Mehdi Bazargan: Predictions about Islamic Revolution in Iran
Mehdi Bazargan was a prominent Iranian scholar, academic, long-time pro-democracy activist and head of Iran's interim government, making him the first prime minister appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. He was the head of the first engineering department of Tehran University. A well respected religious intellectual, known for his honesty and expertise in the Islamic and secular sciences, he is credited with being one of the founders of the contemporary Islamic intellectual movement in Iran.
A few months after his appointment, Bazargan resigned from his Prime Minister position in objection to the seize and capture of U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Although Bazargan was known for his Islamic beliefs and religious roots, his reformist ideas and open criticism of clergymen in "undemocratic" usurpation of power, angered hardcore clerics and Ayatollah Khomeini. Bazargan was subsequently called a traitor and a U.S. spy and his reformist National Religious Party "Nehzate Azadi" (Freedom Movement) was disbanded by the government. Bazargan died in exile in 1995 but many of Bazargan's old compatriots like Ibrahim Yazdi are among political prisoners in Iran sharing a fate with many hard core leftist activists who called Bazargan a "traitor," but are now reformists and themselves placed in prison by the right wing ruling party.
The video shows some early predictions (1982) by Bazargan about the tyranny of the clergy and Islamists in Iran (in Persian/Farsi).
