed continuously until 2012. It allowed arrest without charge, trial of civilians in military and state security courts, and bans on demonstrations. Mubarak kept the peace with Israel, restored relations with the Arab states (Egypt rejoined the Arab League in 1989) and joined the US-led coalition against Iraq in 1991, which was rewarded with the cancellation of much of Egypt’s foreign debt.

In the 1990s the regime fought an armed Islamist insurgency led by al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) in Upper Egypt and Cairo. More than a thousand people were killed between 1992 and 1997; the worst attack, at the temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor on 17 November 1997, killed 62 people, most of them foreign tourists. The security services crushed the insurgency with mass arrests and torture. The non-violent Muslim Brotherhood was officially banned but tolerated, ran charities, won control of professional associations and stood candidates as independents.

Elections were held regularly but never threatened the NDP. Under American pressure, the constitution was amended in 2005 to allow the first multi-candidate presidential election; Mubarak won with about 89 per cent, and the runner-up, Ayman Nour, was imprisoned soon afterwards. In the parliamentary election of 2005 Brotherhood candidates won 88 seats despite violence and arrests. The parliamentary election of November–December 2010 was so heavily rigged that the NDP won over 90 per cent of seats and the opposition was almost wiped out, closing the last legal channel for dissent weeks before the revolution.

The question of succession sharpened discontent. Mubarak’s son Gamal rose through the NDP from 2002 and was widely expected to succeed his father. Gamal’s allies, businessmen such as the steel magnate Ahmed Ezz, dominated the NDP and the cabinet of Ahmed Nazif (2004–2011), which privatised state companies. Many Egyptians saw this as crony capitalism, and the plan for a hereditary succession also worried the army, whose leaders disliked Gamal’s business circle.

Police abuse was the daily face of the regime. Torture in police stations was widespread, according to Egyptian and international human rights groups. On 6 June 2010, Khaled Said, a young man in Alexandria, was beaten to death by two policemen; photographs of his disfigured face spread online, and a Facebook page, "We Are All Khaled Said", set up by the Google executive Wael Ghonim, gained hundreds of thousands of followers and later helped to call the protests of 25 January 2011.

Economic and demographic challenges

By 1990 Egypt was deeply in debt. In 1991 it agreed an Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Programme with the IMF and the World Bank: subsidies were cut, the currency was devalued, interest rates freed and state companies privatised. Inflation fell and growth resumed, and after 2004 the Nazif government’s reforms produced growth of about 7 per cent a year in 2006–2008. Yet growth created few secure jobs, and the benefits went disproportionately to the wealthy and well connected.

The population graph explains much of the pressure. About a fifth of Egyptians were aged 15–24 in the late 2000s, the result of high birth rates in the 1980s, and each year hundreds of thousands of young people entered the labour market. Youth unemployment stood between about 25 and 30 per cent through the 2000s by ILO estimates, and was highest among university graduates, who had been promised state jobs under Nasser and now waited years for them. Many young men could not afford to marry or move out of their parents’ homes. Millions of Egyptians lived in unplanned informal settlements (ashwa’iyyat) around Cairo and other cities.

Data: World Bank, World Development Indicators (population, ILO-modelled youth unemployment, inflation); poverty: World Bank and Egypt’s statistics agency (CAPMAS) household survey of 2008–2009. Poverty estimates differ with the line used: many more Egyptians lived just above it.

Food prices rose sharply in 2007–2008 with world grain prices; queues for subsidised bread turned violent and several people died. Workers responded with the largest wave of strikes in decades. In December 2006 about 20,000 textile workers at the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla al-Kubra struck successfully for unpaid bonuses. A planned general strike there on 6 April 2008 was broken up by police, and two days of rioting followed; young activists who had organised support online founded the April 6 Youth Movement. Earlier, in 2004, the Kefaya ("Enough") movement had brought together intellectuals of left, liberal and Islamist views against another term for Mubarak and the succession of his son.

External factors

Egypt’s position in the world also fed the revolution. The peace with Israel, close cooperation with the United States and Egypt’s part in the blockade of Gaza after 2007 were unpopular, and many Egyptians saw Mubarak as serving foreign interests. Satellite television, especially Al Jazeera, broke the state’s control of information from the late 1990s and covered Egyptian protests and Arab issues in ways the state media did not. By 2010 millions of young Egyptians used the internet and social media.

