Empire: World History - 330. The Iranian Revolution: 1979 vs. 2026 (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

In recent weeks, protestors have swarmed the streets in Iran in defiance of the regime, and it feels as if the country is on the precipice of a transformative change. Yet these scenes feel familiar. In the 1970s, mass protests led to a religious revolution which replaced a monarchy led by the Shah with the Islamic Republic of Iran. What can this history tell us about today? To discuss the parallels between 1979 and 2026, William and Anita are joined by two leading experts on Iran: Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings, and Ramita Navai, documentary-maker and author of City of Lies. Disclaimer: We recorded these episodes on January 17th 2026. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has confirmed that 5,459 protestors in Iran have died, and the organisation is investigating 17,031 more. Two senior officials of Iran’s Ministry of Health have reported that as many as 30,000 people have been killed. In such a volatile situation, predictions are difficult to make and these figures are ever changing. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. All eyes are on Iran, a country in turmoil, a country that seems to be on the cusp of an enormous transformative change. And yet, it feels like we have been here before. So what lessons of 1979 in particular? What can they tell us about the future? Hello and welcome to EmpirePod.

I'm William Durimple. And I'm Anita Arnand. There is, at the moment, in Iran, something of a geopolitical earthquake going on. We're getting reports of thousands of dead on the streets, shot dead by the state. Now, we're recording possibly a week before you, you're hearing this and we're at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

And the kind of magical thing that happens at a literary festival of this size and one that is this international is that you can pull together people with relevant experience. So we have for you today a real treat. We have one person who has forensically looked into the Revolution of 1979 that feels so familiar to what's going on today. And another who has been born in Iran, has contacts with Iran. and can perhaps give us an idea of just how much we should draw from that 1979 experience to predict what is going to happen in the next few months.

So our two amazing guests on this pod, and this is the first time in Empire, I think, that we've done two guests, and it's a measure of their extraordinary abilities that we're having them today. The first is Scott Anderson. Scott, I've rave reviewed your book on Lawrence in Arabia 10 years ago when it came out. And we're very, very thrilled finally to get you here at both the Jai Poethe Festival and to this podcast. Scott spent time in Iran traveling through and has been working the last few years on this highly acclaimed book that anyone that read the roundups of the books of the year this year will have come across Scott's name over and over again in a whole variety of different publications. And it's been a huge success, not just in America, but in Britain and across the world.

And it's been a remarkable look at this event. Yeah, I mean, the book is King of Kings. and it's just a forensic experience of what happened during the revolution, but also through the archives of the American Secret Service. It'll blow your brains, I tell you. And also just the fallout and how quickly it happened, you get a sense of that. By chance, also at the festival, we have Ramita Navai, who's been in the news a great deal lately because she was the presenter and writer

of this extraordinary Channel 4 documentary, The Doctors of Gaza, charting what the UN calls the Medicide, the mass murder of health professionals in the Gaza Strip over the last couple of years, won a whole host of awards, and it's an extraordinary, deeply moving film which you can see online, and I could not recommend it more. But we're not actually talking today to Ramita about that. We're talking about work she did earlier in her career, because she, of course, is Iranian. She was born in Iran.

She has Iranian family and friends all over. And she was, for many years, the Times correspondent in Iran, at a time when Western newspapers were allowed and able to have correspondence in Iran. And she was, in fact, the last Times correspondent. And so has a unique and rare perspective, because this is a country which, although Scott and I and many other people have been through briefly, not many people have spent in the West considerable amounts of time in Iran. And it's a country which since 1979 has been at least partly cut off from the rest of the

world, in the same way that's from North Korea or other countries. And there is a huge ignorance, I think, in the West about it. So Ramita's extraordinary angle on this story is especially valuable. Invalible. So look, we're sort of starting with two ideas. We hold these two ideas in our heads because as we are here, things are changing a pace. So the one thing is how much is this like 1979 and the speed at which you saw a toppling of a regime that seemed unassailable maybe five years ago?

