Iran’s Mullahs Backed the 1953 Coup. What Will They Back Next?

Any time there is a crisis in Iran, the 1953 British-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is dusted off as Exhibit A in the case against Western perfidy. It is rolled out to show how Washington and London strangled Iranian democracy in its crib, proving that foreign powers cannot be trusted and that the Islamic Republic is, at worst, a necessary evil. What is rarely recounted is the key role played in that coup by two leading ayatollahs—Abol-Qasem Kashani and Mohammad Behbahani—who were heroes and mentors to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic. The ideological grandfathers of today’s rulers did not merely suffer the coup; they helped midwife it.

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It is important to remember what the clergy did then, because it may tell us what they will do next. The Islamic Republic is once again in extremis: its Supreme Leader has been killed, the succession is contested, and the streets are restless. Experts are gaming out scenarios in which civilian protests reach a critical mass and one or more branches of the security apparatus—the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij militia, the regular army—break away from the regime. History, however, suggests that we should be watching not the men in uniform, but the men in robes.

Iran’s clergy has almost never been ideologically unified or consistently committed to any one side. From the Constitutional Revolution through the Mossadegh era and the 1979 upheaval, senior clerics have displayed a deeper commitment to being on the winning side than to any fixed political principle. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death gives elements within the establishment their best opportunity in decades to peel away from the system he built if—and it is a very big if—they sense that the tide is turning decisively against it. They have done this over and over in Iran’s modern history. They are the country’s political barometer, its weathervane.

The coup the mullahs prefer to forget

The standard 1953 story features the CIA, MI6, and a weak Shah of Iran. It is a tale of cash‑stuffed suitcases, street thugs, and a young monarch who fled Iran in panic, only to return in triumph. All true, as far as it goes. But Kashani and Behbahani tend to be written out of the script.

Kashani began the decade as Mossadegh’s most important clerical ally. A fiery preacher with a base in Tehran’s bazaars and among conservative urban poor, he mobilized mosque networks and religious guilds in support of oil nationalization, denounced the British from the pulpit, and helped fill the streets for the National Front, the party founded by Mossadegh in 1949. Mossadegh accepted the alliance of convenience: Kashani could deliver the religious masses, even if the prime minister himself believed in the separation of mosque and state.

As the crisis dragged on, the alliance curdled. The economy suffered, the communist Tudeh Party grew stronger and more visible, and Mossadegh resorted to plebiscites and emergency powers that looked, to many, less like democracy and more like improvisation. For a clerical establishment that cared above all about its courts, seminaries, and endowments, this was alarming. A faltering nationalist with a mobilized left at his back threatened the traditional order in ways a restored monarchy did not.

So Kashani pivoted. By 1953 he was denouncing Mossadegh as a dictator and accusing him of betraying Islam and the Shah. According to declassified British and American documents, he organized many of the crowds that took to the streets on Aug. 19, 1953 to demand Mossadegh’s ouster. Another senior cleric, Behbahani, not only threw his weight behind the Shah but, as evidence strongly suggests, accepted CIA money to stage pro-palace demonstrations. A British report refers derisively to “Behbahani dollars,” a phrase that has since passed into the historiography of the coup.

Western intelligence services provided the funding and the blueprint, and the Shah’s officers supplied the tanks. But it was the mullahs who gave the enterprise its local muscle and religious legitimacy. They transformed the coup from a foreign plot into something that could be portrayed, to at least part of the Iranian public, as a defense of faith and order against chaos.

From constitutionalism to counter‑revolution

This was not the first time the clergy had switched sides at a critical moment. During the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, some of Iran’s most revered clerics backed demands for a parliament and a constitution to rein in a corrupt Qajar monarchy. Ayatollah Sayyed Abdullah Behbahani and Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Tabatabai used Islamic arguments to claim that even kings must be bound by law, and that tyranny was incompatible with religion.

Yet other senior scholars, notably Sheikh Fazlollah Nouri, branded constitutionalism a Western import and sided with the court against the revolution. After the dust settled, the clerical establishment as a whole adopted an ambivalent posture: sometimes aligning with popular forces, sometimes with royal power, and always bargaining to preserve its jurisdiction over family law, education, and religious endowments.