The decisive external factor was Tunisia. The flight of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January 2011, after four weeks of protest, showed that an apparently secure Arab dictator could fall. Activists in Egypt chose 25 January, Police Day, for a demonstration against police brutality. American policy mattered at the end: President Obama had called in Cairo in 2009 for "governments that reflect the will of the people", and on 1 February 2011 he publicly urged an orderly transition beginning at once. Because the Egyptian army depended on American aid, Washington’s position influenced the generals’ decision to abandon Mubarak.

The eighteen days and after

On 25 January 2011 tens of thousands of protesters marched in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities, shouting "The people want the fall of the regime" and "Bread, freedom, social justice". On 28 January, the "Friday of Anger", protesters defeated the riot police and burned police stations and NDP offices; the government cut the internet and mobile phone networks, and the army took to the streets but did not fire on the crowds. Tahrir Square in Cairo became a permanent camp. On 2 February men on camels and horses, believed to have been sent by regime supporters, attacked the square. Strikes spread in the following days. On 11 February 2011 Vice-President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned and handed power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). An official fact-finding commission later counted about 846 people killed during the uprising.

The revolution removed Mubarak but not the military state. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the presidential election of June 2012; after mass protests against him, the army removed him on 3 July 2013. On 14 August 2013 security forces cleared the Brotherhood’s protest camps at Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda squares in Cairo, killing at least 817 people according to Human Rights Watch. The army commander, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, became president in 2014 and ruled more repressively than Mubarak.

Perspectives on the causes of 2011

These perspectives can be combined. Long-term political and economic grievances explain why so many Egyptians were willing to protest; the Tunisian example and new media explain when and how they did; and the army’s choice, shaped by its own interests and by American pressure, explains why Mubarak fell in eighteen days rather than holding on, as other leaders did in Syria and Bahrain.

Lebanon: the confessional state and the road to civil war

The confessional system

Lebanon was created under a French mandate after the First World War and became independent in 1943. Its population was divided among many religious communities: Maronite Christians (the largest Christian group), Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics and other Christians, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and Druze. Political power was shared among them by a system called confessionalism, in which offices and parliamentary seats are allocated by religious community.

The unwritten National Pact of 1943 settled the main posts: the president would be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker of parliament a Shi’a, and parliament would have six Christian deputies for every five Muslims. Christians agreed not to seek French protection, and Muslims agreed not to seek union with Syria or the wider Arab world. The ratio was based on the census of 1932, the last official census Lebanon has held.

The system kept the peace for three decades and allowed Lebanon to become the banking and trading centre of the Arab world, but it had two weaknesses. First, it froze a balance of power that no longer matched the population: Muslims, and especially the fast-growing Shi’a community, became a majority without gaining more power. Second, it made religious community the basis of politics, so that social and economic grievances were expressed as sectarian ones. The Shi’a of the south, the Bekaa valley and the poor suburbs of Beirut were the poorest community; in 1974 the cleric Musa al-Sadr founded the Movement of the Deprived to speak for them, and its militia, Amal, was formed in 1975.

The system had already broken down once. In 1958 President Camille Chamoun, a pro-Western Maronite, was accused of seeking an unconstitutional second term and of taking Lebanon into the Western camp; Muslim and Druze opponents inspired by Nasser’s new United Arab Republic rose against him. After the Iraqi revolution of July 1958, US Marines landed in Beirut at Chamoun’s request. The crisis ended with the election of the army commander, Fuad Chehab, who tried to strengthen the state and reduce regional inequality.

The Palestinians and the PLO in Lebanon

About 100,000 Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon in 1948, and with their descendants they numbered around 300,000 or more by the 1970s, most of them stateless and living in camps. Lebanese Christian leaders feared that their permanent settlement, overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, would upset the confessional balance. After the Arab defeat of 1967, armed Palestinian groups, led by Fatah and organised in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), began raids into Israel from southern Lebanon, and Israel retaliated against Lebanon; in December 1968 Israeli commandos destroyed 13 civilian aircraft at Beirut airport.