And the second, I suppose, is while we've been here, there has been a tidal shift in the fact that all of these disparate groups that are taking to the streets in Iran are now seem to be coalescing, or so we're told, under the banner of the progeny of the last Shah Iran. And under the flag, which is everywhere of the old Palovi dynasty. And before that, in fact, the flag goes back further into Qajar times, the lion. and sun flag, this very beautiful pre-revolutionary flag, which is being waived outside Iranian embassies and in the streets of Tehran and Meshed and all the other cities. So if I may, I mean, first of all, can we deal with the second point first? Because that is such a contentious issue. Now, what is the latest that you both have heard about this sort of gear shift that we seem

to be hearing about while we're here in Jaipur? Well, I would say we don't know the extent to which people in Iran are backing the Shah. But what I've found really surprising is that just before the internet was shan, One of my best friends there sent me videos of protests. This person was driving around and it was extraordinary. I could hear long live the Shah, Javi Shah. And I had, and I've been to many protests over the years and I've been covering this story for over 20 something years.

I've never heard that on the streets of Iran. I don't think the disparate groups are completely unified in supporting him yet. I don't know if that will happen. but just that some groups are, some protesters are shouting that in the streets. And that's a strategic shift that's happened that I have heard has come from activist leaders. Okay, so activist leaders who, let's just be very clear about this, who may not want him, but think he's the best option because what they don't, yeah, but what they are sure of is that they don't want this regime anymore.

Absolutely. So this is a matter of expedient. and pragmatism. And these activist leaders, and I'm going to throw to you in a minute, Scott, because these activist leaders who never did support him before, and I think it's interesting why the shift has happened and why Iran are now supporting him, and we should talk about that as well. Yeah. That's something I noticed when I was there last. But these activist leaders, their dream is that he takes over for an interim period while they pave the way to democracy and there's a referendum. But, Scott, we know why.

what happened last time when there was a referendum. I mean, did they not say that about the IOTL. I mean, they did say that about the Ayatollah. They said, you know, he's fine for now. That's right. That's right. What will happen for now? And then, you know, we'll move on.

And I think very similarly that, you know, during the 79, 78, 79 revolution, people galvanized around Khomeini because they saw him as kind of a spiritual guide for everybody from the left to the right. People referred to him as the Iranian Gandhi, that he was going to be, he was the spiritual guide of the revolution. With crown prince Reza, what I think is interesting is how this has come up again. Likewise, from people in the Iranian opposition I've talked to, I have never heard Reza's name Reyes. I think part of it is this reaction. The regime for 40 some odd years has utterly vilified the Pahlavi reign, the dynasty. And so I think in a way it's the ultimate sort of insult

you can throw back to the regime. It's like there's nobody else you can say that's kind of worse to the that now you're supporting the mortal enemy, the great Satan. So I wonder how much of that is driving that. Do you know, and this is the point that I was going to make, actually. I absolutely agree with you, Scott. What I find really interesting is that in the last, I would say, I don't know, 15 years, one thing I've noticed, and it started when I was still living there, is this growing nostalgia for the pre-Islamic regime era.

And as you say, you know, that is an act of rebellion in itself. I have many, many friends who feel this. Yes. And whatever their personal reservations about Raysa Shah, particularly his relationship with the Americans and the relationship with Israel. He's been to Israel. He's visited the Western Wall, but not the Alex of Mosque. And he's done a whole range of things that have made many liberals

and also many on the Islamic side of things anxious about him. But you see these huge crowds coalescing over symbols of the old Iran. It's not just necessarily. meeting at the tomb of Darius? Cyrus. Cyrus. Is it Cyrus or Cyrus? Yeah, Pasagarde.

There's this wonderful white tomb sitting in these plains. It's one of the most resonant historical sites. And there's almost nothing left of what was once the greatest city in the world other than a single standing winged figure. And this very modest simple tomb of this man who created the world's first empire. Now, this whole past of Iran, pre-Islamic, was vilified. by the revolutionary regime, who undermined often even the idea of Iran as a culture.

