Khomeini Returns to Iran
On this day · 1 February 1979
After nearly fifteen years in exile, an aging cleric stepped off a Paris flight and into a revolution that would remake a nation.
On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini landed at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport aboard a chartered Air France jet, ending roughly fifteen years of exile in Iraq and France. Millions of Iranians flooded the streets to greet the cleric whose recorded sermons and defiant statements had, from abroad, helped galvanize a mass uprising against Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
The Shah had fled the country two weeks earlier, leaving a fragile caretaker government under Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar. Khomeini swiftly moved to delegitimize it, appointing a rival provisional government and rallying the public behind his vision of an Islamic Republic.
Within ten days, the monarchy collapsed; on February 11, the revolution prevailed.
Khomeini’s homecoming marked the decisive turn of the Iranian Revolution. A March referendum overwhelmingly approved an Islamic republic, and by year’s end Khomeini stood as Supreme Leader of a new theocratic state. The event reshaped Iran’s domestic order and reverberated across the Middle East and the wider world for decades.
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