After clashes between the Lebanese army and Palestinian fighters in 1969, Nasser brokered the Cairo Agreement of 3 November 1969, which allowed the Palestinians to bear arms in the camps and to operate against Israel from parts of the south. When King Hussein drove the PLO out of Jordan in 1970–1971, its leadership and thousands of fighters moved to Lebanon, and Beirut became the PLO’s headquarters. The PLO built a state within a state, with its own militias, courts and services, and parts of the south became known as "Fatahland".

Lebanese society split over the PLO. Many Muslims, Druze and the Lebanese left saw the Palestinians as allies in a struggle against Israel and against the Maronite-dominated order. Most Maronites, organised in the Kataeb (Phalange) party of Pierre Gemayel and the National Liberal Party of Camille Chamoun, saw them as a threat to Lebanese sovereignty and armed their own militias. The Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt led the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a coalition of leftist, Nasserist and Muslim parties that demanded the end of confessionalism.

The Lebanese Civil War, 1975–1990: from civil war to regional conflict

Outbreak and the initial involvement of the PLO, 1975–1976

On 13 April 1975, after gunmen fired on a church in the Christian Beirut suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh where Pierre Gemayel was attending a service, Kataeb militiamen ambushed a bus carrying Palestinians through the district and killed about 27 of its passengers. Fighting spread across Beirut. On "Black Saturday", 6 December 1975, Kataeb militiamen killed hundreds of Muslim civilians at checkpoints; in January 1976 Christian militias overran the Muslim slum of Karantina, and Palestinian and leftist forces sacked the Christian town of Damour. Massacres of civilians by every side became a feature of the war, and Beirut was split along a front line, the "Green Line", between the Christian east and the mainly Muslim west.

By spring 1976 the PLO and LNM controlled most of the country and seemed close to defeating the Christian militias. The PLO’s role was decisive: its fighters, weapons and money made the LNM a match for the Maronite militias, and Arafat, who had at first tried to stay out, was drawn in to protect the camps. The PLO’s involvement turned a Lebanese political crisis into a war over the future of the Palestinian movement as well.

Syria enters, 1976

Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, regarded Lebanon as part of Syria’s security zone, and feared both a radical PLO-LNM victory that might provoke an Israeli invasion and a partition that would create a Christian state allied to Israel. In June 1976, with the tacit approval of the United States and Israel, Syrian troops entered Lebanon against the PLO and its allies, saving the Christian militias. In August the Christian militias captured the Palestinian camp of Tel al-Zaatar after a long siege in which thousands died. Arab summits in Riyadh and Cairo in October 1976 legitimised the Syrian presence as an Arab Deterrent Force, mostly Syrian. Kamal Jumblatt, who had opposed Syria, was assassinated in March 1977, an act widely blamed on Syria.

Syria then changed partners. When the Maronite leaders turned to Israel for arms, Syria shelled Christian East Beirut in 1978 and drew closer to the PLO, the Druze and later Amal. This pattern of shifting alliances, always aimed at preventing any Lebanese faction or outside rival from dominating Lebanon, was the core of Syrian policy for the rest of the war.

Israel’s interventions, 1978 and 1982

After a Palestinian attack on the Israeli coastal road killed more than 30 Israeli civilians in March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in Operation Litani. The UN Security Council responded on 19 March 1978.

Calls upon Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory; Decides, in the light of the request of the Government of Lebanon, to establish immediately under its authority a United Nations interim force for Southern Lebanon for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.

UN Security Council, Resolution 425, operative paragraphs 2 and 3, 19 March 1978 (adopted by 12 votes to none, with the USSR and Czechoslovakia abstaining). The resolution is the founding text of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Its wording shows the limits of UN action: the force was to confirm a withdrawal and help a Lebanese government that no longer controlled the south, so it could observe but not enforce. Israel handed its positions to a Lebanese Christian militia, later the South Lebanon Army, and did not fully withdraw until 2000.

On 6 June 1982, after an attempt on the life of Israel’s ambassador in London by a Palestinian group hostile to Arafat, Israel launched a full invasion, "Operation Peace for Galilee". Its defence minister, Ariel Sharon, aimed to destroy the PLO in Lebanon, push Syria out and install a friendly Maronite government. Israeli forces destroyed much of Syria’s air force and air defences in the Bekaa and besieged West Beirut for ten weeks, with heavy bombardment. Lebanese figures at the time put the dead of the invasion at about 18,000–19,000, many of them civilians.

