Nagmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis University. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke, she explains Iran’s social, political and economic turmoil:
Q. In 1979, what caused Iran, a relatively liberal country, to turn into a repressive regime?
A. It’s important to think about 1979 and Iran in two phases — there’s the revolution and then, the post-revolutionary state.
There was a revolution because young people are dreamers and always seek a better world which includes freedom, equality and, in the case of Iran, independence. In Iran, there were prominent questions around the distribution of oil money and corruption as well but everything that led to the 1979 revolution happened in a global moment of revolutionary dreaming.
India also had movements with young people hoping the world could become a better place. The former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, all of these created a sense of possibility from a leftist perspective for university students. Those who weren’t leftists or were leftist Islamists also drew from a large cauldron of ideas about how people can change the world.
Meanwhile, in the pre-revolutionary government of the Pahlavis, Iranian women were not forced to veil. Many did wear veils but many also wore skirts and boys and girls would go out together. At one level, Iran looked like how we think of a Western liberal country — but that was just one aspect of society. Many students were arrested for their beliefs, tortured and held in prison, often without any recourse to the judicial system. You could get a two-year sentence just for being in possession of books the government deemed ‘subversive’. So, while people had personal freedoms, they did not have much political freedom. The revolution itself succeeded when it went beyond young people — it hinged on the violence of the state towards these revolutionaries. When parents of these kids saw how violently the Pahlavi state dealt with the latter, more people began joining protests. By December 1978, Tehran saw 50 per cent of its population out protesting — two million people took to the streets. The Pahlavi regime would soon be over.
After the revolution, there was a phase called the ‘Spring of Freedom’ where people were free to read, publish and speak out. Then, a power struggle broke out between groups that had driven the revolution — the one that emerged most violently and strongly were the Islamists close to cleric Ruhollah Khomeini.
Importantly, they also suppressed other Islamist groups that did not believe this was the direction the revolution should go.
Q. What role did oil play in this saga?
A. In 1951, Iran saw a very nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, come to power — he nationalised the British oil company there. The British went to the Americans and in what was a first for the United States of America, they conducted a successful coup. Mosaddegh was thrown out of power and put under house arrest. The Shah, who was away on vacation abroad, returned and this was the beginning of the entanglement of the US in Iranian society, politics and economy. The US became part and parcel of various levels of the Iranian government, including its oil extraction.
Then, in 1964, the Pahlavi government, apparently in exchange for millions of dollars, agreed to ‘capitulation rights’ with the US, meaning if any American committed a crime on Iranian soil, they wouldn’t be prosecuted according to Iranian law. Khomeini gave a speech where he challenged these capitulation rights for America. He used that to add a layer on top of the question of who Iran’s oil belonged to — a connection emerged between oil and rights. This is when Khomeini became a household name and eventually gained power.
Oil came into the picture prominently again in the 1973 war between the Arabs and Israel — OPEC flexed its muscle and Iran got flooded with oil money due to price hikes. This created an ‘expectation gap’ — Iranians thought, ‘We’re flush with funds now, this will seep into various aspects of life and everything will become better.’ However, the gap between the rich and poor actually widened and corruption increased. That fed into revolutionary currents already in place, and eventually, by 1978, it got leveraged into the revolution itself. So, oil is always part of Iran’s story. Sometimes, it’s a symbol, sometimes it’s about how oil revenue actually affects society’s structures — to this day, oil is everything for the Iranian economy.
Q. Are Iran’s frequent protests about economic causes or civil liberties?
A. Over time, they’ve been about different things. The 2009 protests, for instance, were political because people believed the elections held then were rigged. The biggest slogan was, ‘Where Is My Vote?’, focusing on the political contract between people and state being honoured.
The protests in 2018-19 were economic, set off because of gasoline prices and gas subsidies. Yet, the middle class did not get involved then — these were protests by the marginalised. Again, the government was swift and brutal — but these protests did not stem from the middle class, many of whom believed this was a moment of the have-nots coming for the haves. So, they, very explicitly, stayed home.
Then came 2022, which was absolutely about personal rights, individual freedoms and the right to one’s own body. The slogan became ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ and the movement was about autonomies, bodily to intellectual.
We should think about the current protests now in two phases — these started on 28 December 2025, when shopkeepers shut their stores because the Iranian currency plummeted against the dollar. Led by traders, people went into the streets. Initially, the government did not shoot the protesters — in fact, it thought about ways to contain these economic protests and on 5 January, it announced it would give everybody the equivalent of $7 to ease their financial pain. By 8 January, the last time the internet was operating properly, vast groups of people came out and the protests changed from being economic to becoming political and personal. That is an existential threat for the regime — they have dealt with it using brutality.
Q. What is the life of women in Iran like, beyond the universal obsession with their clothing?
A. Once the Islamic Republic of Iran was established, a weird contradiction began. On the one hand, the regime created a kind of gender apartheid — buses and schools were separated and people did not have the right to wear what they wanted to, a very basic freedom. On the other side, women outside the middle and upper classes, many of whom wore a veil before, continued doing so and also felt like the revolution belonged to them. By 1980-81, a space had opened for groups of people which didn’t exist before the revolution. During the Pahlavi years, often more religious or conservative families would not allow their daughters to work or study as they felt they could get corrupted. So, Iran has this contradiction where the trauma of middle-class women existed right next to the fact that other segments, which hadn’t been economic or political participants before, felt they could become so now.
In terms of indicators, in the past 47 years, Iran’s female and male literacy are practically 1 to 1 and over 80 per cent. My understanding is that a greater percentage of Iranian women have a higher education. They take part in most aspects of the country’s economic life, barring what’s not allowed in the name of ‘modesty’. For the most part, Iranian women are highly educated, go to universities and join the workforce.
Certain segments of society also have a level of freedom, such as living with a partner without being married. One of the paradoxical things about the Islamic Republic is that while the state has become more conservative compared to the Pahlavi regime in terms of freedoms for women, society has become more liberal than 1970s Iran. Today, society has opened up because women fought extremely hard for their freedoms. Before these protests, many women had just stopped wearing a veil — but the picture is always complicated in Iran and the government, seeking to punish women who weren’t veiling correctly, put its finger right on this very aspect of women’s economic presence in society. It came up with massive monetary punishments that would break households which were women-run. It targeted precisely the presence of women in the economy, punishing them for something social through economic penalties. Earlier, if you didn’t veil, a woman would get a lash — that punishment became economic in 2023.
Views expressed are personal
