The People’s Revolution, 1977-9

Abstract

In a famous verse of the Qur’ān, ‘the hour approaches, and the moon is split into halves’; ¹ and, according to a well-known prediction in Marx’s Capital, ‘the death-knell of bourgeois property tolls’. When the former happens, sinners will face their final judgement; when the latter happens, ‘the expropriaters will be expropriated!’. The recent Iranian revolution was, metaphorically, no less momentous than the splitting of the moon, and, terrestrially, as perfect a response to total injustice as a celestial judgement. The death-knell tolled not for bourgeois property—which, in its rigorous Marxian sense, was not significant—but for petrolic despotism, and pseudo-modernism; it was not so much the private expropriators who were expropriated, as the bureaucratic usurpers of the people’s collective wealth and socio-political rights. ‘From their palace rooms, they went into their tombs.’²