Under a US-brokered agreement, more than 10,000 PLO fighters and Arafat left Beirut by sea in August 1982, most of them for Tunisia, under the protection of a Multinational Force of American, French and Italian troops. Bashir Gemayel, the commander of the Christian Lebanese Forces militia, was elected president with Israeli backing, but on 14 September he was killed by a bomb. Israeli troops entered West Beirut, and between 16 and 18 September Lebanese Forces militiamen, allowed by the Israeli army into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, killed hundreds of civilians; estimates range from several hundred to about 3,500. An Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the danger, and he resigned as defence minister in 1983.

Foreign and UN involvement, 1982–1984

The Multinational Force returned after the massacre, joined by a small British contingent. At first welcomed as peacekeepers, it came to be seen as a partisan force supporting the government of Amin Gemayel (Bashir’s brother), which signed a US-sponsored agreement with Israel on 17 May 1983. When Druze militias, backed by Syria, fought the Lebanese army and Christian militias in the Chouf mountains in 1983, US warships shelled Druze positions.

On 18 April 1983 a suicide bomber destroyed the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. On 23 October 1983 truck bombs destroyed the barracks of the US Marines and the French paratroopers, killing 241 US service personnel and 58 French soldiers. Responsibility was claimed by a group calling itself Islamic Jihad, generally regarded as a cover name for the militants who formed Hezbollah, with Iranian support; Hezbollah has denied responsibility. The Multinational Force withdrew in February 1984, and in March, under Syrian pressure, Gemayel cancelled the agreement with Israel. With the Western powers gone and the agreement with Israel cancelled, Syria was again the strongest outside power in Lebanon.

Iran and the establishment of Hezbollah

In the summer of 1982 Iran sent a contingent of Revolutionary Guards, about 1,500 strong, to the Bekaa valley, with Syria’s permission. They trained and funded Lebanese Shi’a clerics and militants who had broken with Amal, which they regarded as too secular and too willing to compromise. From these groups emerged Hezbollah ("Party of God"). In its "Open Letter" of 16 February 1985 it announced itself publicly: it declared loyalty to Khomeini as its leader, called for the expulsion of the United States, France and Israel from Lebanon, and presented an Islamic state as the goal, while saying it would not impose one by force.

Hezbollah combined armed resistance to Israeli occupation in the south with schools, hospitals, social services and reconstruction for the Shi’a poor, funded largely by Iran. In 1982–1992 militants linked to it kidnapped dozens of Westerners in Beirut, among them the American journalist Terry Anderson, held for almost seven years, and the British church envoy Terry Waite, held from 1987 to 1991; the hostages became a factor in the Iran–Contra affair. Israel withdrew to a "security zone" in the south in 1985, where Hezbollah fought it and the South Lebanon Army until Israel left in May 2000.

The deepening and end of the war, 1984–1990

After 1984 the war fragmented. Amal, backed by Syria, fought the Palestinian camps to prevent the PLO from rebuilding in Lebanon (the "War of the Camps", 1985–1988), and then fought Hezbollah for control of the Shi’a community (1988–1990), a contest between Syria’s and Iran’s allies. When Amin Gemayel’s term ended in September 1988 without an election, he appointed the army commander, General Michel Aoun, as head of a military government, while a rival Muslim-led government continued in West Beirut. In March 1989 Aoun declared a "war of liberation" against Syria, with weapons from Iraq, which wanted revenge for Syria’s support for Iran.

The Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia with Morocco and Algeria, brought the surviving members of the Lebanese parliament elected in 1972 to the Saudi city of Taif. The Taif Agreement, signed on 22 October 1989, divided seats in parliament equally between Christians and Muslims, moved most executive power from the Maronite president to the Council of Ministers led by the Sunni prime minister, set the abolition of political sectarianism as a national goal without a date, called for the disarmament of the militias, and recognised Lebanon’s "special" relationship with Syria. Aoun rejected it. After Syria joined the US-led coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Washington accepted Syrian action, and the defeat of Aoun by Syrian forces on 13 October 1990 ended the war; Aoun went into exile in France.

