Obituary: Iran's first revolutionary president, Abolhassan Banisadr

Iran's first president following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Abolhassan Banisadr.
Iran's first president following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Abolhassan Banisadr.

Abolhassan Banisadr, who has died aged 88, was a thoughtful, French-educated, Islamic intellectual who accepted the presidency of Iran in 1980 despite his opposition to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s concept of the velayat-e faqih (“governorship of the Islamist jurist”) – effectively Islamic dictatorship.

Banisadr faced the myriad contradictions that emerged after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 from the debate over the role of Islamic clerics in the Iranian constitution in the wake of the overthrow of the shah. The contradictions started with the US embassy hostage crisis of that year but were accelerated by the conduct of the 1980-88 war with Iraq.

Khomeini had gone into exile in France in October 1978 and when he arrived there he was taken directly to the home of Banisadr, whom he regarded as a link to the opposition movement abroad, to Iran’s westernised intelligentsia and to western politicians.

Admirers and sycophants alike descended on Banisadr’s small flat in the Parisian suburb of Cachan until neighbours complained about the noise, and Khomeini was moved to the nearby village of Neauphle-le-Château. When, after the shah’s departure, Khomeini returned on the Air France jet in dramatic triumph to Tehran in February 1979, Banisadr was with him.

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