What was important to them was their links with the world of Islam. And they pitched themselves as the representatives of the Islamic Revolution, which they're going to export all over the world, rather like Russia pitching itself as the center of the Communist Revolution, which you would take to Cuba and to Angola and so on. And the fact that the regime was so down on Persianness and on the succession of different dynasties, which we covered in our Empire Pod series,

and our 26-part series on the history of Iran. First of all, the Achaemenids, then the Sasanians, then the Khadjars and the Safavids and so on. And for many Iranians, this simple, marble, modest, but impressive tomb at Placardi has become a rallying point, and at the birthday of Cyrus, huge crowds have started assembling, sometimes with the lion and sun flag.

And so it's not just the Palavi dynasty, which is the central society. It's nostalgia for a great Iran, Iran, which one stretched right through Afghanistan and into the styles, which represented the Persian language and the spread of Persianness out beyond Iran into India. This whole greatness of the Persian past is what people are nostalgic for. And while many may have their reservations about the Crown Prince, Reza, who's living in Washington, and has a certain set of advisors and who's been leaning towards Trump and this sort of thing in the Taniyahu.

The feeling that Iran has been so diminished by the Mullahs that this country which was richer than Saudi Arabia which had this spectacularly glamorous middle class and who were the poster boys for Asia in fact. Or certainly that region. They were the most successful country in the Middle East. They had an army that was incredibly up to date. They were rich with all revenues

and many, many people in nostalgia for that. but also for the wider world of Persianus, the Persian language, Persian literature, and the old boundaries of Iran which stretched up to Uzbekistan. I mean, that may be true, but let me ask both of you, because you, as I do, will also follow, you know, Palestinian X or, you know, Yemeni X. And there is a great, also, fear that, you know, the greatest supporters of, let's say, Yemen or Gaza, are about to be toppled by somebody who's too close to the American. I mean, when it comes to numbers, you know, the majority feeling in Iran, can you give us any insight?

And how will we ever know what the people of Iran actually, or the most of the people in Iran actually want right now? I have heard, and I don't know where these numbers come from. I've heard recently that say 20 to 25 percent of Iranian support the current regime. And again, I don't know where those numbers come from. I've heard that number two. It's number that goes around. It presumably isn't based on a homily. I would say that's tops.

Yes, yeah. What is shocking to me is talking about how hard it is to figure out what, get the temperature of inside Iran. Three weeks ago when I was talking to people in the Iranian opposition, they were in a state of despondency that goes back to the American and Israeli bombings in June. I've heard this from so many people. There was this huge rallying around the flag effect for the regime. Turns out people don't like to be bombed by foreign countries.

Yeah, surprise. And I was hearing people in the opposition saying, you know, if we go out in protest now, we're painted as lackeys of the Zionists and the Americans. That was up until three weeks ago. And then everything flipped. I never heard anything about crowd Prince Reza. So the watershed moment was in late December with the currency crash. Because now it went all the way across the board in Iran.

Everybody was hurt by it. Really kind of for the first time. The regime has traditionally been very adept at playing. one segment of society off against another. They've tried to do it this time. They've, you know, they've tried to blame it on foreign saboteurs. No one's buying it now because everybody has been hurt by this. And they already's been galvanized by seeing just how bankrupt the whole system is now. Why is it, though, that, you know, there is only this one name that people can coalesce around. I mean, it feels to me, because I hear that also, and that flip, I mean, the

flips are so rapid. So goodness knows what's going to happen by the time this goes out on air. But, you know, right here, right now, the fact that this is the only name coming up, Ramita, why is this the only name that is coming up? Well, who else is there, really? And that's been our problem. You know, I think it's really interesting that during the women life freedom protests, part of its success was that there was no internal leader. Because if there is a leader within the country, it's easy for Iran to decapitate.

that movement. And for an example, the nearest thing briefly was that kid who made that amazingly moving song, who then immediately got arrested and was forced into retracting and that's an example of something they could do to anyone in the country. There were many executions after women life freedom. The prisons became torture camps. There were mass arrests. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were arrested. Many Iranians were raped. There's so many accounts of rape and what happened was that after They completely decimated the uprising and the protest movement because when prisoners were released, when young Iranians were released from prison, they had the deeds of their houses taken. They were completely economically ruined. They weren't allowed to have government jobs.

