The Legacy of Bani Sadr

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : It was this kind of discourse of Islam that led to the revolution in Iran in which a nation was able to unseat a monarchy.
54% : He completed his early education in Hamedan and Tehran, and later studied Economics and Islamic Jurisprudence at the University of Tehran.
54% : During this period, the Tudeh (communist) Party was active in schools and universities across Iran, and it was during this time that Bani Sadr was introduced to the law of dialectics.
48% : In the years following the 1953 coup against the Mossadegh government, political groups in Iran had differing priorities.
47% : Following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Bani Sadr returned to Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini.
46% : While he oversaw the recovery of over half the land which had been occupied by Iraq, Islamic Republican Party leaders prolonged the Iran-Iraq war by striking a clandestine deal with the US (now known as the 'October Surprise'), in which representatives of Ronald Reagans' presidential campaign had agreed to supply Iran with weapons in exchange for postponing the release of the US embassy hostages until after Reagan had been elected president.
45% : In the early 1960s political suppression was on the rise in Iran, and Bani Sadr was twice imprisoned for his involvement in the anti-Shah student movement before leaving for France to continue his research in the fields of economics, sociology, Islam, and philosophy.
44% : Bani Sadr called on supporters of the differing ideologies to participate in these debates, thereby establishing the tradition of political debate in Iran.
43% : He subsequently accepted an alternative role as 'caretaker of the foreign office', in an effort to free the hostages when the Shah left the US, arguing that far from holding the US hostage, rather the crisis had merely led to the US taking Iran hostage.
37% : In addition, Iraq waged war on Iran a few months after the election.
35% : Bani Sadr argued that a fundamental effort was needed to rid Iran and other such societies of this destructive "war of priorities", which he maintained, had steered Iran towards destruction for over half a century.
35% : He fled from Iran to expose the details of the coup and other dictatorial transgressions within the political system.
30% : As part of these efforts, Bani Sadr gave amnesty to Fedayin Khalgh, a militant Stalinist organisation who had undertaken attacks in Iran, inviting them to a live televised debate to explain their actions.

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