By the early 1950s, many clerics had come to see the Pahlavi monarchy, for all its secular pretensions, as a manageable partner. The Shah could be pressured and placated; he was a bulwark against communism and did not, in their view, threaten to absorb religious institutions into a mass political project. Mossadegh, with his proto‑populist base and his insistence on keeping religion at arm’s length from the state, looked more dangerous. So the same establishment that had once helped push a Qajar shah toward constitutionalism helped pull a Pahlavi shah back from exile and back into absolutism.

Opportunism is the through line. When aligning with constitutionalists constrained royal power and protected clerical autonomy, senior ayatollahs wore the mantle of democrats. When backing a coup served those same interests better, they became royalists. Principle was not the constant. Survival was.

Khomeini’s inheritance

One of the younger clerics watching all this was Ruhollah Khomeini. His exact role in the events of 1953 is still debated, but he was closely associated with Kashani’s camp and later spoke of Mossadegh with open disdain, predicting that he would be “slapped by Islam.” More important than any street‑level involvement was the lesson he drew: secular nationalists who tried to marginalize the clergy would sooner or later find themselves on the wrong side of the mosque door.

Kashani, and to a lesser extent Behbahani, were the political models Khomeini looked to when he turned the clergy from spectators into protagonists of Iranian politics. In 1979, facing a Shah who had lost the street and much of the bureaucracy, Khomeini and his allies flipped the script. This time, it was the monarchy that no longer protected clerical interests; it had become, in their eyes, a liability. So they climbed to the head of a broad anti‑Shah coalition, wrapped it in religious language, and then, once in power, claimed the spoils – purging secular rivals and building a system that enshrined clerical rule.

The Islamic Republic that has just lost its supreme leader is the product of that decision to abandon clerical quietism and seize the state. Over four decades, the regime has bureaucratized the clergy, tying seminaries, mosques and religious foundations ever more tightly to the organs of power. Many mullahs have become, in effect, civil servants in turbans. Yet that fusion has a paradoxical consequence: by conflating religion with governance, the system has bound the credibility of faith to its own performance. Every failure of the state now stains the turban as well as the uniform.

That is where Khamenei’s death becomes critical. It has shattered an already fragile equilibrium, opened up rivalries within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and security services, and forced the clerical elite to confront questions they have long tried to postpone: Can this order be sustained without him? Is it still the best vehicle for preserving their authority? Or has it become, like the late Qajar shahs and the last Pahlavi, a sinking ship?

The formal process of choosing a new supreme leader runs through the Assembly of Experts, a group of 88 senior clerics who are, on paper, charged with selecting and supervising the country’s highest authority. In practice, they are enmeshed in the same web of patronage and coercion as the rest of the system. But they are also, collectively, the most important weathervane in Iran. If a significant bloc of them begins to resist the preferences of the Revolutionary Guard or the remnants of Khamenei’s inner circle, that will signal that the clerical establishment senses the wind shifting.

Watching the robes

There will be no shortage of scenarios in the weeks ahead that hinge on the Revolutionary Guards’s choices. Will the commanders splinter? Will a “moderate” general emerge as kingmaker? Will the Basij refuse to fire on protesters? Those are vital questions but they are only half the story. The other half is being written in the seminaries of Qom and the offices of the Guardian Council, where senior jurists are quietly running their own calculations about risk and reward.

If they conclude that the system Khomeini built and Khamenei hardened can still be salvaged, they will bless a successor— however uninspiring— and instruct the faithful to close ranks. If they decide that the tide has turned decisively and the regime can’t be salvaged, they will start to hedge, to distance themselves from the most repressive measures, perhaps even to endorse cosmetic reforms that keep them on the right side of the next order.

They have done it before: siding with constitutionalists, then with coup plotters; with a king, then with a revolutionary; with a theocracy, and— one day, perhaps—with something that looks again like democracy. For those trying to read Iran’s future, the lesson of 1953 is not just that foreign powers can be perfidious. It is that Iran’s political barometer is still held in the hands of the men in robes.