INTRODUCTION

After Ay. Ruhollah Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, he appointed Mehdi Bazargan, an Islamist and veteran of the anti-Shah opposition, to form a “provisional government.” Its tasks were to “govern the country, hold a referendum on the change of regime to an Islamic republic, call an elected constitutional assembly to ratify the new regime's constitution, and organize parliamentary elections on the basis of the new constitution.” The revolution had united large sectors of Iranian society against the Shah's dictatorship, and now a man with impeccable democratic credentials was chosen by the charismatic leader of the revolution to head an interim administration until permanent institutions based on popular suffrage were put in place; the choice seemed to augur well for a transition to democracy. But by the end of 1979, Iran had a quasitheocratic constitution, and by the summer of 1981, radical Islamists had gained a monopoly of power, eliminated all other political parties (with the exception of the Communist Tudeh party, which was tolerated until 1983), and unleashed a reign of terror whose violence was unprecedented in twentieth-century Iran.

Bazargan's ill fated administration exemplifies the first type of interim government identified by Shain and Linz in their Introduction, the “provisional revolutionary government.” This chapter begins by discussing why the crisis of the Shah's regime found its denouement in a provisional government rather than a “power-sharing interim coalition” or an “incumbent as caretaker administration.”