The human cost was immense. Estimates of the dead range from about 120,000 to 150,000, in a country of about three million; about 17,000 people disappeared and have never been accounted for; around a million people were displaced or emigrated. An amnesty law of 1991 pardoned most wartime crimes, and militia leaders became the politicians of the post-war state.

The impact of the war on regional politics

• Syria. Syria emerged as the dominant power in Lebanon. It kept tens of thousands of troops there, controlled Lebanese politics through the Treaty of Brotherhood (1991) and allied politicians, and stayed until April 2005, when the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005 and mass demonstrations (the "Cedar Revolution") forced it out.

• The PLO. Expulsion from Beirut in 1982 ended the PLO’s last base on Israel’s borders. From Tunis it moved towards diplomacy, accepting Resolution 242 and a two-state solution in 1988, and the initiative passed to Palestinians in the occupied territories, who began the first intifada in December 1987.

• Israel. The 1982 invasion destroyed the PLO’s military presence but did not produce a friendly Lebanon. Sabra and Shatila caused mass protests in Israel, and eighteen years of occupation in the south ended in a unilateral withdrawal in May 2000 under pressure from Hezbollah. The two fought another war from 12 July to 14 August 2006, which killed more than 1,100 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 165 Israelis, and ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

• Iran. Hezbollah was the most successful export of the Iranian revolution. It became the strongest armed force in Lebanon, a party in parliament and government, and after 2012 a fighting force in the Syrian civil war on Assad’s side. Iran later used the same model, an allied armed movement with social services and a political wing, in Iraq and Yemen.

• The West. The bombings of 1983 and the hostage crisis made the United States wary of placing ground troops in Middle Eastern civil wars for a decade, and suicide bombing spread as a tactic across the region.

• Lebanon itself. Taif ended the war but kept confessionalism. The economic collapse of 2019, protests against the whole political class from 17 October 2019, and the explosion in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020, which killed more than 200 people, showed how far the post-war system had failed.

Perspectives on the Lebanese Civil War

The Lebanese view of a "war of others" is attractive because it lifts responsibility from Lebanese leaders, which is also its weakness: the confessional system, militia leaders and massacres by every Lebanese faction were Lebanese. Most historians conclude that internal weaknesses made Lebanon open to foreign intervention, and that foreign intervention then made the war longer and harder to end.

Revolution, reform and foreign relations compared

The three countries show different routes through the same regional forces: the end of European domination, the Cold War, oil, Arab nationalism, the conflict with Israel and the rise of political Islam.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The questions below cover each of the three countries and both kinds of claim: a factor claim, which names one cause to weigh against others, and an effect or characterisation claim, which must be tested across groups, areas and phases. Plan each answer for about five minutes before writing.

Iran: the causes of the revolution

Iran: the impact of the revolution

Egypt: the impact of Nasser

Egypt: the reasons for the 2011 revolution

Lebanon: the civil war and regional politics

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the oil dispute of 1951–1953, the coup against Mosaddeq and the roles of Britain, the USA and Iranian royalists.

• To do:

  I can describe the Shah’s royal dictatorship, SAVAK and the American alliance.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims and effects of the White Revolution, including its unintended consequences.

• To do:

  I can explain Khomeini’s opposition from 1963, his exile and the doctrine of velayat-e faqih.

• To do:

  I can narrate the revolution of 1978–1979 and weigh its long-term, short-term and immediate causes.

• To do:

  I can compare the interpretations of Abrahamian, Keddie, Skocpol, Arjomand and Kurzman.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Islamic Republic was built and how its institutions work.

• To do:

  I can describe political and economic developments in Iran from 1979 to 2020, including sanctions and the nuclear deal.

• To do:

  I can explain Iran’s foreign relations after 1979, from the hostage crisis to the killing of Soleimani.

• To do:

  I can evaluate the experiences of women and of marginalised groups in post-revolution Iran.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and end of the Iran–Iraq War, and the involvement of regional and global powers.

• To do:

  I can assess the economic and social impact of the Iran–Iraq War and the impact of chemical weapons and other technology.