And, you know, the government is the biggest employer in Iran. But one of the reasons the protests managed to carry on for so long is because there was no leader. But that's also one of the reasons why so far, uprients. in Iran haven't been successful because who is there? Who is there to replace the regime? And I think this is where the Shah's son has come in recently. I would like to say that I've heard, you know, that this strategic shift in some activist leaders backing him

that's only just happened in the last, you know, 10 days in the last two weeks. It's really, really good. You should say there have been a minority who have been in love with him. And if you go on... Exiles mostly. If you go on to exile, Iranian Twitter, exiles in Britain, but particularly exiles in Terrangeles in California.

Oh God, they love him. And they are absolutely adoring of this man. And for the last, certainly five maybe longer years, putting out these images of he's the Shah, he's the king, he's our man. But that was limited more to the exiles. You got the impression, certainly, than to the people in the country. And now it's in the country and it's in the country in a big way.

And this is what's extraordinary. Yes. So I have heard that work. was sent from activist leaders. This is a really grassroots movement. And these are activists leaders who are in prison? Some of them are in prisons. And, you know, they did decimate the activist movement after women life freedom.

You know, there were many executions. And I just explained what happened with the mass arrests and imprisonments. But there's still groups who are mobilizing. And there are still groups who are getting word out to protesters. there is some level of organisation. And the protests in the last few days have abated, but they haven't stopped. And we saw this with women life freedom. There was absolute repression and the protest stopped.

But the protests that are happening now are pretty coordinated in the same way they were then. What I know is that some of the activist leaders who are strategically calling for the Shah to be a unifying figurehead, something they've never had before, are very deeply uncomfortable with his ties to Israel and do see him as a possible American puppet. However, they do also see him as their only route to toppling the regime. Well, look, I mean, this is a place where we're going to take a break. And then after the break, we're going to come back

and we're going to look at, because 1979, you know, I think we all agree, this feels like, you know, a landscape we have walked before. So join us after the break where we compare what happened then, And perhaps what's happening now. Welcome back. So Scott, let's go back to you and your experience of being literally battered over the head by Iranian politics in Washington. So you saw up close and personal, this is a pivotal moment for the old Shah, who is making a visit to the United States and Jimmy Carter to cement at least in the eyes of the world and his own people maybe.

that you know what, I've got this man who, you know, we're coming to help you. I can't remember the exact terminology Trump used, but, you know, we got your back. You know, we're coming. We got your back. So describe what happened in Washington. Yeah, so this was in November, November 15th of 1978. Sorry, 1977. The Shaw was coming to meet Carter for the first time as this official state visit.

He was very nervous about the visit because, of course, Jimmy Carter came to the White House as a reformist. We're going to cut off aid to foreign dictators. were going to limit American military arms sales. All about the human rights. We're all about the human rights. And you couldn't have more of like a bull's high on anybody except the Shah. In 1977, Iran was responsible for over half of American foreign arms sales. Word had been sent to the Shah that none of this applied to him.

Carter was not this kind of dreamy-eyed idealist. And he was a pragmatist. The Shah wanted to sit across the table from Carter. So it was this big ceremony coming. There were some 50,000 Iranian students studying in the United States and universities and graduate programs. About 4,000 anti-Shah demonstrators had converged on Washington to, quote, welcome the Shah. And the Shah had bust in, or the Iranian embassy had bust in about 1,500 pro-Shah demonstrators. Largely from the cadet corps.

