A plane, a portrait, and a city that would not be the same
When Mohammad Reza Pahlavi climbed aboard his jet at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport in January 1979, he carried with him more than a suitcase. He left behind a nation heavy with contradiction: gleaming boulevards that masked simmering discontent, modern factories that had created a new urban poor, and old mosques that still hummed with a different kind of authority.
By sundown, the city had begun to unmake itself. Statues toppled. Banknotes were scrubbed of his face. Men and women who had felt invisible for years poured into streets and squares, lit not only by the headlights of cars but by a fierce, incandescent hope. “It felt like the sky had opened,” said an elderly Tehran shopkeeper I imagined standing on the pavement that night. “You could hear people crying and laughing at the same time.”
From land reform to landslides: the deep currents beneath revolution
The Shah’s program of rapid modernization—known as the White Revolution of the 1960s—changed Iran with dizzying speed. Land reforms, literacy campaigns, and the extension of suffrage to women tore at centuries-old social orders, and for some they delivered opportunity. For many others, particularly peasants uprooted by land consolidation and migrants who swelled Iran’s cities, those promises went unfulfilled.
“When villages emptied, people didn’t land in middle-class apartments,” explained a historian I imagined in Tehran’s University of Tehran, voice faded by cigarette smoke and a stack of photocopied articles. “They landed in shanties, in the margins of a city whose wealth they fueled but whose doors remained closed to them.”
Enter Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: expelled in the mid-1960s, he was at first a figure of clerical grievance. Yet exile—from Turkey to Iraq and eventually to a small town outside Paris—only broadened his reach. From a modest house in Neauphle-le-Château he sent cassettes and messages that galvanized a dispersed population. The revolution was, crucially, not conjured out of thin air. It had roots—mosques, seminaries, and the ulama’s social networks—that the Shah had never fully uprooted.
Why institutions matter
When scholars talk about revolutions, they rarely mean only guns and tanks. They mean organization: an apparatus that can mobilize, feed, shelter and, above all, give people a language to explain their anger. In 1979, the clerical establishment—anchored in Qom and woven through bazaars and neighborhoods—provided that language and the means to act.
“You knock on the door of a mosque and you find three things: a prayer, a teacher, and a phone tree,” an imagined seminary teacher told me. “Those are the things that win streets.”
Fast forward: why change feels easier to call for than to deliver
Now consider the present, and the problem becomes less romantic and more structural. Across the past four decades the Islamic Republic remodeled Iranian life in ways that make a repeat of 1979 unlikely in reverse. The state did not simply replace faces; it rewired institutions.
One clear difference is that the current ruling architecture is less reliant on a single palace or a single wealthy elite that can pick up and flee. The Revolutionary Guards—known as the IRGC—and associated paramilitary forces like the Basij are embedded in politics, the economy, and local governance. Estimates by various analysts suggest that IRGC-linked companies control a sizable chunk of Iran’s non-oil economy, from construction to telecoms, though the exact figures are opaque. More plainly: the regime’s power is interwoven with many facets of everyday life.
Repression has grown more sophisticated, too. The state now combines legal tools, mass surveillance, and cycles of co-optation and punishment to crush organized dissent. The traumatic memory of crackdowns—most visibly during the 2009 Green Movement and again after the 2022 protests following the death of Mahsa Amini—has left civil society fragile. Human-rights organizations documented hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests during those upheavals; such experiences do not easily vanish.
“People want change, but fear has weight,” said a young woman I pictured in Tehran’s Valiasr district. “You can put hope in your pocket, but you cannot hide it from plainclothes men.”
The iron law of no exit
There is another, often overlooked detail that separates 1979 from today: the rulers of the past had escape routes. The Shah had villas abroad, bank accounts, and a ready exile network. Today’s leaders do not. Years of sanctions, asset freezes, and international isolation mean there are few comfortable exits for those at the top. Surviving the system is, for many of them, indistinguishable from surviving personally.
“They fear not just political defeat, but prosecution, loss of livelihood, and retribution,” said an imagined former diplomat in exile. “When the prize is one’s freedom, the prize tends to be defended fiercely.”
So what does change look like, if not theatrical collapse?
If the spectacle of a jet pulling away and a system crumbling is historically powerful, it is also rare. Meaningful transformation tends to be slow: the patient work of rebuilding institutions, protecting independent media, fostering credible political alternatives, and creating safe spaces for civic action. Without those, external forces—bombs, sanctions, or exhortations—can at best pressure, and at worst harden resolve, stigmatize dissent, and deepen suffering.
Ask yourself: would an abrupt removal of leaders deliver the kind of society most Iranians say they want—security, dignity, and a say in governance? Or would it hand a fractured nation to the highest bidder of chaos? These are not rhetorical stances; they are practical dilemmas nations and international actors face when contemplating intervention.
Place, people, and the pulse of possibility
Walk today through Tehran and you will find contradictions at every corner: luxury car showrooms opposite dilapidated staircases, high-tech startups buzzing beside age-old tea houses, a graffiti mural that nods to hope while the satellite dishes keep watch. Young Iranians, who make up a large share of the population—roughly half are under 35—carry ambitions that confound the old categories of left and right. They are connected, educated, and impatient.
“We do not want the past returned and we do not want a foreign blueprint installed,” said a university student I imagined, fingers stained from a late-night protest mural. “We want a country that trusts us enough to let us lead; is that too much?”
That question, more than any headline about toppled statues or targeted strikes, may be the one that determines Iran’s future. Revolutions can change regimes in a night. Building a polity that can last takes generations. The dramatic scene of a plane lifting off is seductive, but the real work is quieter: the slow, stubborn reconstruction of trust, institutions, and civic life.
So when we read the headlines calling for regime change, let us ask not only whether change is possible, but what kind of change is being sought—and who will actually build it.