A lot of the more military cadets. Young, fighting men. That's right. I'm pretty convinced that it was one of the military cadets that hit me. Right. You see, he had quite a wall up. So the two sides were masked on the ellipse, which is just below the White House. This is the great lawn just outside of the White House.

And they were separated by snow fencing, just a little flimsy fencing. And at the moment the Shaw arrived at the White House, they started a 21 gun salute. And it was like a signal to the demonstrators on the ellipse to attack each other. And I happened to be standing along with a few reporters kind of in the no man's land between them. Just to clarify, you were there as a reporter, not as a demonstrator. No, I was actually the special aid to the Secretary of Treasury. I was an errand boy, essentially. It's a nice title special aid, but in fact, I was an errand boy.

And the secretary of the time didn't really require much erranding. So I spent my days as kind of wandering on trying to find interesting things to do. It was kind of a no-show job. So, of course, I saw this thing happening in the ellipse, which is right next to the Treasury building. So I went over there. And I got caught in the middle of no man's land. And as I say in the book, I got knocked to the ground by somebody with a wooden stave. But the significance of this, of that day.

So it was the most violent day, Washington, D.C. in a decade. 127 people, I believe, wounded, injured. Nobody killed, but including about 30 policemen. And it was all broadcast live back in Tehran. Somebody had the idea of showing a live feed at this glorious moment. The triumphant arrival of the King of Kings. to Washington. And of course, it backfired because the Iranian people now saw the way they interpreted that was that the Americans were humiliating the Shah. It's like, why would they allow

this to happen if they were still supporting the Shah? And so really within days of that, you started seeing the first anti-Shah demonstrations inside Iran, jump forward six weeks to New Year's Eve of 1977. The Shah makes a visit to Tehran. He's only there for about 12 hours. There's a state dinner. Carter was very given to these long, fulsome toasts. And he got up, and it was not what he was supposed to say. Iran is an island of stability in a troubled region. And it's all because of the love your people have for you, your majesty.

Six days later, in Iran, the demonstrations against the Shah start. And just one other observation about that meeting with Carter in Washington, the one where you got bashed over the head. I mean, tear gas is let loose. So you've got this, I mean, it's pantomime, isn't it? You've got the two men posing for their photo opportunity, about to do very long, nice speeches about each other. Right.

The tear gas blows straight into their faces, and they are basically streaming with tears. That's right. So the whole thing is farcical. The optics were terrible. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's so many ironies about the Redmond Revolution, but one is actually the Shaw and Carter at that first meeting,

there was very much a meeting in their minds. They liked each other, genuinely. But the optics couldn't have been worse. Ramita, has anything happening currently which echoes that in the 1979 era? Well, there's been a real shift in the last few years from Iranians wanting reform from within. And this is really hard for some exiles to accept. But certainly when I was there, the last time I was there, you know, Iranians did not want outside intervention. and they thought that the kind of most peaceful way to getting rid of the regime was reformed from within.

They've realized that's not going to happen. And so the calls from Iranians are very clear now that they want the regime toppled. And we're talking about figures. Again, just to clarify, there's been quite a lot of elections in Iran. But the list of those eligible to stand for elections are picked by the Supreme Leader. Yes, but Guardian Council. The Guardian Council. So a body of jurists. Anyone who actually will do any sort of genuine reform.

Exactly. And where you've had famous reformists leaders like Khatami, you've seen very little change. So absolutely now what we do know, we're talking about numbers and being impossible because polling is illegal in Iran to really know what Iranians are thinking. What we do know is that the majority of Iranians want this regime toppled. And I tell you something else, the Islamic regime also knows that the majority of people, its citizens want it tappled. And I tell you how we know that. During the women life freedom protests, there was a hack. We think it's probably an Israeli group hacked into an Iranian newspaper. And two interesting things came out of this hack.

One of them was that they managed to get footage of, I think it was the economics journal. list masturbating at his desk. So that's, yeah, that's by the by. The second, which is far more important. Ewe. I'll resume your story. The second more illuminating fact that we got from that is that they managed to hack into a missive, a bulletin that's sent to IRGC top brass. So we now know that the regime knows that its citizens are against it. And of course, that's most obvious because of the killing spree that's happening now, the rate of killing. The regime is fighting for its life. So we've now actually, I mean, because I feel like these programs with you two are going to be a lot about similarities because, you know, there are so many.

But this is one fundamental difference that right now you're saying that everybody is aware of the fact there is trouble ahead. But in 1979, or 77, 78, 78, 79, it seemed as if nobody was aware of how close to falling. The Carter administration, the island of stability, the Shah himself, not at all conscious of the fact that people hated him and wanted to go. That's right. And the worst intelligence I have ever come across about the situation. There was no intelligence of the West, and certainly of the Americans. They were doing nothing. So the Iranian revolution was very odd in that it basically transpired over 14 months.

There are all these highs and lows. And giving the benefit of the doubt to people who should have seen it coming, there were long periods when it looked like it was going to fizzle out. And of course, the Shah had been in power for 37 years at that point. So it's very, with most revolutions, there's this steady tightening of tension and violence. But Scott, again, another neat parallel is the economics. That's right. Because the economics would be very good at the beginning or the early part of the Shah's reign. That's right.

Oil revenues have been restored to Iran. The Iranian economy was booming. Right. And then there was this moment when it effectively overheated. That's right. And it was the economic factors that brought people out the streets. Right. Because there was a feeling that the elite were looting the country and the people, particularly in the villages, the conservative Iran, which is unchanged in many ways for a century or so.

was losing out. And there was a center periphery thing and there was a class thing. Yep. But most of all, there was an economic thing. That's right. And what had happened with the boom that it started in 1974 with the quadrupling of oil prices, you had millions of mostly young men coming in from the countryside to try to get their little piece of the Iranian economic miracle. And these were men living in shanty towns on the outskirts of every Iranian city. especially Tehran. South Tehran. Yeah.

The difference in income between urban and rural Iran in 1977 was seven to one. And the countryside had been gutted. So anybody with any sort of hope of getting ahead moved to the city, then the economic, not a complete collapse, but certainly a deep recession. And now you have these millions of young men, again, primarily young men from religious backgrounds out of work or severely underemployed in the city. cities and religious backgrounds, but from religious families. Religious families, that's right. They weren't they weren't mullers or related to mullers, but they were conservative.

That's right. They believed in the religion to which they've been brought up. That's right. And what's interesting is so much of what people are rebelling about today, it's official corruption, as you said. It's the elite who have milked the system for in exactly the same way. In exactly the same way. The primary difference, of course, being the role of religion. But you have never been in my travels in Iran. And I went first a few years after the revolution. And then again, more recently, is I've never been to any Islamic country in the world where the mosques are more empty today. Right.

So, so, you know, you go to Syria, you go to Lebanon, you go to any parts of India or the Middle East. And Egypt, particularly, the mosques are robbed. Yeah. But Friday prayers in Yazd or Isfahan or Tehran, there's a handful of old people at the front and that is it. Well, look, we're going to draw this through a close, but we've got another episode coming up with these two brilliant people talking about the parallels, because we've only just really started scratching the surface. If you don't want to wait for that, Empaboduk.com is where you can go, become a member of the club and you get all of these episodes in a miniseries altogether in one go. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durham.

We recorded these episodes on January the 17th, 2026. As of January the 30th, 2026, the US-based human rights activist news agency has confirmed that 5,459 protesters in Iran have died, and the organisation is investigating 17,031 more. Two senior figures of Iran's Ministry of Health have reported that as many as 30,000 people have been killed. In such a volatile situation, predictions is difficult to make, and these figures are ever-changing, but relentlessly rising.